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Ask Soylent: Can We Turn ReactOS into a Viable Alternative to Windows 10?

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 21 2015, @09:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-put-a-man-on-the-moon,-but-we-wont-do-that dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Microsoft's telemetry features in Windows 10 are a privacy advocate's nightmare. Now that Microsoft is trying to back port these "features" into existing versions of Windows, it seems like many of us have no future upgrade path. Sure there is Linux, but I have some older Windows software that I still want to use. ReactOS is still out there, but does not look like there have been any updates in a while.

Does the Soylent community believe it is possible to get this project going full steam to producing a useable alternative for existing Windows users?

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  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday October 22 2015, @11:58PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Thursday October 22 2015, @11:58PM (#253447)

    OOXML was a scam. I'm talking about an actual Standard with a real published set of complete ABI/API documentation and a test suite to judge conformance against. In that sort of scenario Microsoft Office in it's current form would probably be ruled non-conforming and off the approved purchase list. I'm proposing nothing short of seizing the power to define what is and isn't conforming from Microsoft's control, that it is the whole point. OOXML did none of that, you can't even implement a conforming implementation from the so called standard and there is no conformance test suite other than 'does MS Office load/save it?'

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday October 23 2015, @02:18AM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday October 23 2015, @02:18AM (#253487)

    No, OOXML was an actual standard with a real published set of complete documentation too: the ISO even says so. The fact that MS screwed with the ISO's process is beside the point.

    You really think MS wouldn't do the exact same thing with a Win32 standardization effort? That's seriously naive.

    Or do you think they should just get a neutral standards organization to make up the standard? Like, oh, ISO?? Oh wait...

    I'm proposing nothing short of seizing the power

    Seizing it how? You're not going to get the US government to do this (and even if they wanted to, they probably wouldn't be able to legally).

    And finally, where are you going to get any alternative OSes to actually implement this standard? It's not like there's a bunch of software companies out there large enough to pull of such a big project, and who have the expertise to make an OS. We already have something sorta-close with WINE (implements Win32 API/ABI on Linux/x86), and it doesn't work half the time because the Win32 "standard" is such a mess.