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ReactOS “Open-Source Windows” Manages to Run Some Battlefield Games
- giancarlostoro 5y agoI'm really after letting ReactOS be useful for a boring office environment, has anyone been able to achieve this yet?
- emteycz 5y agoWhy not Linux? I'd worry about stability and security in business context.
- giancarlostoro 5y agoI dont mean for a literal business, just for personal use, but being able to run stuff like MS Office and such would be nice. Maybe even do Windows development on it for web things. I like the idea of an OS not bloated by "telemetry" basically. I hate tweaking Windows beyond the norm, it breaks things typically.
- alar44 5y agoI just run Windows in a VM if I need to do things with Office that I can't do with the Office for the web products, which isn't very often.
- striking 5y agoThink of ReactOS as a replacement for Windows XP. The selling point is more that it has compatibility with things like NT-based drivers, rather than being the future of compatibility with Windows. I have heard that you can set up Office 365 on Linux under Wine with a few tricks applied.
- marcodiego 5y agoI've got office 365 on linux. Legally. It is buggy and slow.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoYou can run MS Office in Linux via Wine.
- LeFantome 5y agoI would like that too.
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoWhy more monoculture? The Linux driver situation is already bad enough, but it is even more terrible that it's practically the ONLY operating system which has some hardware support.
- emteycz 5y agoI support alternative open source OSs as much as I can, but monoculture or not, using ReactOS for business - especially connected to the internet - is asking for problems. Turns out that's not the intention anyways. There is plenty of Linux-certified hardware as well as support plans.
- Hydraulix989 5y agoWhat is the Linux driver situation and how is it bad in ways that other non-Windows FOSS OSes would be able to mitigate?
- LeFantome 5y agoNo
- squarefoot 5y agoI would expect even better compatibility in the future as they work closely with the WINE team. Months ago I played Far Cry 5 at medium settings on my AMD 4300GE (no external GPU) using WINE and it ran perfectly: graphics, sound, everything.
- spaniard89277 5y agoI've tried to set up some modern games in ubuntu with wine for a friend and it was pretty much impossible. Old games, yes, new games, a nightmare. That was my experience at least.
- marcodiego 5y agoNote that wine in ubuntu repositories is quite old. Try with a specialized tool like bottles.
- lostmsu 5y agoWhat's the TL;DR; setup for bottles on Ubuntu? Get bottles from official Ubuntu repository, and let it install latest Wine version?
- graynk 5y agoBottles did not work very well for me. I'd suggest Lutris - it does a lot of things to ease the pains and has reasonable defaults. But if your game is on Steam - then just install Steam and let the game run through Proton, you don't need to do anything else
- graynk 5y agoI've just finished playing through Elden Ring via Valve's Proton and now moving onto Hitman 3 from Epic Games Store via regular Wine. Somehow it works even better than the Windows versions (Elden Ring has noticeably less stutters, for example) VR games however, especially with Oculus Quest, are extremely problematic
- 5y ago
- wongarsu 5y agoI just realized that ReactOS is only 5-7 years younger then the Linux kernel. Both projects that feel like they have always been there. And while ReactOS will never catch up with the current version of Windows, Microsoft has made ReactOS and Wine a lot more important in recent years when they decided that it wasn't worth it for them to keep backwards compatibility forever.
- richardfey 5y agoReactOS might become a real alternative to Windows for the older version of me, and I hope it will be ready by then! If they open up a "bughunting Friday" for games I might participate for the sake of old games conservation.
- e3bc54b2 5y agoOn another thread an HN comment complained that Win32 was becoming standard API for games instead of Linux native, thanks to Wine. The reply kind of opened my eyes. If Wine/ReactOS do continue the trend of becoming better more stable platform than Windows itself, thanks to Microsoft hell bent on destroying their reputation, eventually, Wine/ReactOS can even Embrace-Extend-Extinguish Windows itself. A man can dream..
- smoldesu 5y agoI really do believe it's possible. 10 years ago it would have been a pipe dream, but the dedication people put into making Wine and DXVK function properly is nothing short of astounding. Aside from high-performance studio software like NLEs and DAWs, you can pretty much expect everything to "just work" through Wine these days. From Bonzi Buddy to Battlefield, nothing seems to escape it's compatibility.
- jchw 5y agoWe need to implement WM_POINTER* support in the input stack somehow, though. If we had that, Clip Studio Paint would work fine with a graphics tablet. Probably even Photoshop. Some hacking on Wine was able to get SAI2 running, but SAI1 is elusive due to the design of Wine’s wintab32 implementation; XI2 events only go to the window that is being interacted with, whereas wintab32 events can and often are pumped to hidden background windows (for reasons unknown to me, though I guess if the window is on a different event loop it probably helps to mitigate events lagging. WM_POINTER magically coalesces events when the loop is tied up, and lets you grab the coalesced events, so it has less of this problem.) I’ve thought about it a lot, but… The Wine input stack is fairly complicated and I haven’t grokked it all. I do have some projects I made for (clean room) examining behavior of the WM_POINTER events though. (Also, testing for this will suck.)
- dTal 5y ago>you can pretty much expect everything to "just work" through Wine these days Oh... if only... I can't remember the last time I tried to run a non-game application and it actually worked. And I try often - I can think of three instances in the past few weeks alone (if you want to know - Fusion 360, an internal .NET app from 2010 that by rights should have worked perfectly, an old DVD of Altium Designer). Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely grateful for Wine. But perfectly compatible it ain't, not even close.
- Koshkin 5y agoEver since upgrading to Windows 11 on my relatively modern desktop, I have been tempted to replace it with ReactOS. I do not expect the 100% stability or compatibility, but my question is, what should I expect from it as a "daily driver" in a home (i.e. non-critical) setting? I do not intend to use any software from Microsoft (which is known to sometimes rely on some undocumented features and assumptions).
- jeroenhd 5y agoUnless you're content with a severely outdated browser and notepad for your productivity, ReactOS is not even close to a daily driver. In my opinion, for production use it's currently best suited for use as a free virtual machine for old software that no longer runs natively on Windows. If enough APIs are covered, it can be an excellent replacement for an XP VM to run some ancient tools.
- Koshkin 5y agoDo you mean that Firefox will not install or work in ReactOS?
- opencl 5y agoOnly the Firefox releases that supported Windows XP work on ReactOS, which was dropped in Firefox 53 in 2017.
- jeroenhd 5y agoModern versions don't. There was an LTS version for XP that was updated up until relatively recently that still works, but I wouldn't recommend using that for a daily driver anymore. In theory someone could take modern Firefox, figure out what essential APIs are missing, and contribute a set of fixes to get the latest LTS version of Firefox working again, but that's quite a complicated process.
- jaclaz 5y agoJFYI, there is some work in this space: https://msfn.org/board/topic/182647-my-browser-builds-part-3/ https://msfn.org/board/topic/182647-my-browser-builds-part-3...
- pipeline_peak 5y agoWhat exactly does ReactOS provide that Wine or some emulation environment on Linux can't?
- zozbot234 5y ago> What exactly does ReactOS provide that Wine or some emulation environment on Linux can't? Support for NT kernel interfaces. This allows drivers written for Windows to work under ReactOS. Most of the userspace should work just fine on Wine and Linux.
- pipeline_peak 5y agoOkay, that makes a huge difference lol. I always felt like the project seemed pointless and unsuccessful, but a free os that can run existing NT drivers is exciting.
- tedunangst 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper
- ecef9-8c0f-4374 5y agoWindows driver support
- Koshkin 5y agoProblem is, Windows is, and seems to become more and more, with each version, something of a moving target - and so may be (are?) device drivers, which begs the question whether one can only use devices from ten years ago or such...
- 0des 5y agoStop saying shit like "open source windows". Not only does it undersell the accomplishment here but it is a low brow way to bring the wrong kind of heat and attention. Michael should know better than to publish that headline. Is this what we should expect from phoronix for 2022 onward?
- choeger 5y agoNow wait for pretty much every game to come with kernel-level drivers ("anti cheat").
- pipeline_peak 5y agoI feel like showing off a game from 2002 comes off like “anti news”. Like look how slowly we’ve progressed.
- grishka 5y agoA possibly dumb question. I know that ReactOS developers work by observing what the real Windows does, documenting that, and then reimplementing from those docs, instead of straight reverse engineering. This is supposed to avoid legal trouble. But wouldn't it be better to take a Windows installation and start replacing components, one by one, with open-source reimplementations, until there is none of the original proprietary Windows left? Or, to rephrase it: what would happen if I took Windows XP and replaced the kernel (ntoskrnl.exe) with the one from ReactOS? Would that not be the ultimate binary and API compatibility test?
- Topgamer7 5y agoYou could try. But several of the APIs just map to Linux equivalents. Such as if you ask for network details, it would interact with Linux to determine what is needed and return that value. Things like dxvk or vkd3d have done support for what you are describing iirc though.
- LeFantome 5y agoYour answer seems to be about WINE. The question was about ReactOS. While I do not think that ReactOS is managed as described, I see no reason ReactOS could not meet its goals in this way. From a practical stand-point, I do not think it is possible today as few ReactOS components are complete enough to work in a real Windows environment. Certainly some of the user space stuff gets tested like that though. Both GNU and BSD were created by starting with stuff that worked in real UNIX and filling in the blanks until a full system emerged. So, it seems a very practical approach. The opposite happens sometimes as I have seen reports that say that something works on ReactOS when using one or two DLLs from real Windows.
- LeFantome 5y agoWhen I mentioned GNU, I realized that in some ways ReactOS works the same. ReactOS relies on WINE for user controls and libraries close to the user. In this way, it is a bit like GNU that started with the user interface and worked back to the kernel. The ReactOS project itself seems to be focussed on the kernel and working back out from there. Perhaps this is all too simple a view though as ReactOS certainly has other components ( like the app installer ). I think there is certainly some overlap between WINE and ReactOS devs as well.
- justinclift 5y agoHmmmm, wonder how well it works with recent VMware Workstation/Player? From memory, that has fairly decent DirectX and OpenGL support in its drivers too, probably more optimised than the VirtualBox stuff.
- phendrenad2 5y agoWhat I want to see is a Windows kernel with GNU/Linux coreutils and X window manager. Then the circle will be complete.
- anticensor 5y agoWSL1 has you covered.
- phendrenad2 5y agoAh good point, but it would be better if it were open-source.