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Alternatives to Win32...Win32 of course! ReactOS still making progress....

posted by cmn32480 on Sunday August 28 2016, @03:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-more-whining dept.

opinionated_science writes:

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!

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @01:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @01:29PM (#394651)

    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.