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ReactOS (FOSS "Windows") achieves 3D-accelerated Half-Life on real hardware
- ajross 4mo agoWhile this is sort of laughable out of context (I mean, Steam on Linux for the last few years has run basically everything with full acceleration)... I think what is being claimed, but not explicitly in the article, is that this is running the NVIDIA driver stack (for an ancient GeForce 8 card) directly, as opposed to emulating DirectX at the API level on top of a Vulkan driver.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- chadgpt3 4mo agoIndeed. ReactOS is to the full Windows stack what Wine is to the userland Windows API.
- himata4113 4mo agoI mean they reimplemented directx without vulkan, that's indeed in a league of their own. wine/proton relies on opengl/vulkan to do anything.
- ddtaylor 4mo agoWine has had many different DirectX backends over the decades, including one before Vulkan existed obviously.
- himata4113 4mo agoAll of them relied on translation (ex: opengl). Proton specifically is focused on dx->vulkan.
- da_chicken 4mo ago> While this is sort of laughable out of context (I mean, Steam on Linux for the last few years has run basically everything with full acceleration)... Eh. It's sort of like saying FreeDOS is laughable because DOSBox exists. I think that's missing the point.
- wolvoleo 4mo agoI wouldn't call it laughable. ReactOS was not created only to run half-life. It's just one of their many impressive achievements.
- NooneAtAll3 4mo agosomething I wondered for a while do windows viruses get ported by such efforts as well?
- chadgpt3 4mo agoYes
- augusto-moura 4mo agoSome, but not all, most don't. Ideally they would all work, ReactOS doesn't make a priority on being a "safer" option, just an open source option
- canyp 4mo agoSomewhere in the docs they state that they must also recreate whatever bugs the API has, otherwise applications written with those bugs as an (implicit) assumption could misbehave.
- hurtigioll 4mo agoits worse than that, Windows activates/deactivates "bugs" based on the compatibility profile of the app. so you can set an app to use a Windows XP compatibility profile, and this will simulate Windows bugs which were fixed in more recent versions of the OS
- naturalmovement 4mo ago[flagged]
- nvr219 4mo agoWhat's the major Linux malware problem that everyone is ignoring
- shakna 4mo agoAUR got hit recently [0], by what looks like more work of TeamPCP and friends. EDIT: Worth noting, Arch ain't hosted on AUR. That's the community side only. [0] https://archlinux.org/news/active-aur-malicious-packages-incident/ https://archlinux.org/news/active-aur-malicious-packages-inc...
- alaskahoffman 4mo agoreactos has been in development for 28 years and it can run half-life on real hardware. that is approximately how long half-life 1 itself has existed in the first place!
- doawoo 4mo ago[dead]
- theturtletalks 4mo agoGiven enough time, open-source will win. Just think about how more and more people are programming and how that will draw them to open-source.
- underscore_ku 4mo agomore people and AI
- da-x 4mo agoSpecifications are important. The better the specs of a commercial product, the easier it would be to produce an open source version it, with coding and testing automation perhaps even a one-to-one offering.
- hard_times 4mo agowell, you've got endless "integration testing" in the form of 3rd party software for Windows. More reliable than any specification, considering Windows itself is a patchwork of workarounds to not break backward-compatibility.
- xattt 4mo ago> development for 28 years now > given enough time This has been a lifetime for a slice of the human population. It’s getting into Sagrada Familia territory.
- KronisLV 4mo agoSee, at this rate it won’t even take a century!
- rzzzt 4mo agoThis is an absolute tangent (a perpendicular one if you will), but I thought the Sagrada Familia is completed: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2026/06/10/barcelonas-sagrada-familia-completed-after-144-years-celebrates-gauds-centenary/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2026/06/10/bar... The article talks about construction on the exterior, the cross on the main tower, the Pope's visit and commemoration of the architect, etc. while on the official website the timeline says "Today, more than 140 years after the laying of the cornerstone, construction continues on the Basilica": https://sagradafamilia.org/en/history-of-the-temple https://sagradafamilia.org/en/history-of-the-temple So which one is it? Is this one of those cases where we have to define "done" first?
- eaf7e281 4mo agoWhat is the benefit compared to a compatibility layer? Is it easier for future maintenance? It's definitely a huge improvement towards "FOSS Windows."
- okanat 4mo agoYou can run proprietary drivers with ReactOS since it replicates the driver layer too. So unlike Linux systems with Nvidia Kepler cards, you can still run the most up-to-date desktop environment. Or if you have an obscure WiFi card, you can use the Windows drivers.
- BoingBoomTschak 4mo agoThis, I'd love to be able to use Genelec GLM from Linux but it needs some custom serial drivers... too bad it only supports Win 10 right now.
- maufl 4mo agoIt would be great if we could combine ReactOS with Good old Games to build a retro Windows games distribution. I could hand that out at LAN parties as USB boot stick.
- shevy-java 4mo agoAgreed. For this to work, though, I guess there needs to be: - a listing of all games that work well on ReactOS, similar to how WineHQ does. Or perhaps a specialized variant of ReactOS with that focus in mind. Do we have such a list? I assume many games also won't work perfectly well; see WineHQ, that also had tons of issues with some games.
- hilbert42 4mo ago"Or perhaps a specialized variant of ReactOS with that focus in mind." Trouble is there's never been enough interest in ReactOS to get it to the point where it's stable let alone warrant fancy extras. (After three decades of trying to clone the basics and failing is proof enough.) In short, developers see it as a dead end. Why there's so little interest I've never fully understood, but it's fact. If it were actually stable and usable as a basic operating system it could be used for lots of offline stuff but it's not—even at this point. If it were useable I'd readily adopt it to use offline (I've tried many times and failed). Another point, this lack of interest shows up on ReactOS's website; there's so little new news and info the site may as well be dead.
- spwa4 4mo agoI think a lot could be achieved by defining a "rom format" for windows games.
- dannyfritz07 4mo agoA Linux Distro that comes with Wine and Application shortcuts could probably achieve this. Sounds really cool actually. Retro LAN Party Distro.
- shevy-java 4mo agoThat's great. I have not tested ReactOS in many years and I am rather reluctant to try it again (last time I tried, I could not connect to the internet with it, and that was a breaking point for me), but the better they are at providing a working alternative, the nicer this is as a win-win scenario. Linux kind of spoiled me though, I noticed this with HaikuOS too. If things such as ruby do not work, I am not going to bother anymore. Linux kind of raised the bar here, at the least for things that I would expect to work as-is (this is not the only example, there were more issues and I simply don't want to feel going into a downgrade-area when using an operating system; I have Win10 on a computer to my left side but whenever I do things such as copying data to an USB stick or to it, it is so slow compared to Linux. It annoys me every time I have to do so.)
- succo 4mo agowe are still here lol
- forinti 4mo agoWindows is going downhill so fast, I fear ReactOS won't be relevant before Windows becomes irrelevant. Maybe ReactOS will live after Windows as an option for people with critical applications that for some reason won't run on Linux. If ReactOS had worked this well 20 years ago, I would probably have used it (I did try it a couple of times). Today I just don't need it.
- Jigsy 4mo agoI find ReactOS interesting, but I could never get anything to work the last time I tried it - which was a few months ago. I also have a feeling that I'll be dead for centuries long before it ever becomes a viable replacement. On the plus side, at least it'll be finished quicker than GNU Hurd will be...