21 ms·

10 software compatibility

617 points by bratao 9y ago

richard_todd 9y ago
One day when Windows drifts too far away from its golden age functionality, it will be great if ReactOS can fill the gap. However, I feel like MS could one-up them overnight by providing a sandboxed 32-bit XP VM as part of current windows. We’d get back DOS support and compatibility with old programs would be better. Call it Windows Subsystem for Windows or whatever. That would also pave the way to removing a lot of Win32 cruft from the main codebase, which MS seems very itchy to do.
- gambiting 9y ago
  It was already a thing in Windows Vista - at least in Enterprise, you could download a "windows xp " compatibility package, right click on any application and start it in windows XP - it would silently start XP in the background and render the app the same way as a native Vista app, while running on the XP kernel in the background. I have no idea if it exists in newer versions of Windows however.
  - Jaruzel 9y ago
    No it doesn't, unfortunately. The best option they suggest is moving it to a VM under Windows 10's Hyper-V: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/1f6e73ad-b3f0-4c05-9fb4-0f0237420f6b/how-to-legally-run-xp-mode-vm-with-windows-10-host?forum=w7itprovirt https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/1f...
- viraptor 9y ago
  What's the point in doing this for MS? There's no money in it and they'd need a serious team backing it. And by no money, I mean at scale - there are going to be small companies needing something like that and there are going to be huge companies. Huge ones already got a public offer of "pay an increasing tax for XP support" and likely a private "this corporate deal is possible" if they're important enough. The small ones put together, I don't think could collectively fund ongoing xp support. If anything ReactOS picking up those small companies is beneficial to MS by keeping them in the MS ecosystem.
  - richard_todd 9y ago
    Like a sibling comment mentioned, it wouldn’t be the first time MS has done this sort of thing (XP on certain SKUs of Vista or maybe it was 7). I assume they already have a serious team backing tons of legacy Win32 cruft. So, instead of maintaining that, they freeze it and shift it into a VM. MS gets to cut down modern Win32 to something closer to the UWP subset, and users that want it—-make it an optional subsystem—-get better legacy compatibility than they have had in years. Maybe the 2020 win7 end of life would be a good time to do something like this. I don’t know if there is a good enough financial reason for MS, but from a user’s perspective I think it would be better than the situation today.
bhanu423 9y ago
One of the most interesting changelog that I have read in a While. Well written, thoughtful and gave me good insight into the project.
- iforgotpassword 9y ago
  Indeed a great read to catch up with the project. > Talking about the notification tray, due to Ged’s work, icons of killed and finished process are now automatically removed, even when apps crash. This is something that Windows doesn't even provide with Win10, and many Windows users may have noticed. Made me chuckle. This has bothered me since forever. It seemed like such a low hanging fruit to fix, I wonder why Microsoft never did.
  - fluxsauce 9y ago
    > I wonder why Microsoft never did. I'm assuming it's because of the size of the codebase, available engineering resources, return-on-investment calculation, and a business prioritization of new features over refinement. Most engineers can look at their own work or codebase and think, "well, that's a bit shit but it works well enough." I can't imagine their backlog. I'm sure it's lurking in an issue queue somewhere.
    - dfox 9y ago
      One notable thing is that in Windows the behavior of taskbar changed around the time of Windows 98SE/2000 (I'm not sure in which version exactly). Originally the "orphaned" tray icons just were there and you could not cause them to go away, "new" behavior is that first event (ie. hover) causes them to be destroyed.
      - mschuster91 9y ago
        Guesswork: once you hover over an icon in the taskbar, later Windows checks if the process (or, rather, window, as the icon will be tied to the window handle you get from CreateWindowEx) handle belonging to it is still alive. If not (aka it cannot find a target window to send the message to) the icon gets destroyed. ReactOS, another guess here, does either a polling check if all taskbar icons have valid process handles or a check whenever a process exits.
orliesaurus 9y ago
I think their site is getting the HN hug of death, loads extremely slow/doesn't load at all...
- make3 9y ago
  yep it's currently fully smothered for me
rocky1138 9y ago
What I like about this project, besides the dedication and professionalism of the team behind it, is that it offers PC gamers a possible way to play Windows-era games moving forward. In a decade or two, we likely won't be able to activate a Windows XP machine (and wouldn't want to with all of the security hazards either) so it's great to have a free and open source project to run our Windows stuff.
- jug 9y ago
  Yeah, DOSBox is nice for retro gaming or even the oddball application, but it pales in comparison to the potential of this project.
  - megaman22 9y ago
    The place where DOSBox isn't sufficient is for games in that Win 95/98/2000 era. Most of those don't run very well, if at all on modern Windows, unless somebody still has the source and bothers to rerelease a modern "HD edition" or somesuch. I still have to keep a Win 98 VM so I can play Sierra's Civil War Generals 2 from time to time.
    - orionblastar 9y ago
      I heard that DOSBox can run Windows 3.1 to run 16 but Windows games. I also heard someone hacked Win95 and Win98 to run under DOSbox. You could just use QEMU emulate a Pentium box and install 95 or 98 under that as an alternative.
      - efreak 9y ago
        Dosbox runs windows 3.1 perfectly, with resolutions up to at least 1280x1024 (what I use for tetris) _or_ true color mode (unfortunately not both). You can supposedly install 95/98 in it, but I've had trouble actually using them in it.
- geff82 9y ago
  Good thought, never saw it from an archiving point of view!
chris_wot 9y ago
I’m curious - so now that the ReactOS guys are picking up bugs in Windows, does this mean they have a comprehensive test suite of Microsoft Windows proper?
- jacobush 9y ago
  They've had for a decade at least.
jug 9y ago
I feel like ReactOS has gained more attention lately and hope some of it will spill over to support of this project. It’s a bit like you need to reach a critical mass in features and usability, and until then it’s an uphill battle to maintain enough traction. Haiku is another cool project, especially as someone who will always have a warm spot left for the Amiga. But until the long waited for beta is out, I think they have an ever more dangerously steep uphill path to climb.
- erric 9y ago
  Haiku OS[0] is a BeOS inspired OS, though I do see some articles about a port of it to Amiga hardware. [0]https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/ [1]http://www.generationamiga.com/2017/09/03/haiku-os-for-amigaone-500-computers-68k-port-in-development/ http://www.generationamiga.com/2017/09/03/haiku-os-for-amiga...
  - antod 9y ago
    They must've meant AROS http://www.aros.org/ http://www.aros.org/
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      Within the Amiga community there's a certain level of admiration for HaikuOS, as BeOS/HaikuOS is seen by these individuals as a spiritual successor to AmigaOS. As you point out, AROS is the open-source reimplementation of AmigaOS, so it's worth mentioning it, I just wanted to clarify why the Amiga+Haiku link might have been made.
      - erric 9y ago
        Much appreciated! I wasn’t lucky enough to have an Amiga, I only had a PCjr. I did see them in the store and listed after them.
      - nickpsecurity 9y ago
        Those of you discussing Amiga might find this comment from skrzyp interesting: https://lobste.rs/s/vkpekg/morphos_3_10_released#c_ktgnn3 https://lobste.rs/s/vkpekg/morphos_3_10_released#c_ktgnn3 It gives a huge, deep history lesson from author's perspective covering important events, hardware/software, and especially the culture. It was fascinating. Also made me hold off on MorphOS for one of my projects.
konschubert 9y ago
What Kernel does this OS use? What's its history? Is it a unix fork such as Linux?
- dfox 9y ago
  It uses it's own opensource implementation of Windows NT kernel.
  - lnx01 9y ago
    And a lot of code from Wine too
- mschuster91 9y ago
  No, it's a reverse engineered Windows. I believe that due to copyright issues it even is a fully clean-room developed implementation, which means that it's not based on MS documentation or on decompiled source code.
  - rossy 9y ago
    > which means that it's not based on MS documentation I think looking at MS documentation is okay. You're allowed to look at MSDN for Wine development[1]. Since the projects share code, you're probably allowed to do so for ReactOS as well. [1]: https://wiki.winehq.org/Clean_Room_Guidelines https://wiki.winehq.org/Clean_Room_Guidelines
- e12e 9y ago
  See eg: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/ntoskrnl/include/ntoskrnl.h https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/ntoskrnl/incl...
- SllX 9y ago
  The ReactOS kernel is their own, clean room reverse engineered to be compatible with the NT kernel. Also just a side note, Linux isn't exactly a UNIX fork either. Linux was developed from scratch on a MINIX host, which in turn was another OS designed to be UNIX-compatible but did not actually use any UNIX code. To put it another way, it's Unix-like two generations removed, but definitely not something you could call a fork. That might seem like a small detail to you but SCO vs IBM says otherwise.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wensley 9y ago
Seen ReactOS pop up a few times and always thought it was something to do with the Facebook Javascript library. This is really amazing, I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.
- jwilk 9y ago
  Blame Facebook for poor name choice. ReactOS is much older than React, the JS library.
  - wensley 9y ago
    I realise that now but did have to do some googling to find out about the history of the project.
  - jhall1468 9y ago
    Lots of products have similar names, that doesn't make ReactJS a poor choice. One is a frontend framework and one is an operating system. The naming isn't the reason he wasn't aware of ReactOS... the fact that it's a very small community is why he wasn't aware of it.
- bartread 9y ago
  Yeah, I've been confused too. The website itself doesn't help: no "About" or "What is ReactOS?" in the main nav. I ended up looking it up on Wikipedia to find out what it is: an open source OS that is intended to be binary compatible with Windows. This does actually ring a bell for me - I seem to remember mention of it very early in the century. That perhaps cuts to the heart of the issue: it's been going as a project since 1996, yet it's still only considered alpha. In other words, I'm not so sure it's going anywhere fast, and I'm not sure what you'd really use it for.
  - wensley 9y ago
    I was surprised to find it has been going since 96. There is some good info on this site: https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/83578.html https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/83578.html
middleclick 9y ago
Can anyone comment if I can install old Windows 2000 games on this, like C&C Red Alert? Would it work?
- shakna 9y ago
  Hit and miss as there are missing win32 pieces, but Red Alert for example ran nearly as well as it used to, for me.
- antoineMoPa 9y ago
  And simtower?
  - exikyut 9y ago
    - Version 1.0: Game saving is broken, everything else works: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=789&iTestingId=36712&sAllBugs https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI... - Version 1.1b (retail): Copy a DLL over for working sound, then everything works: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=28003 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
- exikyut 9y ago
  C&C Red Alert 2, both 1.0 and Yuri's Revenge: rating "everything works": https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=252&iTestingId=52008 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
- exikyut 9y ago
  PSA: The best way it seems to check the AppDB is to do something like site:https://appdb.winehq.org "simtower" and site:https://appdb.winehq.org "c&c" "red alert" "2" (The search box on the website is just google custom search)
owenversteeg 9y ago
This has been one of my favorite software projects to watch, because it's such an insanely monumental undertaking and moves so damn slowly. There were people working on this two decades ago, putting in tiny fixes and little bits of code and whatnot, and they did it even knowing that basically nobody would see their work for decades. Hell, I have never seen a ReactOS installation in the wild, and I'm the kind of person whose friends install Haiku, Nix and NetBSD as their daily drivers. And the second-hand stories I've heard about people who did install React was basically "I was bored, I put it on a drive, played around for 5 minutes, and wiped it." But that doesn't discourage them. Meanwhile, work keeps going on in the background. So many untold man-hours of thankless work going into the project, and the vast majority of that "hard" work with no payoff for years. And now it's finally getting close to actual Windows, after decades of work, and soon (well, years, but still) people will be using it everywhere as a replacement for Windows. This is one of the most important software projects in history. My hat is off to the ReactOS developers, and congratulations on the latest release. [edit] Here are the names of the 75 programmers that have worked on ReactOS: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/CREDITS https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/CREDITS
- shakna 9y ago
  > Hell, I have never seen a ReactOS installation in the wild It's not especially common, but I do know of a couple kiosks and a PoS system that run ReactOS under the hood to avoid Windows licensing.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    How the hell do they get PCI certified with ReactOS?
    - tom169 9y ago
      Typically credit card processing is handled entirely by a physical device plugged into the computer. The computer isn't in a PCI zone.
digi_owl 9y ago
Tried the livecd in a VM and a couple of niggles sprang up. First of all, no driver for the network card in Virtualbox, though Vmware worked fine. Second, no web browser... Third, the mouse sometimes freaked out and got stuck in a corner.
- feikname 9y ago
  It should be obvious enough, but perhaps you missed: you can install a browser, such as an old version of opera, by fetching its installer over the internet via ReactOS builtin "program downloader" (I do not remeber its name). If you meant lack of default browser preinstalled though, I agree with you its lacking. It's necessary to change the network card in VirtualBox for internet connection to work IIRC.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Ah, i missed the program downloader while poking around. I'll take another look.
    - andreiw 9y ago
      Firefox 48 worked, but the autoupdate crashed. If you install 7Zip, you should know that 7Zip does not associate itself with file extensions by default. This is 7zip behavior. You need to run 7zip, go to options, and set associations by clicking on the '+' button.
- andreiw 9y ago
  AMD PCnet-PCI II as the NIC works fine for me (VBox 5.2.4 r119785 (Qt5.6.3) on the Mac, if that helps)
snvzz 9y ago
The USB support isn't quite there yet (major rework didn't make it this release) but otherwise this is a pretty good release with massive progress in actual usefulness.
- Koshkin 9y ago
  For why USB is hard, see http://www.usbmadesimple.co.uk/ http://www.usbmadesimple.co.uk/.
  - exikyut 9y ago
    Arg! This is so awesome, but is as though USB 3 never existed.
  - andreiw 9y ago
    Ugh. This website saved my ass trying to make HID devices work on top of the completely non-conforming Linaro DwUsbHostDxe driver (look at https://github.com/andreiw/RaspberryPiPkg/commits/master/Drivers/DwUsbHostDxe https://github.com/andreiw/RaspberryPiPkg/commits/master/Dri... for a laugh). I did end up having to hit the USB spec in the end, but it's a legit resource to get a birds-eye view of the whole USB1 and USB2 thing. It doesn't make USB simpler, but sure makes it more approachable.
    - voltagex_ 9y ago
      Offtopic: What's the end goal of all this UEFI work you're doing for the Pi?
      - andreiw 9y ago
        No concrete goal beyond having a reasonably useful UEFI development environment (more so than the 96boards one). It’s been useful to be able to run the same Ubuntu and SUSE images as VMs and servers do, but that’s only really possible because the built kernels have RPi3 support (but at least you now don’t need a custom image with U-Boot).
      - 9y ago
boramalper 9y ago
Genuine question: What advantage does ReactOS provide over Wine? https://www.reactos.org/wiki/WINE https://www.reactos.org/wiki/WINE explains a bit but still doesn't answer the question. P.S. oh by the way, the developers of both projects are apparently collaborating and ReactOS uses Wine's DLLs for their userspace, so my question is not meant to criticise the "double-effort" or anything like that.
- pnloyd 9y ago
  I've wondered this myself, anyone know if ReactOS can run anything wine can't? I tried wine-develolment a few days ago and 3D performance is still rather spotty (amongst all the other usuall hiccups). That being said is has helped me play a few games with a decent experience.
  - Kliment 9y ago
    Drivers for one - reactos can be used for Windows driver testing, wine cannot.
- Endy 9y ago
  Well, for one, you don't need to deal with setting up a separate Linux OS.
- exikyut 9y ago
  Primarily support for drivers, I think. https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_History https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_History and https://www.reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS/History https://www.reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS/History were interesting to look through.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
  The big-picture advantage is that Windows users can switch to it without becoming Linux users first. Many people actually like (some version of) Windows and would prefer to keep using it, but have issues with licensing or Microsoft's stewardship of the platform. There are also some technical advantages for applications that require driver code. Examples include specialized software with intrusive DRM (where either the DRM is so beastly or interest in the software is so narrow that there's no crack; ISTR that Cubase is sort of legendary for this) or software that drives industrial equipment. Wine will probably never run this sort of thing.
_bxg1 9y ago
Every time I see this I briefly think it's a Linux distro with a React-based window manager
bitmapbrother 9y ago
With the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling that API's are copyrightable I wonder what type of impact it could have on open source projects, such as ReactOS, if the copyright holder ever decided to take action.
- carussell 9y ago
  1. The ReactOS project's implementation of Windows APIs is purely for compatibility reasons; on the other hand, Android's implementation was not meant as a compatibility layer for existing apps. (In fact, that Android didn't implement a compatibility layer was a huge sticking point for the Sun contingent within Oracle—although if we're honest, we know the motivations for Oracle proper are the dollar signs.) It wouldn't be a good idea to try and draw direct parallels between the two. 2. Oracle v Google still isn't over, so even drawing any inferences about Oracle v Google itself would be premature. 3. The copyright holder here is MS. Any action on their part to go after ReactOS now be the undoing of all the goodwill they've built in the Nadella/MS-on-GitHub era. The result would be (a) a bunch of I-told-you-sos from the leery folks still holding on to their grudges today, and (b) a massive, massive, innoculating "fool me once…" reaction among the folks who'd actually been made suckers for not heeding the grudgeholders' warnings. All in all, it would be a spectacularly bad idea for MS at this point, especially given how much weaker their empire has already gotten in the last decade.
johnvega 9y ago
appears to work well, including old photoshop 5.5 from a windows cd https://youtu.be/Ne88Is2cymQ https://youtu.be/Ne88Is2cymQ
ww520 9y ago
I love ReactOS, especially in VM. Windows requires separate license for each VM. If I maintains 10 VM for testing, it's a problem.
rhemgla_corp 9y ago
For those of you who would like to run pen tests on safe ip addresses here is a list: http://bit.do/rhemgla http://bit.do/rhemgla
boznz 9y ago
Windows 10 is still not a good option for embedded x86 systems even in its proper supported embedded mode. Once I've replaced the shell, turned off all the services and junk programs and opened the one port on the firewall my industrial touchscreen application requires I would really rather windows take the hint not to change anything and leave things be. I have been keeping an eye on Reactos for over 10 years, it is still a promising candidate for my legacy systems, USB Install would still be good to have as it is painfully hard to get it on to newer systems which don't have Optical drives. It took me a while but I can now compile my gui applications for Linux, so going forward that is my strategy, but lots of factories out there still scared to move off windows XP and Reactos would be ideal.
Panino 9y ago
> Several bugs have been squashed in the ReactOS CC and Freeloader, allowing it to boot in 96MB hardware (smaller RAM need than our 0.4.7 release). This is an impressive update when most projects, and not necessarily wrongly, always move in the opposite direction. Good to see. As a free Unix user I'm primarily interested in ReactOS in order to test certain Windows things such as cwrsync over ssh. I tried installing ReactOS about a month ago but didn't have the right hardware to make it through the installer. I will definitely try again.
andreiw 9y ago
So I'm a ReactOS fanboi, but... but... - You need to fix your flaccid dev community. Your forums have a terrible S/N ratio. IRC may be great and all, but I don't see any hard documentation behind any design discussions or development. I do see crazy shite like "can I run ReactOS on Playstation 2". The forums make your project seem dead, which it clearly isn't. - You need to fix your flaccid dev community. It needs a larger presence. It needs to be tangible (who is doing what? who are the people? do you have conferences?) - You need to fix your flaccid dev community. There is a bunch of really useless, out-of-date, confusing and out-right self-inconsistent information on building ROS, and the Git move didn't help (but kudos on the move, it is long overdue). I've tried 4-5 times to do something, but the directions I followed on Win, Ros or Linux all ended up breaking somewhere. - You need to fix your attitude problems (or your forums). There are people asking reasonable questions, who get actively or passively aggressive answers. Not good. - You need to fix your toolchain problems. This whole SEH thing is getting out of hand. Does Clang support SEH yet? It might - https://clang.llvm.org/docs/MSVCCompatibility.html https://clang.llvm.org/docs/MSVCCompatibility.html. So maybe you need to bail on GCC, or maintain your own fork of it (yes, it's ridiculous that GCC still doesn't have SEH support, and the patents have long expired). - You need to get a grip on x64 support. Your toolchain problems cannot be a gate (and you can clearly use MSVC for building... so...). IA32 support is great and all, but needs a back seat to x64. - You need to get a grip on UEFI booting (note UEFI booting does not /necessarily/ mean you need improved ACPI support, in practice) - SMP? - Forget Xbox, NewWorld PowerMacs (those were BE anyway) and 32-bit Arm chips (which outside of the Pi are too varied and too few). Targeting 64-bit Arm chips does make sense, though, now that Microsoft has released a client build of Win 10 on laptops and an Arm server vendor demoed Windows Server at OCP'18 (http://www.opencompute.org/assets/Uploads/18150J-Ampere-PPT-OCPSummitKumar-final.pdf http://www.opencompute.org/assets/Uploads/18150J-Ampere-PPT-...). You will need UEFI and reasonable ACPI support to support ARM64. You can target SBSA and SBBR compliant systems and this will give support for the entire server ecosystem (and qemu VMs, har har). - You might wish to minkernel-ize ROS as well, so you can boot without a GUI. - You might wish to update Wiki (and build a list of links to relevant pages) for active subprojects.
- chris_wot 9y ago
  Wow, aggressive much?
withinrafael 9y ago
I've submitted non-clean-room reverse engineered code to ReactOS years ago when I was younger and it was accepted with no questions asked. But since that day, I can't bring myself to believe all of this is clean-room reverse engineered. I hope it was an outlier event and that external contributions are better audited today.
- d33 9y ago
  As long as nothing can't be proved, why bother? I don't think one could raise a good point about ethics in favor of Microsoft. DMCA is shit.
- vicmarcal-ros 9y ago
  Superman flies. Spiderman spiders. Trolls exist.
sspiff 9y ago
I wonder if the planned Vista/7/10 support will extend to kernel mode drivers, especially for WDDM2 and up graphics drivers. Currently, the supported graphics drivers is pretty sad for modern-ish hardware on ReactOS, because they are limited to drivers for Windows Server 2003 / Windows XP, which aren't available for a lot of modern cards (or integrated chips, for that matter). Additionally, a lot of the older XP drivers don't work well on ReactOS today.
fsiefken 9y ago
I'd be curious if ReactOS runs the Oculus Rift drivers, runs docker and is more performant then Windows 10.
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  > more performant Do you mean faster?
  - fsiefken 9y ago
    More resource fficient, which ususally means faster in execution or runs better on resource constrained machines. For example how well does it run in 2G compared to Windows 10?
z3t4 9y ago
I think Windows will just keep breaking compatibility faster then they themselves and others are able to keep up. Forcing users to keep upgrading and buying the same software over and over again.
gjvc 9y ago
In case you are dismissing this as a fringe project, remember, what is ridiculous today is commonplace tomorrow.
ksk 9y ago
I'm willing to bet, this will be very useful in a few years time, and the primary use will be 'fixed function' devices (in industries that are very slow to change) that currently require Windows. (ATMs, POS, Announcement Screens, Equipment controllers, SCADA systems, etc, etc)
unixhero 9y ago
Does Starcraft run?

617 points by bratao 9y ago

One day when Windows drifts too far away from its golden age functionality, it will be great if ReactOS can fill the gap. However, I feel like MS could one-up them overnight by providing a sandboxed 32-bit XP VM as part of current windows. We’d get back DOS support and compatibility with old programs would be better. Call it Windows Subsystem for Windows or whatever. That would also pave the way to removing a lot of Win32 cruft from the main codebase, which MS seems very itchy to do.

gambiting 9y ago
It was already a thing in Windows Vista - at least in Enterprise, you could download a "windows xp " compatibility package, right click on any application and start it in windows XP - it would silently start XP in the background and render the app the same way as a native Vista app, while running on the XP kernel in the background. I have no idea if it exists in newer versions of Windows however.
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  No it doesn't, unfortunately. The best option they suggest is moving it to a VM under Windows 10's Hyper-V: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/1f6e73ad-b3f0-4c05-9fb4-0f0237420f6b/how-to-legally-run-xp-mode-vm-with-windows-10-host?forum=w7itprovirt https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/1f...
viraptor 9y ago
What's the point in doing this for MS? There's no money in it and they'd need a serious team backing it. And by no money, I mean at scale - there are going to be small companies needing something like that and there are going to be huge companies. Huge ones already got a public offer of "pay an increasing tax for XP support" and likely a private "this corporate deal is possible" if they're important enough. The small ones put together, I don't think could collectively fund ongoing xp support. If anything ReactOS picking up those small companies is beneficial to MS by keeping them in the MS ecosystem.
- richard_todd 9y ago
  Like a sibling comment mentioned, it wouldn’t be the first time MS has done this sort of thing (XP on certain SKUs of Vista or maybe it was 7). I assume they already have a serious team backing tons of legacy Win32 cruft. So, instead of maintaining that, they freeze it and shift it into a VM. MS gets to cut down modern Win32 to something closer to the UWP subset, and users that want it—-make it an optional subsystem—-get better legacy compatibility than they have had in years. Maybe the 2020 win7 end of life would be a good time to do something like this. I don’t know if there is a good enough financial reason for MS, but from a user’s perspective I think it would be better than the situation today.

bhanu423 9y ago

One of the most interesting changelog that I have read in a While. Well written, thoughtful and gave me good insight into the project.

iforgotpassword 9y ago
Indeed a great read to catch up with the project. > Talking about the notification tray, due to Ged’s work, icons of killed and finished process are now automatically removed, even when apps crash. This is something that Windows doesn't even provide with Win10, and many Windows users may have noticed. Made me chuckle. This has bothered me since forever. It seemed like such a low hanging fruit to fix, I wonder why Microsoft never did.
- fluxsauce 9y ago
  > I wonder why Microsoft never did. I'm assuming it's because of the size of the codebase, available engineering resources, return-on-investment calculation, and a business prioritization of new features over refinement. Most engineers can look at their own work or codebase and think, "well, that's a bit shit but it works well enough." I can't imagine their backlog. I'm sure it's lurking in an issue queue somewhere.
  - dfox 9y ago
    One notable thing is that in Windows the behavior of taskbar changed around the time of Windows 98SE/2000 (I'm not sure in which version exactly). Originally the "orphaned" tray icons just were there and you could not cause them to go away, "new" behavior is that first event (ie. hover) causes them to be destroyed.
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      Guesswork: once you hover over an icon in the taskbar, later Windows checks if the process (or, rather, window, as the icon will be tied to the window handle you get from CreateWindowEx) handle belonging to it is still alive. If not (aka it cannot find a target window to send the message to) the icon gets destroyed. ReactOS, another guess here, does either a polling check if all taskbar icons have valid process handles or a check whenever a process exits.

orliesaurus 9y ago

I think their site is getting the HN hug of death, loads extremely slow/doesn't load at all...

make3 9y ago
yep it's currently fully smothered for me

rocky1138 9y ago

What I like about this project, besides the dedication and professionalism of the team behind it, is that it offers PC gamers a possible way to play Windows-era games moving forward. In a decade or two, we likely won't be able to activate a Windows XP machine (and wouldn't want to with all of the security hazards either) so it's great to have a free and open source project to run our Windows stuff.

jug 9y ago
Yeah, DOSBox is nice for retro gaming or even the oddball application, but it pales in comparison to the potential of this project.
- megaman22 9y ago
  The place where DOSBox isn't sufficient is for games in that Win 95/98/2000 era. Most of those don't run very well, if at all on modern Windows, unless somebody still has the source and bothers to rerelease a modern "HD edition" or somesuch. I still have to keep a Win 98 VM so I can play Sierra's Civil War Generals 2 from time to time.
  - orionblastar 9y ago
    I heard that DOSBox can run Windows 3.1 to run 16 but Windows games. I also heard someone hacked Win95 and Win98 to run under DOSbox. You could just use QEMU emulate a Pentium box and install 95 or 98 under that as an alternative.
    - efreak 9y ago
      Dosbox runs windows 3.1 perfectly, with resolutions up to at least 1280x1024 (what I use for tetris) _or_ true color mode (unfortunately not both). You can supposedly install 95/98 in it, but I've had trouble actually using them in it.
geff82 9y ago
Good thought, never saw it from an archiving point of view!

chris_wot 9y ago

I’m curious - so now that the ReactOS guys are picking up bugs in Windows, does this mean they have a comprehensive test suite of Microsoft Windows proper?

jacobush 9y ago
They've had for a decade at least.

jug 9y ago

I feel like ReactOS has gained more attention lately and hope some of it will spill over to support of this project. It’s a bit like you need to reach a critical mass in features and usability, and until then it’s an uphill battle to maintain enough traction. Haiku is another cool project, especially as someone who will always have a warm spot left for the Amiga. But until the long waited for beta is out, I think they have an ever more dangerously steep uphill path to climb.

erric 9y ago
Haiku OS[0] is a BeOS inspired OS, though I do see some articles about a port of it to Amiga hardware. [0]https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/ [1]http://www.generationamiga.com/2017/09/03/haiku-os-for-amigaone-500-computers-68k-port-in-development/ http://www.generationamiga.com/2017/09/03/haiku-os-for-amiga...
- antod 9y ago
  They must've meant AROS http://www.aros.org/ http://www.aros.org/
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    Within the Amiga community there's a certain level of admiration for HaikuOS, as BeOS/HaikuOS is seen by these individuals as a spiritual successor to AmigaOS. As you point out, AROS is the open-source reimplementation of AmigaOS, so it's worth mentioning it, I just wanted to clarify why the Amiga+Haiku link might have been made.
    - erric 9y ago
      Much appreciated! I wasn’t lucky enough to have an Amiga, I only had a PCjr. I did see them in the store and listed after them.
    - nickpsecurity 9y ago
      Those of you discussing Amiga might find this comment from skrzyp interesting: https://lobste.rs/s/vkpekg/morphos_3_10_released#c_ktgnn3 https://lobste.rs/s/vkpekg/morphos_3_10_released#c_ktgnn3 It gives a huge, deep history lesson from author's perspective covering important events, hardware/software, and especially the culture. It was fascinating. Also made me hold off on MorphOS for one of my projects.

konschubert 9y ago

What Kernel does this OS use? What's its history? Is it a unix fork such as Linux?

dfox 9y ago
It uses it's own opensource implementation of Windows NT kernel.
- lnx01 9y ago
  And a lot of code from Wine too
mschuster91 9y ago
No, it's a reverse engineered Windows. I believe that due to copyright issues it even is a fully clean-room developed implementation, which means that it's not based on MS documentation or on decompiled source code.
- rossy 9y ago
  > which means that it's not based on MS documentation I think looking at MS documentation is okay. You're allowed to look at MSDN for Wine development[1]. Since the projects share code, you're probably allowed to do so for ReactOS as well. [1]: https://wiki.winehq.org/Clean_Room_Guidelines https://wiki.winehq.org/Clean_Room_Guidelines
e12e 9y ago
See eg: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/ntoskrnl/include/ntoskrnl.h https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/ntoskrnl/incl...
SllX 9y ago
The ReactOS kernel is their own, clean room reverse engineered to be compatible with the NT kernel. Also just a side note, Linux isn't exactly a UNIX fork either. Linux was developed from scratch on a MINIX host, which in turn was another OS designed to be UNIX-compatible but did not actually use any UNIX code. To put it another way, it's Unix-like two generations removed, but definitely not something you could call a fork. That might seem like a small detail to you but SCO vs IBM says otherwise.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wensley 9y ago

Seen ReactOS pop up a few times and always thought it was something to do with the Facebook Javascript library. This is really amazing, I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.

jwilk 9y ago
Blame Facebook for poor name choice. ReactOS is much older than React, the JS library.
- wensley 9y ago
  I realise that now but did have to do some googling to find out about the history of the project.
- jhall1468 9y ago
  Lots of products have similar names, that doesn't make ReactJS a poor choice. One is a frontend framework and one is an operating system. The naming isn't the reason he wasn't aware of ReactOS... the fact that it's a very small community is why he wasn't aware of it.
bartread 9y ago
Yeah, I've been confused too. The website itself doesn't help: no "About" or "What is ReactOS?" in the main nav. I ended up looking it up on Wikipedia to find out what it is: an open source OS that is intended to be binary compatible with Windows. This does actually ring a bell for me - I seem to remember mention of it very early in the century. That perhaps cuts to the heart of the issue: it's been going as a project since 1996, yet it's still only considered alpha. In other words, I'm not so sure it's going anywhere fast, and I'm not sure what you'd really use it for.
- wensley 9y ago
  I was surprised to find it has been going since 96. There is some good info on this site: https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/83578.html https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/83578.html

middleclick 9y ago

Can anyone comment if I can install old Windows 2000 games on this, like C&C Red Alert? Would it work?

shakna 9y ago
Hit and miss as there are missing win32 pieces, but Red Alert for example ran nearly as well as it used to, for me.
antoineMoPa 9y ago
And simtower?
- exikyut 9y ago
  - Version 1.0: Game saving is broken, everything else works: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=789&iTestingId=36712&sAllBugs https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI... - Version 1.1b (retail): Copy a DLL over for working sound, then everything works: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=28003 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
exikyut 9y ago
C&C Red Alert 2, both 1.0 and Yuri's Revenge: rating "everything works": https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=252&iTestingId=52008 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
exikyut 9y ago
PSA: The best way it seems to check the AppDB is to do something like site:https://appdb.winehq.org "simtower" and site:https://appdb.winehq.org "c&c" "red alert" "2" (The search box on the website is just google custom search)

owenversteeg 9y ago

This has been one of my favorite software projects to watch, because it's such an insanely monumental undertaking and moves so damn slowly. There were people working on this two decades ago, putting in tiny fixes and little bits of code and whatnot, and they did it even knowing that basically nobody would see their work for decades. Hell, I have never seen a ReactOS installation in the wild, and I'm the kind of person whose friends install Haiku, Nix and NetBSD as their daily drivers. And the second-hand stories I've heard about people who did install React was basically "I was bored, I put it on a drive, played around for 5 minutes, and wiped it." But that doesn't discourage them. Meanwhile, work keeps going on in the background. So many untold man-hours of thankless work going into the project, and the vast majority of that "hard" work with no payoff for years. And now it's finally getting close to actual Windows, after decades of work, and soon (well, years, but still) people will be using it everywhere as a replacement for Windows. This is one of the most important software projects in history. My hat is off to the ReactOS developers, and congratulations on the latest release. [edit] Here are the names of the 75 programmers that have worked on ReactOS: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/CREDITS https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/CREDITS

shakna 9y ago
> Hell, I have never seen a ReactOS installation in the wild It's not especially common, but I do know of a couple kiosks and a PoS system that run ReactOS under the hood to avoid Windows licensing.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  How the hell do they get PCI certified with ReactOS?
  - tom169 9y ago
    Typically credit card processing is handled entirely by a physical device plugged into the computer. The computer isn't in a PCI zone.

digi_owl 9y ago

Tried the livecd in a VM and a couple of niggles sprang up. First of all, no driver for the network card in Virtualbox, though Vmware worked fine. Second, no web browser... Third, the mouse sometimes freaked out and got stuck in a corner.

feikname 9y ago
It should be obvious enough, but perhaps you missed: you can install a browser, such as an old version of opera, by fetching its installer over the internet via ReactOS builtin "program downloader" (I do not remeber its name). If you meant lack of default browser preinstalled though, I agree with you its lacking. It's necessary to change the network card in VirtualBox for internet connection to work IIRC.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Ah, i missed the program downloader while poking around. I'll take another look.
  - andreiw 9y ago
    Firefox 48 worked, but the autoupdate crashed. If you install 7Zip, you should know that 7Zip does not associate itself with file extensions by default. This is 7zip behavior. You need to run 7zip, go to options, and set associations by clicking on the '+' button.
andreiw 9y ago
AMD PCnet-PCI II as the NIC works fine for me (VBox 5.2.4 r119785 (Qt5.6.3) on the Mac, if that helps)

snvzz 9y ago

The USB support isn't quite there yet (major rework didn't make it this release) but otherwise this is a pretty good release with massive progress in actual usefulness.

Koshkin 9y ago
For why USB is hard, see http://www.usbmadesimple.co.uk/ http://www.usbmadesimple.co.uk/.
- exikyut 9y ago
  Arg! This is so awesome, but is as though USB 3 never existed.
- andreiw 9y ago
  Ugh. This website saved my ass trying to make HID devices work on top of the completely non-conforming Linaro DwUsbHostDxe driver (look at https://github.com/andreiw/RaspberryPiPkg/commits/master/Drivers/DwUsbHostDxe https://github.com/andreiw/RaspberryPiPkg/commits/master/Dri... for a laugh). I did end up having to hit the USB spec in the end, but it's a legit resource to get a birds-eye view of the whole USB1 and USB2 thing. It doesn't make USB simpler, but sure makes it more approachable.
  - voltagex_ 9y ago
    Offtopic: What's the end goal of all this UEFI work you're doing for the Pi?
    - andreiw 9y ago
      No concrete goal beyond having a reasonably useful UEFI development environment (more so than the 96boards one). It’s been useful to be able to run the same Ubuntu and SUSE images as VMs and servers do, but that’s only really possible because the built kernels have RPi3 support (but at least you now don’t need a custom image with U-Boot).
    - 9y ago

boramalper 9y ago

Genuine question: What advantage does ReactOS provide over Wine? https://www.reactos.org/wiki/WINE https://www.reactos.org/wiki/WINE explains a bit but still doesn't answer the question. P.S. oh by the way, the developers of both projects are apparently collaborating and ReactOS uses Wine's DLLs for their userspace, so my question is not meant to criticise the "double-effort" or anything like that.

pnloyd 9y ago
I've wondered this myself, anyone know if ReactOS can run anything wine can't? I tried wine-develolment a few days ago and 3D performance is still rather spotty (amongst all the other usuall hiccups). That being said is has helped me play a few games with a decent experience.
- Kliment 9y ago
  Drivers for one - reactos can be used for Windows driver testing, wine cannot.
Endy 9y ago
Well, for one, you don't need to deal with setting up a separate Linux OS.
exikyut 9y ago
Primarily support for drivers, I think. https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_History https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_History and https://www.reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS/History https://www.reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS/History were interesting to look through.
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
The big-picture advantage is that Windows users can switch to it without becoming Linux users first. Many people actually like (some version of) Windows and would prefer to keep using it, but have issues with licensing or Microsoft's stewardship of the platform. There are also some technical advantages for applications that require driver code. Examples include specialized software with intrusive DRM (where either the DRM is so beastly or interest in the software is so narrow that there's no crack; ISTR that Cubase is sort of legendary for this) or software that drives industrial equipment. Wine will probably never run this sort of thing.

_bxg1 9y ago

Every time I see this I briefly think it's a Linux distro with a React-based window manager

bitmapbrother 9y ago

With the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling that API's are copyrightable I wonder what type of impact it could have on open source projects, such as ReactOS, if the copyright holder ever decided to take action.

carussell 9y ago
1. The ReactOS project's implementation of Windows APIs is purely for compatibility reasons; on the other hand, Android's implementation was not meant as a compatibility layer for existing apps. (In fact, that Android didn't implement a compatibility layer was a huge sticking point for the Sun contingent within Oracle—although if we're honest, we know the motivations for Oracle proper are the dollar signs.) It wouldn't be a good idea to try and draw direct parallels between the two. 2. Oracle v Google still isn't over, so even drawing any inferences about Oracle v Google itself would be premature. 3. The copyright holder here is MS. Any action on their part to go after ReactOS now be the undoing of all the goodwill they've built in the Nadella/MS-on-GitHub era. The result would be (a) a bunch of I-told-you-sos from the leery folks still holding on to their grudges today, and (b) a massive, massive, innoculating "fool me once…" reaction among the folks who'd actually been made suckers for not heeding the grudgeholders' warnings. All in all, it would be a spectacularly bad idea for MS at this point, especially given how much weaker their empire has already gotten in the last decade.

johnvega 9y ago

appears to work well, including old photoshop 5.5 from a windows cd https://youtu.be/Ne88Is2cymQ https://youtu.be/Ne88Is2cymQ

ww520 9y ago

I love ReactOS, especially in VM. Windows requires separate license for each VM. If I maintains 10 VM for testing, it's a problem.

rhemgla_corp 9y ago

For those of you who would like to run pen tests on safe ip addresses here is a list: http://bit.do/rhemgla http://bit.do/rhemgla

boznz 9y ago

Windows 10 is still not a good option for embedded x86 systems even in its proper supported embedded mode. Once I've replaced the shell, turned off all the services and junk programs and opened the one port on the firewall my industrial touchscreen application requires I would really rather windows take the hint not to change anything and leave things be. I have been keeping an eye on Reactos for over 10 years, it is still a promising candidate for my legacy systems, USB Install would still be good to have as it is painfully hard to get it on to newer systems which don't have Optical drives. It took me a while but I can now compile my gui applications for Linux, so going forward that is my strategy, but lots of factories out there still scared to move off windows XP and Reactos would be ideal.

Panino 9y ago

> Several bugs have been squashed in the ReactOS CC and Freeloader, allowing it to boot in 96MB hardware (smaller RAM need than our 0.4.7 release). This is an impressive update when most projects, and not necessarily wrongly, always move in the opposite direction. Good to see. As a free Unix user I'm primarily interested in ReactOS in order to test certain Windows things such as cwrsync over ssh. I tried installing ReactOS about a month ago but didn't have the right hardware to make it through the installer. I will definitely try again.

andreiw 9y ago

So I'm a ReactOS fanboi, but... but... - You need to fix your flaccid dev community. Your forums have a terrible S/N ratio. IRC may be great and all, but I don't see any hard documentation behind any design discussions or development. I do see crazy shite like "can I run ReactOS on Playstation 2". The forums make your project seem dead, which it clearly isn't. - You need to fix your flaccid dev community. It needs a larger presence. It needs to be tangible (who is doing what? who are the people? do you have conferences?) - You need to fix your flaccid dev community. There is a bunch of really useless, out-of-date, confusing and out-right self-inconsistent information on building ROS, and the Git move didn't help (but kudos on the move, it is long overdue). I've tried 4-5 times to do something, but the directions I followed on Win, Ros or Linux all ended up breaking somewhere. - You need to fix your attitude problems (or your forums). There are people asking reasonable questions, who get actively or passively aggressive answers. Not good. - You need to fix your toolchain problems. This whole SEH thing is getting out of hand. Does Clang support SEH yet? It might - https://clang.llvm.org/docs/MSVCCompatibility.html https://clang.llvm.org/docs/MSVCCompatibility.html. So maybe you need to bail on GCC, or maintain your own fork of it (yes, it's ridiculous that GCC still doesn't have SEH support, and the patents have long expired). - You need to get a grip on x64 support. Your toolchain problems cannot be a gate (and you can clearly use MSVC for building... so...). IA32 support is great and all, but needs a back seat to x64. - You need to get a grip on UEFI booting (note UEFI booting does not /necessarily/ mean you need improved ACPI support, in practice) - SMP? - Forget Xbox, NewWorld PowerMacs (those were BE anyway) and 32-bit Arm chips (which outside of the Pi are too varied and too few). Targeting 64-bit Arm chips does make sense, though, now that Microsoft has released a client build of Win 10 on laptops and an Arm server vendor demoed Windows Server at OCP'18 (http://www.opencompute.org/assets/Uploads/18150J-Ampere-PPT-OCPSummitKumar-final.pdf http://www.opencompute.org/assets/Uploads/18150J-Ampere-PPT-...). You will need UEFI and reasonable ACPI support to support ARM64. You can target SBSA and SBBR compliant systems and this will give support for the entire server ecosystem (and qemu VMs, har har). - You might wish to minkernel-ize ROS as well, so you can boot without a GUI. - You might wish to update Wiki (and build a list of links to relevant pages) for active subprojects.

chris_wot 9y ago
Wow, aggressive much?

withinrafael 9y ago

I've submitted non-clean-room reverse engineered code to ReactOS years ago when I was younger and it was accepted with no questions asked. But since that day, I can't bring myself to believe all of this is clean-room reverse engineered. I hope it was an outlier event and that external contributions are better audited today.

d33 9y ago
As long as nothing can't be proved, why bother? I don't think one could raise a good point about ethics in favor of Microsoft. DMCA is shit.
vicmarcal-ros 9y ago
Superman flies. Spiderman spiders. Trolls exist.

sspiff 9y ago

I wonder if the planned Vista/7/10 support will extend to kernel mode drivers, especially for WDDM2 and up graphics drivers. Currently, the supported graphics drivers is pretty sad for modern-ish hardware on ReactOS, because they are limited to drivers for Windows Server 2003 / Windows XP, which aren't available for a lot of modern cards (or integrated chips, for that matter). Additionally, a lot of the older XP drivers don't work well on ReactOS today.

fsiefken 9y ago

I'd be curious if ReactOS runs the Oculus Rift drivers, runs docker and is more performant then Windows 10.

theandrewbailey 9y ago
> more performant Do you mean faster?
- fsiefken 9y ago
  More resource fficient, which ususally means faster in execution or runs better on resource constrained machines. For example how well does it run in 2G compared to Windows 10?

z3t4 9y ago

I think Windows will just keep breaking compatibility faster then they themselves and others are able to keep up. Forcing users to keep upgrading and buying the same software over and over again.

gjvc 9y ago

In case you are dismissing this as a fringe project, remember, what is ridiculous today is commonplace tomorrow.

ksk 9y ago

I'm willing to bet, this will be very useful in a few years time, and the primary use will be 'fixed function' devices (in industries that are very slow to change) that currently require Windows. (ATMs, POS, Announcement Screens, Equipment controllers, SCADA systems, etc, etc)

unixhero 9y ago

Does Starcraft run?