4 ms·

The office suite market in general has been relatively stagnant over the last couple of decades. Sure there have been some noticeable advancements such as the i

by laumars 10y ago

The office suite market in general has been relatively stagnant over the last couple of decades. Sure there have been some noticeable advancements such as the introduction of ribbon bars and zipped XML documents replacing undocumented binary blobs. But feature MS Office reached a plateau in the late 90s so a significant amount of work since has been about user experience instead. Often just with pointless UI tweaks in the aim of milking their proverbial cash cow. This has made it easier for open source competitors to catch up with Microsoft. However compare that to operating system development - or to be more specific: reverse engineering undocumented APIs that receive updates every few years - and you have yourself a whole order of magnitude more difficult job to even just reach a usable parity let alone being a competitive alternative. As quickly as ReactOS developers can reverse engineers Windows, Microsoft will progress their flagship OS. ReactOS is chasing a moving target in a way that LibreOffice is not. Disclaimer: I'm not dismissing the developers efforts. I just don't agree with your statement that ReactOS will snowball in the same way that many other open source developments do.

frik 10y ago
Windows subsystem stagnated since 2006. Win32 is on a standstill. All new efforts (Silverlight, UniversalRuntime, etc) are not very successful (and based on Win32 subsystem as well) and like a niche compared to the vast amount of WinAPI based applications. So Windows like Office are not a moving target like they used to be. ReactOS aims for WinNT series compatibility including hardware drivers. And those driver APIs haven't changed for a decade or more.
- laumars 10y ago
  From an end user perspective Windows 10 might not appear any more advanced than it's predecessors, but the NT subsystem has still changed quite considerably since 2006 (that date range covers Vista, Windows 7, 8.* and 10). There have also been massive changes to the way Windows handles networking and authentication protocols (Active directory, SMB, etc), changes to the the driver model, changes to the way POSIX support is handled, etc. As much as you might dismiss some subsequent Microsoft technologies to be "not very successful", the fact remains that Microsoft are still always pushing new technologies and a not so insignificant number of developers do sometimes use these technologies which means, at some point, the ReactOS developers will either need to reverse engineer those technologies as well (assuming those libraries can't run natively on ReactOS already _and_ there's no legal restrictions preventing them from running on non-Microsoft endorsed platforms) or accept a lack of parity with Windows.
  - userulluipeste 10y ago
    "Microsoft are still always pushing new technologies" And how much of it is actually needed? Considering only the actually useful parts of an OS, my impression is that Windows got saturated a long ago and the parts in later versions were just forced along in new versions due to reasons that have nothing to do with technological advance. My point is, ReactOS has only to become stable and reasonably good on real hardware to be successful. There is a lot of parts in the later Windows versions that only serve niches, thus being cruft for the bulk of users. Microsoft had to evolve this way due to its commercial nature, whereas ReactOS doesn't have to.
    - laumars 10y ago
      It doesn't matter how much of the new tech is needed in Windows. It doesn't even matter if the tech is any good or not. What matters is if it's used by applications. If it is then ReactOS has to reverse engineer it if they want parity with Windows. I don't get why people are pushing back on this point. It isn't a criticism of ReactOS. It's just a pragmatic result of writing a clone of another project that itself is constantly undergoing development. This is why people more often talk about ReactOS being exciting in terms of supporting older software rather than new. Obviously if it ever got to the stage that it had parity with the latest releases of Windows then that would be amazing but the chances of that happening are miniscule.
      - userulluipeste 10y ago
        "It doesn't even matter if the tech is any good or not. ReactOS has to reverse engineer it if they want parity with Windows. It's just a pragmatic result of writing a clone of another project that itself is constantly undergoing development." I think this is where you're making wrong assumptions. ReactOS is free and open-source, and from this comes choice. Even if the main project chooses to work on reimplementing marginal or even unwanted things, a fork is always an option. (A fork from an immature project like it still is doesn't make sense for now.) After all, it's known that people don't appreciate bloat. ReactOS wants parity with Windows 2003 and that is a manageable target. Bits from later Windows versions may be added for important applications but it hasn't have to be nor is necessarily wanted all that Microsoft pushed from Vista hitherto. ReactOS doesn't have to cover all that much, really. Also, an important nitpeek: ReactOS doesn't reverse-engineer. It employs clean-room engineering.

by laumars 10y ago

frik 10y ago

Windows subsystem stagnated since 2006. Win32 is on a standstill. All new efforts (Silverlight, UniversalRuntime, etc) are not very successful (and based on Win32 subsystem as well) and like a niche compared to the vast amount of WinAPI based applications. So Windows like Office are not a moving target like they used to be. ReactOS aims for WinNT series compatibility including hardware drivers. And those driver APIs haven't changed for a decade or more.

laumars 10y ago
From an end user perspective Windows 10 might not appear any more advanced than it's predecessors, but the NT subsystem has still changed quite considerably since 2006 (that date range covers Vista, Windows 7, 8.* and 10). There have also been massive changes to the way Windows handles networking and authentication protocols (Active directory, SMB, etc), changes to the the driver model, changes to the way POSIX support is handled, etc. As much as you might dismiss some subsequent Microsoft technologies to be "not very successful", the fact remains that Microsoft are still always pushing new technologies and a not so insignificant number of developers do sometimes use these technologies which means, at some point, the ReactOS developers will either need to reverse engineer those technologies as well (assuming those libraries can't run natively on ReactOS already _and_ there's no legal restrictions preventing them from running on non-Microsoft endorsed platforms) or accept a lack of parity with Windows.
- userulluipeste 10y ago
  "Microsoft are still always pushing new technologies" And how much of it is actually needed? Considering only the actually useful parts of an OS, my impression is that Windows got saturated a long ago and the parts in later versions were just forced along in new versions due to reasons that have nothing to do with technological advance. My point is, ReactOS has only to become stable and reasonably good on real hardware to be successful. There is a lot of parts in the later Windows versions that only serve niches, thus being cruft for the bulk of users. Microsoft had to evolve this way due to its commercial nature, whereas ReactOS doesn't have to.
  - laumars 10y ago
    It doesn't matter how much of the new tech is needed in Windows. It doesn't even matter if the tech is any good or not. What matters is if it's used by applications. If it is then ReactOS has to reverse engineer it if they want parity with Windows. I don't get why people are pushing back on this point. It isn't a criticism of ReactOS. It's just a pragmatic result of writing a clone of another project that itself is constantly undergoing development. This is why people more often talk about ReactOS being exciting in terms of supporting older software rather than new. Obviously if it ever got to the stage that it had parity with the latest releases of Windows then that would be amazing but the chances of that happening are miniscule.
    - userulluipeste 10y ago
      "It doesn't even matter if the tech is any good or not. ReactOS has to reverse engineer it if they want parity with Windows. It's just a pragmatic result of writing a clone of another project that itself is constantly undergoing development." I think this is where you're making wrong assumptions. ReactOS is free and open-source, and from this comes choice. Even if the main project chooses to work on reimplementing marginal or even unwanted things, a fork is always an option. (A fork from an immature project like it still is doesn't make sense for now.) After all, it's known that people don't appreciate bloat. ReactOS wants parity with Windows 2003 and that is a manageable target. Bits from later Windows versions may be added for important applications but it hasn't have to be nor is necessarily wanted all that Microsoft pushed from Vista hitherto. ReactOS doesn't have to cover all that much, really. Also, an important nitpeek: ReactOS doesn't reverse-engineer. It employs clean-room engineering.