5 ms·

I would like to see ReactOS succeed for various reasons, mainly philosophical. On the other hand, for practical real-world use cases, it has to compete with sev

by ch_123 9mo ago

I would like to see ReactOS succeed for various reasons, mainly philosophical. On the other hand, for practical real-world use cases, it has to compete with several alternative solutions: 1. Just use Windows 11. Yes, it sucks and MS occasionally breaks stuff - but at least hardware and software vendors will develop their code against Win 11 and test it. In other words, you have the highest likelihood that your computer will work as expected with contemporary Windows applications and drivers. 2. Use an older version of Windows. If you want to use old hardware or software, odds are you will get the best experience with whatever version of Windows they were developed/tested against. You have to accept the lack of support for modern software, and you will need to take appropriate security measures such as not connecting it to the internet - but at the same time, it's unlikely that your Windows 98 retro gaming rig is your only computer, so that's probably an acceptable tradeoff. 3. Run WINE on top of Linux (or some other mature open source operating system). This might not be a good solution for the average person, but ticks the box for people who feel strongly pro-open source, or anti-Microsoft. Since Windows compatibility is dictated by Windows' libraries and frameworks and not the kernel, compatibility is likely to be comparable to ReactOS. I am not saying that this covers every possible use case for ReactOS, but I would posit it covers enough that the majority of people who might contribute or invest into ReactOS will instead pick one of the above options and invest their time and energy elsewhere.

afavour 9mo ago
IIRC ReactOS uses and contributes heavily to WINE. So in many ways your #3 isn't far from using ReactOS, and if done correctly it'll be friendlier for the average person than Linux itself.
- ch_123 9mo ago
  Yes, exactly my point - thanks for elaborating on it.
  - hypercube33 9mo ago
    Why not use Linux with WINE and that Chicago95 theme and call it a day?
    - ch_123 9mo ago
      That's (part of) my point. A project like ReactOS which clones Windows down to the kernel level solves for a very small set of practical use cases which are not covered by real Windows, or Linux+WINE. It's worth noting that 30 years ago, there was a definite advantage to an open source operating system which could reuse proprietary Windows drivers - even Linux had a mechanism for using Windows drivers for certain types of hardware. Nowadays, Linux provides excellent support for modern PC hardware with little to no tinkering required in most cases. I have seen many cases where Linux provided full support out-of-the-box for a computer, whereas Windows required drivers to be downloaded and installed.
      - genewitch 9mo ago
        it causes you physical pain to say "NDIS", too?
- spijdar 9mo ago
  This isn't really my arena, but I did happen to recently compare the implementation of ReactOS's RTL (Run Time Library) path routines [0] with Wine's implementation [1]. ReactOS covers a lot more of the Windows API than Wine does (3x the line count and defines a lot more routines like 'RtlDoesFileExists_UstrEx'). Now, this is not supposed to be a public API and should only be used by Windows internally, as I understand it. But it is an example of where ReactOS covers a lot more API than Wine does or probably ever will, by design. To whom (if anyone) this matters, I'm not sure. [0] https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/sdk/lib/rtl/path.c https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/sdk/lib/rtl/p... [1] https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/blob/master/dlls/ntdll/path.c https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/blob/master/dlls/ntdll/p...
  - ch_123 9mo ago
    That's an interesting data point. I wonder if there is a hard technical reason why that logic could not be added to WINE, or if the WINE maintainers made a decision not to implement similar functionality.
    - tadfisher 9mo ago
      There is not a hard technical reason, just different goals. WINE is a compatibility layer to run Windows apps, and thus most improvements end up fixing an issue with a particular Windows application. It turns out that most Windows applications are somewhat well-behaved and restrict themselves to calling public win32 APIs and public DLL functions, so implementing 100% coverage of internal APIs wouldn't accomplish much beyond exposing the project to accusations of copyright infringement. IIRC, there is also US court precedent (maybe Sony v. Connectix?) that protects the practice of reverse-engineering external hardware/software systems that programs use in order to facilitate compatibility. WINE risks losing this protection if they stray outside of APIs known to be used (or are otherwise required) by applications.
      - cachius 9mo ago
        There's also another partial Win32 reimplementation in retrowin32, with the different goal of being a Windows emulator for the web, not for Linux or as alternate OS, at https://evmar.github.io/retrowin32/ https://evmar.github.io/retrowin32/ It thus has an even more sparse path/fileapi.h implementation [2] than WINE and ReactOS. Written in Rust. [2] https://github.com/evmar/retrowin32/blob/main/win32/dll/kernel32/src/file/path.rs https://github.com/evmar/retrowin32/blob/main/win32/dll/kern...
- badsectoracula 9mo ago
  No, the Wine developers refuse to accept contributions from ReactOS developers or even people who have seen ReactOS code[0]. So any improvements go one way only. [0] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guidelines https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide... (last "Don't" entry)
  - kwanbix 9mo ago
    You are saying that ReactOS doesn't use clean room code? Source?
    - snovymgodym 9mo ago
      I believe the integrity of ReactOS's clean room reverse engineering has been called into question in the past when it was found that there were some header or code files with sections that matched leaked Windows Server 2003 code or something like that. Can't recall for sure though.
      - userulluipeste 9mo ago
        The article mentions this: "In January 2006, concerns grew about contributors having access to leaked Windows source code and possibly using this leaked source code in their contributions. In response, Steven Edwards strengthened the project’s intellectual property policy and the project made the difficult decision to audit the existing source code and temporarily freeze contributions." The allegations have been taken seriously and since then the procedure for accepting contributions include measures to prevent such further events from occurring. If you or anyone else happen to have any plausible suspicion, then please report it to the ReactOS team, otherwise keeping alive this kind of vague and uncertain connection between some Windows code leakage and ReactOS fits the very definition of FUD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt Please stop.
    - zen928 9mo ago
      They posted their source for their claim (which is different than yours). Click and read it.
- boznz 9mo ago
  >it'll be friendlier for the average person than Linux itself. I think the myth that Windows is easier needs to die. The builds targeted at Windows users are very easy to use; You would likely go into the Command Prompt as much as you would with Windows, and the "average person" spends more time on their non-windows phone than they do in Windows. I am a 30+ years Windows developer, who thought he would never move, but who migrated literally a week ago, the migration was surprisingly painless and the new system feels much more friendly, and surprisingly, more stable. I wrote it up on my blog, and was going to follow it up with another post about all the annoyances in my first full week, but they were so petty I didn't bother.
  - johnisgood 9mo ago
    I agree. One can just install Linux Mint or Fedora or anything and then Linux is just as friendly to use. You got a desktop, you can use your mouse to start up the browser, install applications with a mouse click, and so forth. You could do without opening up the terminal. Functionally the same as using Windows.
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      I would like to see many non technical people doing that, and then their experience trying to watch Netflix, Prime, HBO, YouTube,... Linux experience is ok, when one knows UNIX and is technically skilled.
      - maybewhenthesun 9mo ago
        My parents, and my wife's parents, have been doing just that without any trouble whatsoever. Just browse to netflix.com and log in. Not any different than in windows. My parents use mail, firefox and libreoffice writer. That's about all they need and it works fine and is way more stable and hasslefree on linux than when it was when they were still using windows (admittedly quite long ago). And if you are talking about seeing people install the OS, people can't do that for windows either.
        8mo ago
thisislife2 9mo ago
Sigh, I hate to agree with you. On a slight tangent, I was exploring what file system I could use safely with different OSes, so that I could keep my personal data on it and access (or add to it) from other OSes, and incredibly NTFS is the only feature rich cross-platform filesystem that works reliably on all the major OSes! None of the open source solutions - ZFS, Btrfs, Ext etc. work reliably on other OSes (many solutions to make them cross-platform or still in beta, for years now). It's the Windows effect - open source developers are putting so much effort into supporting windows tech because of it's popularity, that unknowingly they are also helping it make even more entrenched, to the detriment of better open source solutions.
- saghm 9mo ago
  Last time I looked at this, I think I determined that exFAT also had reasonable support for Windows, Linux, and MacOS? I guess it might not be "feature rich", but it's at least suitable for a USB drive or something. This also isn't a counterpoint to your argument that Windows tech is better supported given its origins, but it might be useful for some people depending on their intended use.
  - thisislife2 9mo ago
    That's a good tip, and I do use exFat on some pendrives. But due to the lack of journaling, and its buggy performance on macOS ( https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/exfat-file-system-save-henk-smit-ragzf https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/exfat-file-system-save-henk-s... ) I wouldn't recommend it for long-term use on any fixed drives with data you care about. My research lead me to conclude that NTFS implementations are the least buggiest non-native file systems on Linux and macOS.
    - saghm 9mo ago
      Interesting, I wasn't aware of the exFAT issues on MacOS. I can't remember exactly the last time I tried to use a USB drive like this, so it's possible that it might be further back than I thought and it was when NTFS didn't have write support out of the box for me on Linux.
KellyCriterion 9mo ago
> accept the lack of support for modern software Running MS SQL 2008 R2 and MS Server 2016 in production here. What "modern software support" do I lack here?
- Gud 9mo ago
  Software updates?
  - genewitch 9mo ago
    software only ever gets better
  - KellyCriterion 9mo ago
    The system runs only one app and does not serve public internet content - it does not get any updates at all, only this one app is updated every few month. We do not need updates here?
- ch_123 9mo ago
  > What "modern software support" do I lack here? There is a growing list of software that which has discontinued support for Windows 10 on the latest versions (or the Server versions thereof). I'm not sure if your example of running a ~16 year old version of SQL Server on Server 2016 demonstrates. To my original post - if you only need to run an old version of a software package, then an old version of Windows is fine. Just because something is old, it doesn't mean that it is not useful.
pkphilip 9mo ago
I think using WINE over Linux has won as the option to consider if you want to run Windows applications on a non-Windows OS without loading Windows into a VM.

by ch_123 9mo ago

afavour 9mo ago

IIRC ReactOS uses and contributes heavily to WINE. So in many ways your #3 isn't far from using ReactOS, and if done correctly it'll be friendlier for the average person than Linux itself.

ch_123 9mo ago
Yes, exactly my point - thanks for elaborating on it.
- hypercube33 9mo ago
  Why not use Linux with WINE and that Chicago95 theme and call it a day?
  - ch_123 9mo ago
    That's (part of) my point. A project like ReactOS which clones Windows down to the kernel level solves for a very small set of practical use cases which are not covered by real Windows, or Linux+WINE. It's worth noting that 30 years ago, there was a definite advantage to an open source operating system which could reuse proprietary Windows drivers - even Linux had a mechanism for using Windows drivers for certain types of hardware. Nowadays, Linux provides excellent support for modern PC hardware with little to no tinkering required in most cases. I have seen many cases where Linux provided full support out-of-the-box for a computer, whereas Windows required drivers to be downloaded and installed.
    - genewitch 9mo ago
      it causes you physical pain to say "NDIS", too?
spijdar 9mo ago
This isn't really my arena, but I did happen to recently compare the implementation of ReactOS's RTL (Run Time Library) path routines [0] with Wine's implementation [1]. ReactOS covers a lot more of the Windows API than Wine does (3x the line count and defines a lot more routines like 'RtlDoesFileExists_UstrEx'). Now, this is not supposed to be a public API and should only be used by Windows internally, as I understand it. But it is an example of where ReactOS covers a lot more API than Wine does or probably ever will, by design. To whom (if anyone) this matters, I'm not sure. [0] https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/sdk/lib/rtl/path.c https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/sdk/lib/rtl/p... [1] https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/blob/master/dlls/ntdll/path.c https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/blob/master/dlls/ntdll/p...
- ch_123 9mo ago
  That's an interesting data point. I wonder if there is a hard technical reason why that logic could not be added to WINE, or if the WINE maintainers made a decision not to implement similar functionality.
  - tadfisher 9mo ago
    There is not a hard technical reason, just different goals. WINE is a compatibility layer to run Windows apps, and thus most improvements end up fixing an issue with a particular Windows application. It turns out that most Windows applications are somewhat well-behaved and restrict themselves to calling public win32 APIs and public DLL functions, so implementing 100% coverage of internal APIs wouldn't accomplish much beyond exposing the project to accusations of copyright infringement. IIRC, there is also US court precedent (maybe Sony v. Connectix?) that protects the practice of reverse-engineering external hardware/software systems that programs use in order to facilitate compatibility. WINE risks losing this protection if they stray outside of APIs known to be used (or are otherwise required) by applications.
    - cachius 9mo ago
      There's also another partial Win32 reimplementation in retrowin32, with the different goal of being a Windows emulator for the web, not for Linux or as alternate OS, at https://evmar.github.io/retrowin32/ https://evmar.github.io/retrowin32/ It thus has an even more sparse path/fileapi.h implementation [2] than WINE and ReactOS. Written in Rust. [2] https://github.com/evmar/retrowin32/blob/main/win32/dll/kernel32/src/file/path.rs https://github.com/evmar/retrowin32/blob/main/win32/dll/kern...
badsectoracula 9mo ago
No, the Wine developers refuse to accept contributions from ReactOS developers or even people who have seen ReactOS code[0]. So any improvements go one way only. [0] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guidelines https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide... (last "Don't" entry)
- kwanbix 9mo ago
  You are saying that ReactOS doesn't use clean room code? Source?
  - snovymgodym 9mo ago
    I believe the integrity of ReactOS's clean room reverse engineering has been called into question in the past when it was found that there were some header or code files with sections that matched leaked Windows Server 2003 code or something like that. Can't recall for sure though.
    - userulluipeste 9mo ago
      The article mentions this: "In January 2006, concerns grew about contributors having access to leaked Windows source code and possibly using this leaked source code in their contributions. In response, Steven Edwards strengthened the project’s intellectual property policy and the project made the difficult decision to audit the existing source code and temporarily freeze contributions." The allegations have been taken seriously and since then the procedure for accepting contributions include measures to prevent such further events from occurring. If you or anyone else happen to have any plausible suspicion, then please report it to the ReactOS team, otherwise keeping alive this kind of vague and uncertain connection between some Windows code leakage and ReactOS fits the very definition of FUD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt Please stop.
  - zen928 9mo ago
    They posted their source for their claim (which is different than yours). Click and read it.
boznz 9mo ago
>it'll be friendlier for the average person than Linux itself. I think the myth that Windows is easier needs to die. The builds targeted at Windows users are very easy to use; You would likely go into the Command Prompt as much as you would with Windows, and the "average person" spends more time on their non-windows phone than they do in Windows. I am a 30+ years Windows developer, who thought he would never move, but who migrated literally a week ago, the migration was surprisingly painless and the new system feels much more friendly, and surprisingly, more stable. I wrote it up on my blog, and was going to follow it up with another post about all the annoyances in my first full week, but they were so petty I didn't bother.
- johnisgood 9mo ago
  I agree. One can just install Linux Mint or Fedora or anything and then Linux is just as friendly to use. You got a desktop, you can use your mouse to start up the browser, install applications with a mouse click, and so forth. You could do without opening up the terminal. Functionally the same as using Windows.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    I would like to see many non technical people doing that, and then their experience trying to watch Netflix, Prime, HBO, YouTube,... Linux experience is ok, when one knows UNIX and is technically skilled.
    - maybewhenthesun 9mo ago
      My parents, and my wife's parents, have been doing just that without any trouble whatsoever. Just browse to netflix.com and log in. Not any different than in windows. My parents use mail, firefox and libreoffice writer. That's about all they need and it works fine and is way more stable and hasslefree on linux than when it was when they were still using windows (admittedly quite long ago). And if you are talking about seeing people install the OS, people can't do that for windows either.
      - 8mo ago

thisislife2 9mo ago

Sigh, I hate to agree with you. On a slight tangent, I was exploring what file system I could use safely with different OSes, so that I could keep my personal data on it and access (or add to it) from other OSes, and incredibly NTFS is the only feature rich cross-platform filesystem that works reliably on all the major OSes! None of the open source solutions - ZFS, Btrfs, Ext etc. work reliably on other OSes (many solutions to make them cross-platform or still in beta, for years now). It's the Windows effect - open source developers are putting so much effort into supporting windows tech because of it's popularity, that unknowingly they are also helping it make even more entrenched, to the detriment of better open source solutions.

saghm 9mo ago
Last time I looked at this, I think I determined that exFAT also had reasonable support for Windows, Linux, and MacOS? I guess it might not be "feature rich", but it's at least suitable for a USB drive or something. This also isn't a counterpoint to your argument that Windows tech is better supported given its origins, but it might be useful for some people depending on their intended use.
- thisislife2 9mo ago
  That's a good tip, and I do use exFat on some pendrives. But due to the lack of journaling, and its buggy performance on macOS ( https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/exfat-file-system-save-henk-smit-ragzf https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/exfat-file-system-save-henk-s... ) I wouldn't recommend it for long-term use on any fixed drives with data you care about. My research lead me to conclude that NTFS implementations are the least buggiest non-native file systems on Linux and macOS.
  - saghm 9mo ago
    Interesting, I wasn't aware of the exFAT issues on MacOS. I can't remember exactly the last time I tried to use a USB drive like this, so it's possible that it might be further back than I thought and it was when NTFS didn't have write support out of the box for me on Linux.

KellyCriterion 9mo ago

> accept the lack of support for modern software Running MS SQL 2008 R2 and MS Server 2016 in production here. What "modern software support" do I lack here?

Gud 9mo ago
Software updates?
- genewitch 9mo ago
  software only ever gets better
- KellyCriterion 9mo ago
  The system runs only one app and does not serve public internet content - it does not get any updates at all, only this one app is updated every few month. We do not need updates here?
ch_123 9mo ago
> What "modern software support" do I lack here? There is a growing list of software that which has discontinued support for Windows 10 on the latest versions (or the Server versions thereof). I'm not sure if your example of running a ~16 year old version of SQL Server on Server 2016 demonstrates. To my original post - if you only need to run an old version of a software package, then an old version of Windows is fine. Just because something is old, it doesn't mean that it is not useful.

pkphilip 9mo ago

I think using WINE over Linux has won as the option to consider if you want to run Windows applications on a non-Windows OS without loading Windows into a VM.