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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: 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.