5 ms·

Every time I’ve tried it, it falls apart within minutes of using it. You’d think after 20 years of development it might be somewhat stable but I guess not.

by jamesu 6y ago

pizza234 6y ago
IMO, the is a monumental underestimation of the man-hours put into make Windows as compatible as it is, even ignoring the fact that Microsoft's engineers are/were highly skilled. I like the ReactOS idea, but I think it will take decades to be compatible enough - and I'm even talking about enough. If the objective was to run obsolete software, I personally had to distribute resources, I'd just do assign them to Wine. It's surely much more productive to make software compatible on a per-case basis, rather than writing a whole operating system with the objective of being compatible.
- IncRnd 6y ago
  > I like the ReactOS idea, but I think it will take decades to be compatible enough - and I'm even talking about enough. It has been under development for decades. That is more than twice the time it took to develop Windows 95. I've tried ReactOS a few times over the years, and it has never worked for me. I know of two specific examples of ReactOS code that as of a couple years ago were identical with Windows code. There are likely other instances pointing to a non-clean-room implementation.
  - rnd0 6y ago
    >I know of two specific examples of ReactOS code that as of a couple years ago were identical with Windows code. Cool; if they're specific then you ought to be able to cite them for the rest of us.
    - russelg 6y ago
      https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/59b78b4756da02e275e35bd40a27962d5a759b69/ntoskrnl/ke/i386/exp.c#L803-L804 https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/59b78b4756da02e275e3... Is just one example.
      - rnd0 6y ago
        Odd, here's the commit history for that file: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/commits/master/ntoskrnl/ke/i386/exp.c https://github.com/reactos/reactos/commits/master/ntoskrnl/k... What I'm wondering is if you just chanced upon a submission that wasn't actually accepted into the tree at any point? Perhaps because it literally says: >/* This part was copied from Windows source / > / We should obfuscate this somehow? */ And looks sketchy as hell? I'm not part of their project (just a fan) and my knowledge of git/github is shaky at best -but that's the way it looks from where I'm standing. Also, I'm not seeing the original windows source code itself; only a comment.
        rnd1 6y ago
        Do you expect someone to verify for you whether that is stolen source code?
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        rnd1 6y ago
        Why would anyone provide that sort of proof on the internet? ReactOS doesn't accept submissions from people who have seen Windows source and Microsoft will revoke source code access.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        dang 6y ago
        We've banned this account - it's not ok to mimic someone else's username like that, but it's especially not ok to add sockpuppet accounts to a thread you're already in. Doing that will get your main account banned as well, so please don't do that again.
      - johnsoft 6y ago
  - asddubs 6y ago
    not really a fair comparison, windows 95 had the advantage of not having to be developed from the ground up to retain perfect binary compatibility with blindows 95
- jacobush 6y ago
  But I'm not disappointed in ReactOS because it's not fully compatible. I'm disappointed because it's not stable. (Or was, last time I tried a couple of years ago.) I think they should go for rock solid stable first. Then people could build on it. It's perfect for embedded, Point-of-Sale etc where the vendor want to keep their codebase untouched but hop off the Microsoft bandwagon.
yaseer 6y ago
It's both a very hard problem, and a very interesting problem. My impression is that most of the work on the project is motivated by interest in learning about OSs, rather than demand from real use-cases. If the problem had strong enough demand from real use-cases, I presume it would be stable by now.

Every time I’ve tried it, it falls apart within minutes of using it. You’d think after 20 years of development it might be somewhat stable but I guess not.

by jamesu 6y ago

Every time I’ve tried it, it falls apart within minutes of using it. You’d think after 20 years of development it might be somewhat stable but I guess not.

pizza234 6y ago

IMO, the is a monumental underestimation of the man-hours put into make Windows as compatible as it is, even ignoring the fact that Microsoft's engineers are/were highly skilled. I like the ReactOS idea, but I think it will take decades to be compatible enough - and I'm even talking about enough. If the objective was to run obsolete software, I personally had to distribute resources, I'd just do assign them to Wine. It's surely much more productive to make software compatible on a per-case basis, rather than writing a whole operating system with the objective of being compatible.

IncRnd 6y ago
> I like the ReactOS idea, but I think it will take decades to be compatible enough - and I'm even talking about enough. It has been under development for decades. That is more than twice the time it took to develop Windows 95. I've tried ReactOS a few times over the years, and it has never worked for me. I know of two specific examples of ReactOS code that as of a couple years ago were identical with Windows code. There are likely other instances pointing to a non-clean-room implementation.
- rnd0 6y ago
  >I know of two specific examples of ReactOS code that as of a couple years ago were identical with Windows code. Cool; if they're specific then you ought to be able to cite them for the rest of us.
  - russelg 6y ago
    https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/59b78b4756da02e275e35bd40a27962d5a759b69/ntoskrnl/ke/i386/exp.c#L803-L804 https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/59b78b4756da02e275e3... Is just one example.
    - rnd0 6y ago
      Odd, here's the commit history for that file: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/commits/master/ntoskrnl/ke/i386/exp.c https://github.com/reactos/reactos/commits/master/ntoskrnl/k... What I'm wondering is if you just chanced upon a submission that wasn't actually accepted into the tree at any point? Perhaps because it literally says: >/* This part was copied from Windows source / > / We should obfuscate this somehow? */ And looks sketchy as hell? I'm not part of their project (just a fan) and my knowledge of git/github is shaky at best -but that's the way it looks from where I'm standing. Also, I'm not seeing the original windows source code itself; only a comment.
      - rnd1 6y ago
        Do you expect someone to verify for you whether that is stolen source code?
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        rnd1 6y ago
        Why would anyone provide that sort of proof on the internet? ReactOS doesn't accept submissions from people who have seen Windows source and Microsoft will revoke source code access.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        dang 6y ago
        We've banned this account - it's not ok to mimic someone else's username like that, but it's especially not ok to add sockpuppet accounts to a thread you're already in. Doing that will get your main account banned as well, so please don't do that again.
    - johnsoft 6y ago
- asddubs 6y ago
  not really a fair comparison, windows 95 had the advantage of not having to be developed from the ground up to retain perfect binary compatibility with blindows 95
jacobush 6y ago
But I'm not disappointed in ReactOS because it's not fully compatible. I'm disappointed because it's not stable. (Or was, last time I tried a couple of years ago.) I think they should go for rock solid stable first. Then people could build on it. It's perfect for embedded, Point-of-Sale etc where the vendor want to keep their codebase untouched but hop off the Microsoft bandwagon.

yaseer 6y ago

It's both a very hard problem, and a very interesting problem. My impression is that most of the work on the project is motivated by interest in learning about OSs, rather than demand from real use-cases. If the problem had strong enough demand from real use-cases, I presume it would be stable by now.