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For those not following this project it is a FOSS reimplementation of the Win32 interface, which supports a great deal of humanity's historical computational effort. The new ReactOS release has reached 0.42 and the filesystems ext, btrfs are apparently RW, though Reiserfs and UFS are readonly mounts, successful systems have been shown running.
A nice gallery of some successfully run high profile applications is here (e.g. SimCity and PhotoshopCS2 !!), although interesting, not why I am reporting this.
There are an *enormous* number of scientific instruments (not just microscopes, but various scanners, PCR decks , robots) which originally came with a Win32 driver disk, and have since gone out of business or stopped support. There might only be a single run instance on a crusty old i386 (yes, I've seen that!!).
This is an ambitious project and of course depends on the effective WINE project. It deserves some specific credit and visibility, for providing a possible threshold in the future that sufficient OLD applications can be run independent of the new Microsoft "One OS to rule them All", that it may be possible to construct hybrid machines running Linux, and sufficient driver support from ReactOS to manage the old device drivers that WINE may find difficult to reverse engineer.
But in general, more OS choice's are a good thing!
(Score: 1, Disagree) by eravnrekaree on Sunday August 28 2016, @04:35PM
ReactOS i have always thought is a waste of time, as to emulate windows the easiest way to utilize as much existing functionality as possible, thus Wine, implementing Win32 on top of Linux and using Linux functionality to implement Win32. Implementing a kernel,GUI etc just for Win32 is all a collosal waste of time which detracts from the actual goal which is getting Windows apps to run without Windows. Instead of writing their own kernel, ReactOS developers could do more good by abandoning ReactOS and writing win32 compatability code for WINE instead of wasting their time writing a kernel when we already have a kernel.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @05:07PM
I disagree.
We need more choices. Linux is not the end-all of operating systems. It is actively under attack by the system. And the attack is so in-your-face that they called it systemd. They are laughing at us all that things are working in their favour in time for one-world government.
We have been out-foxed by the system and one way to fight back is to make our attack surface so large that the system cannot deal with it and implodes.
And one more thing: There are so many Windows developers who can program for Windows that their talent must not go to waste. They spent years learning Windows APIs. And an OS written from scratch that runs Windows APIs natively will be much faster than an emulator.
When ReactOS is also attacked (and defeated?) systemd-style then we must move to another OS. The system must not win. We, the people have to keep our computing space free from oppression.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JNCF on Sunday August 28 2016, @06:36PM
Linux is not the end-all of operating systems. It is actively under attack by the system. And the attack is so in-your-face that they called it systemd.
When ReactOS is also attacked (and defeated?) systemd-style then we must move to another OS.
Wait, the peoples' response to systemd is reimplementing Win32? Wouldn't using Slackware or Devuan seem like easier solutions? Wikipedia tells me that ReactOS predates systemd by 12 years. I think they're trying to solve a different problem than you are. I agree with the general sentiments of your post, but the specifics seem questionable. I'm open to alternatives to Linux, but I'm not running a reimplementaion of Win32 to escape systemd. There are good reasons to do that, but systemd is not one of them.
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Sunday August 28 2016, @10:42PM
On ubuntu there was upstart before that. So systemd was not a big change. Most of the arguments against systemd have been debunked. For intance, most shell scripts are extremely difficult to understand, shell scripting being the obtuse language it is. The systemd configuration files are significantly simpler. It is not monolithic, the concept behind systemd is to have an event oriented start up with being able to start services on events occuring like network startup. You can have listener daemons on DBUS watching for those events and start your services when that happens. Its not one big monolithic daemon, in fact its a large number of highly specialized programs that are very modular. Furthermore, if you want, you can start your services from scripts if you want.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JNCF on Monday August 29 2016, @01:38AM
We're veering off the t̶r̶a̶c̶k̶ topic with great and frightening speed, but I've never really minded that. While I haven't personally had any issues with systemd, I saw a really interesting argument against adopting anything made by Red Hat. It was posted by somebody on SoylentNews, but I forget who. It's based upon this interview [blogspot.com] with Red Hat CTO Brain Stevens (emphasis original, to denote questions):
Do you think the Red Hat model would apply equally well to other areas of software?
Red Hat's model works because of the complexity of the technology we work with. An operating platform has a lot of moving parts, and customers are willing to pay to be insulated from that complexity.
I don't think you can take one finite element - like Apache - and make a business out of it [using our model]. You need product complexity.
While this isn't an admission that Red Hat makes things purposefully complex, it seems to spell out the fact that they have a motive to make things needlessly complex. Even if this isn't true of systemd at the moment (I don't really know, but I've seen alligations that it already is that I haven't taken the time to vet) it seems like they would at least have an incentive to crank up complexity once one of their programs achieves wide adoption -- which systemd has. If you're interested in things being as simple as possible, Red Hat's business model has some troubling implications. I'm glad they're publishing stuff opensource, but that doesn't mean we should adopt it without extreme skepticism. It seems really positive that some distros are refusing to adopt systemd, or barring that getting forked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @11:53PM
Will all you systemd-obsessed people PLEASE shut the fuck up, the sooner the better.
Please PLEASE do not carry on with this thread-derailing bullshit, it is not only seriously annoying, but interferes with discussion on whatever the topic actually is. Plus you give free software and free software promoters a bad name that's deserving of only a few (you in particular).
If you really are opposed to people using systemd for whatever reason, please use your energy to work to provide or polish an alternative, and promote that alternative. No matter how shrill or fucking annoying you are, your incessant mouth is not going to make me say "gee, maybe I better stop using debian" whereas if you actually promoted something neat, I might say "gee, i might try (whatever) for my next project, it sounds neat."
No matter how terminal your vocal monomania, reactos isn't in danger of using systemd (nor SysV, nor upstart, nor anything ELSE fucking utterly unrelated) for its boot procedures. Get the fuck over yourselves.
It has been enough years of this garbage. Long past enough. Laser sharks heating grits on hayden-christiansen-anakin's girlfriend is even less annoying than this, and that's saying something.
If you find yourself tempted to introduce the word "systemd" in any discussion forum, whether in-person or online, consider the following:
That is all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @03:14AM
So, having said that, waddya think of systemd?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @01:29PM
Meh, I don't mind it but I'm not going to go cheering for it either.
Some people who understand the whole of a linux system and make major distributions put together a complete operating system for me, and use systemd as part of that process, and put together a nice ISO for me to install on my servers and workstations. I appreciate their work, and I'm not too particular about how they go about it as long as they use free(ish) software and put together something effective that I can use. I've used debian since potato and it still works as well as ever, I can still put things in rc.local and it starts them up just like it always did, so whatever.
Offtopic discussion about systemd on the other hand can go right to /dev/null or to NUL or $null or wherever it is people put such things these days. Systemd is not all that great, but neither is it satan-common.rpm come to eat your linux children.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @05:12PM
which detracts from the actual goal which is getting Windows apps to run without Windows.
No, your actual goal is that. But different people are allowed to have different goals; the world doesn't revolve around you.
(Note that in real life there's a significant population of developers active in both projects, and a lot of code in common -- not necessarily the either/or proposition you're portraying it as.)
(Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Sunday August 28 2016, @05:57PM
Except that that's not true.
Certain programs are unlikely to ever work on Wine because they make assumptions about the kernel or require hardware to function. Wine is great, but React OS aims to provide the other pieces of the puzzle. I know that I've personally got several pieces of software that require hardware to be useful and Wine will never allow me to use those pieces of hardware.
As for the GUI itself, did they even do any work on that at all? There's been GUIs for *NIX that duplicated the Windows look for many, many years now.