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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @03:53PM
Of course from psychological perspective, some people might need a clearly bad choice and a clear "best" choice to pick then they will feel happy that they have made the right choice. Whereas if there are many good choices to pick from they could feel like they may have not made the best choice and so feel dissatisfied with their decision.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday August 28 2016, @05:02PM
The bad choice, win32, is in the past, so it is not a choice, it is a reality. Running old win apps on new PCs and with a free OS is heaven for a lot of people, and I see no reason why the ReactOS people should pursuit other goals instead of this. IT is a sad circus of planned obsolescence and reinvented wheels, so if you want to criticize you have a wealth of projects to choose from.
Account abandoned.
(Score: -1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @04:09PM
what a waste of time.
(Score: 5, Touché) by JNCF on Sunday August 28 2016, @04:16PM
what a waste of time.
I'm not excited about it either (nor am I the target audience), but the authors clearly consider it to be worth their time. They should have asked you before starting the project; you could have saved them all that work!
(Score: 5, Touché) by Nerdfest on Sunday August 28 2016, @04:26PM
A waste if you're one of those people that throws out perfectly good, expensive hardware as soon as "support" is gone, or upgrades operating systems and software regardless of whether or not it breaks compatibility with your hardware. Sometimes replacement hardware for certain applications is not even available, much less affordable. This gives people with obscure hardware for which OS support has been dropped or broken and keeps them up to date so they don't need to worry about all the unpatched security exploits left in their unsupported OS.
For you, I'd recommend sticking with Apple products. You'll get along just fine.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @08:15PM
Any x86 is junk. Any amd64 more than 5 years old is junk. Nobody cares about your energy wasting CPUs. You are not elite for still having a Core 2 Duo, you are an idiot who would waste electricity over a stupid emotional attachment to hardware.
The only old hardware worth keeping is SPARC, and that's for testing software for correctness.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @08:28PM
And when you reach age 25, you will be shot in the head, and you will be fed to the dogs. Old hardware is dog food. You are old hardware.
(Score: 4, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Sunday August 28 2016, @10:11PM
Hello? Hello! Anyone missing their child? They appear to be special needs and alone on the internet leaving comments. Soylent mods, please phone the appropriate authorities so this unfortunate person gets the help they need.
(Score: -1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @12:26AM
You are an idiot and probably a Drumpf-supporting Republican.
There' s no need to waste energy just because you have a hard-on for old hard-ware. People like you are the reason that nations consume too much electricity over bullshit reasons. The fucking ice caps are melting and right-wing types like you would rather let the brown people of the world drown than distribute power evenly among all people regardless of skin color. Nobody needs a 600W power supply just to sit around and watch Youtube videos. While you sit in your throne of smug whiteness, wasting precious electricity, there are blacks and immigrants RIGHT IN YOUR OWN TOWN that are starving.
It's vile, borderline racist, wasteful, and an absolutely disgusting hobby to keep your old equipment around. Your capacitors are probably leaking and your solder is lead poison. But you would rather sit in your smug position and brag, "I haven't upgraded my hardware in years" because it makes you a god in your circlejerk of white only friends. Get a fucking grip you over-sensitive racist motherfucker.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday August 29 2016, @11:32AM
I'd vote for tump if he built a wall around your house. But after reading your post I'm sure you already reside in a walled institution.
What a crappy libtroll. I'd say your almost as bad as that Milo twat on the alt-fart side.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @02:40PM
The Efficiency Optimization Center thanks you for your concern about wastefulness. We have determined that your flesh is not being used to its maximum efficiency.
Please report to your nearest Efficiency Optimization Station where your flesh will be reclaimed and efficiently recycled as fertilizer in a Chinese iPhone toxic waste dump.
Thank you for supporting a greener way of life where you are dead.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday August 29 2016, @04:00AM
I have recently been memory testing with a Pentium D and Athlon 64 X2.
AMD beat the pants off of Intel back in the day.
The Pentium D, running at 3Ghz with a memory bandwidth of 2.2GB/s (DDR2) runs Memtest86+ 3x slower than the Athlon 64 at 2Ghz with a memory bandwidth of 1.5GB/s (DDR1).
The Athlon also supports ECC memory. At this point, I think buying the memory will be cheaper than buying a used server board+used memory (and would not save on power draw).
I actually got the machine from the trash. The reason it was there: Video card + resulting PSU and memory failure. I checked e-bay for replacement boards: they all appeared to use an added DDR2 memory controller that does not support ECC. The PCI-E slots appear to be damaged, but I can work around them. I plan to do more extensive testing before buying ECC memory, but I currently would not trade my Athlon 64 for newer crap.
TL;DR: For my use-case of a back-up server made from salvaged parts, the Athlon 64 should be good. ECC memory is essential since I want to use ZFS to correct any disk errors from redundant disks. For intermittent use, 70-100W of power draw is not that big a deal.
PS: I am aware that there is an economic theory that capital costs don't matter (possibly related to the sunk-cost fallacy), but they do.
I am also planning on building a power-hungry computing machine: as a proof of concept until I can afford more efficient hardware. The proof of concept would let me get all the software working: preventing new, expensive, hardware from sitting idle.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday August 29 2016, @04:19AM
Yes, the video card failure was caused by blown caps.
I opted to recover components like inductors from my old Pentium 4 boards (rather than repair them).
I mean: even if I replace the caps...Pentium 4's are simply too power hungry.
(Score: 5, Informative) by SomeGuy on Sunday August 28 2016, @04:29PM
Anyone trying out ReactOS for the fist time should carefully read about the status of the project and what it is about. There are a lot of misconceptions out there. ReactOS is a serious project and will likely eventually fill certain long term market voids that Microsoft is leaving behind. But one must understand the nature of the project and the state of the product.
Currently, ReactOS WILL fall down on its face often. It is still a work in progress, and still considered alpha quality. Anyone expecting it to magically install and work perfectly on goofy lobotomized "modern" hardware will be disappointed. Even Microsoft Windows falls down on its face sometimes (seemingly more often these days). Try out Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 sometime as a reminder of how easy people have it these days.
Applications WILL often fail. Applications can even break under Microsoft Windows when Microsoft pushes out small updates - but when that happens people can point at the vendors rather than Microsoft. The ReactOS compatiblity isn't perfect, and never can be simply by virtue that it is NOT windows. Again, it is alpha quality, but if an application works under Wine with no workaround, then it stands a good chance of working under ReactOS.
Development is slow - it is actually impressive that they have come this far with only a hand full of developers. If you don't like the speed at which things are moving, then feel free to donate money or resources to help speed things along.
ReactOS can't just include Windows components. Most Microsoft runtime DLLs, resources, and updates are only licensed for use under Genuine Microsoft Windows. Some people perceive that Wine under Linux sort of gets a free pass on this, as many workaround involve installing Microsoft DLLs. But neither Wine nor ReactOS will ever be licensed to bundle Microsoft's work. Of course, you are free to mix and match things however you want on your own personal computer.
Yes, ReactOS is "legal". This can not be emphasized enough. ReactOS contains no proprietary Microsoft code, and clean-room re-implements APIs.
Given how Microsoft is going downhill these days, having another Windows-compatible OS is becoming an increasingly good idea.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by eravnrekaree on Sunday August 28 2016, @04:44PM
The problem I have with ReactOS is actually wastes developer time and resources on implementing kernel functionality we already have with Unix open source kernels, instead of focusing on a windows comparability layer on top of existing Unix kernels. IF the goal is to get Windows apps to run without Windows, this does not bring us most expeditiously closer to that goal in the most time efficient way possible. Its useless wheel reinventing, writing code that absolutely does not need to be written for win32 compatibility. Think, if these people were to spend their time writing Win32 compatibility code for WINE instead of writing their own kernel, we would be further along in getting Windows apps to run without Windows. The real goal here is to get windows apps to run without Windows. I would also argue most people who want to run Windows apps without Windows want to run Windows apps on top a Unix OS along with Unix apps, and do not want to have to run a seperate OS just for Windows apps.
If you want us to get closer to being able to run all Windows apps without Windows. please, cancel ReactOS and focus your code writing efforts on making WINE work better for Unix OSs like Linux, BSDs and OS X.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @04:57PM
1 word: drivers
(Score: 3, Informative) by SomeGuy on Sunday August 28 2016, @06:03PM
One of the goals of ReactOS is not just to provide application compatiblity but also *hardware* compatibly. There is quite a bit of Windows-only hardware out there where the only way to operate it (or operate it fully) is through a proprietary closed source binary driver. Now, if you can stomp your feet enough to get all of these vendors to release source code, then by all means please do.
There is also the seperate issue that some people just don't want a Unix based OS. There are many archaisms in Linux/Unix, and while Windows has its own archaisms, many people would, to put it bluntly, prefer not to run an OS that feels like it should be running on a DEC PDP-11.
Tthe people with the above needs/wants deserve to have a choice, and therefor it is not a "waste".
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Sunday August 28 2016, @10:25PM
You could do a hardware driver compatability layer on Linux. In fact, that would be a great idea to get more people to use Linux, would be for windows drivers to work on it.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Sunday August 28 2016, @11:31PM
You obviously have zero idea what that would involve. Perhaps YOU should try getting past the Linux politics and implementing it if you think it is so simple.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @09:31AM
FWIW NDISwrapper exists.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Arik on Sunday August 28 2016, @06:26PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 29 2016, @05:25PM
I completely disagree. Running in an old-fashioned pre-XP Windows environment is not a desirable thing. There's issues of IT support, keeping the system updated, network connectivity and file transfers, etc. And further fragmentation is not a good thing.
What they should be working on is 1) improving WINE so that it'll run all this crappy proprietary Win32 software these machines run, and 2) developing a device driver translation layer so that the custom device drivers these machines use can be run on Linux. This will give you both software and hardware compatibility, but allow you to run on any Linux machine you want, and will allow you to continue to update your Linux machine (both the hardware and the software) while still running the same proprietary Win32 application and any custom hardware it interfaces to. The main problem will be when their custom hardware simply isn't capable of being easily connected to a modern PC: an example of that is old ISA expansion cars, which can't be plugged into a modern PCI/PCIe motherboard, but even here I do believe there's PCI-to-ISA adapters out there for exactly this reason. For the device drivers, we already have an example of something like this being done: remember when Linux WiFi drivers all ran under NDISwrapper? That was exactly the same situation: people wanted to run WiFi hardware in Linux, but didn't have Linux drivers available, so they made a wrapper allowing them to run Windows drivers. It should be possible to do the same thing here, but in a more generalized way.
Instead of trying to make a closed-off, all-in-one solution to this problem, we need a building-block approach that allows us to use these blocks in any kind of system we want; these can then be integrated into more complete systems, much like how LinuxCNC can be run on any Linux system you want without too much trouble (install the software and build a kernel with the realtime extensions), but the LinuxCNC developers provide a Debian-based all-in-one system if you want to use theirs.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday August 29 2016, @08:16PM
Well, then the good news is that in theory if ReactOS gets enough traction you won't have any of those problems. When that happens, you will be running an up-to-date operating system that can handle all of that and maintain compatiblity with Windows based hardware and software.
I'm so glad that you and the other poster seem to know what everyone should specifically be doing. Someone should make you the manager of Earth. :P
The whole NDISWrapper thing was sort of a fluke really. NDIS is an oddly standard driver interface that originated with 3COM, and was then used across DOS, Windows, and Windows NT. So it has some cross platform-ness already baked in to it. This is not the case with most other driver classes.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 29 2016, @10:20PM
You don't need the driver to be cross-platform, you just have to figure out the driver API and write a translation layer for that. If you're making a Windows clone, then you're already doing that basically.
And no, ReactOS isn't going to "get enough traction" with its tiny little team and little interest. There isn't enough money or interest from people who want to keep clunky old Windows-based manufacturing and scientific equipment running to fund that; if there were, the team wouldn't be complaining about funding and resources like they are. Companies in that position will happily use a free solution if it exists, but if it means shelling out a bunch of money as a contribution, they'll sooner just junk the equipment and buy a new one. You're not going to get a lot of people wanting to work for free on this project, because honestly, who the fuck wants to spend their spare time making a clone of Windows 2000?
If you think it's such a great project, then you can spend your time working on it. I'm just pointing out how with their limited resources, they could have a much more positive effect by creating some smaller building blocks rather than trying to clone an entire OS that no one is really gung-ho about using unless they're forced to.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ramze on Sunday August 28 2016, @07:06PM
Ah, see the problem is you don't understand the goal. The goal isn't to run Win32 apps without windows. It's to completely replace Windows -- especially for hardware that only has windows proprietary drivers. Lots of organisations have ancient Windows machines chugging along to support not just some app, but some printer, scanner, document imager, medical imager/device. Usually these devices cost tens of thousands of dollars or more and only came with drivers for very old Windows machines. I've seen Clerk of Court offices running Windows 95 back when 2000 was old hat and XP was on SP3. I've seen map and blueprint printers that needed Windows XP (no bloody SP1, SP2, or SP3) in the Windows 7 days. (I've even seen a printer with XP embedded version on it and the printer was inextricably tied to the same hardware as the OS)
Sometimes you can run these environments in a virtual machine or on a linux PC with a wrapper for the driver, but often not.
The point is to install ReactOS anywhere you need Windows, then run any random windows installer with 100% compatibility... and use any random USB cable for your usual windows USB plug'n'play with the Windows drivers.
With your attitude, one could just as easily say it's best to scrap all this Linux on the Desktop crap, invest everything in ReactOS as "everyone" really just wants to run Windows apps in a Windows-like environment anyway for their desktops. Leave Linux for corporate servers, stop re-inventing the wheel when 90% of the planet really just wants free Windows without the spyware/adware. With Wine, Mono, Vulkan, and ReactOS, we could make it happen.
But, seriously... none of that coding is a waste. It's all different approaches and different strokes for different folks. Now... Gnu/Hurd, BeOS/Haiku/PearPC, and a few others might be of questionable use-cases... but ReactOS is a worthy endeavor.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @09:17PM
There is also software that requires kernel level access that an emulation layer like WINE can't provide easily and safely at least. Drivers are not just there for hardware, drivers are a standalone executable type (.sys) in Win32 that can be used for any system level task.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @09:19PM
My employer is looking to use ReactOS to replace some boxes running Windows XP. Sure, replacing the computers is easy, but the multi-million dollar machines they are attached to are a little more difficult. We specifically have multiple old BIOS computers in storage to keep them running. We've tried WINE, but it craps out due to the DRM of the system not being supported because it uses a driver to talk directly to the hardware that Linux + WINE hates. With ReactOS, we can get a lot farther in the process with the hardware, but there is some software problem, but given that is a software problem, there is a chance WINE would have toe same one, even without hating the driver.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @05:41AM
The most important bit about ReactOS is that it runs real Windows drivers. Having the hardware support that Windows does is massively important.
Really, this is an issue that only ReactOS is in a good position to solve -- not just with current hardware with awful not-Windows drivers, but older custom hardware with no drivers for any other system.
The other thing is that it pretty much works like Windows -- administration and the lot are just like on a Windows machine. The target audience for ReactOS isn't Linux users, but Windows users who have issues with the way Windows is progressing.
There's also architectural differences that cause major issues with WINE (one that's affected me a bunch over the years is how awful DirectDraw performance is in Wine -- although, Windows 8's DirectDraw performance is also really bad, I think WINE is actually doing better than Windows with it at the moment, even if Win7 and down can soundly beat the pants off of it).
Still, if you really want to run Windows programs right now without Windows, WINE is still your best bet.
(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.
(Score: 1) by driven on Sunday August 28 2016, @07:11PM
Maybe time to dust off my old Borland products that barf on newer Windows versions. In some ways I miss those days, when prototyping a GUI could be done with minimal fuss. If only it were that easy with JavaScript/CSS. But I digress...
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Sunday August 28 2016, @07:45PM
Yeah, HTML and CSS are annoying (not that JavaScript isn't, just that it isn't what makes GUI building so horrible). Some of the reasons they're so bad are accidents of history, and some of them are more philosophical differences about what HTML and CSS should be trying to do -- they aren't for building applications, they're for rendering hyperlinked documents. And of course, it is easy to make simple cookie-cutter interfaces in them. But they aren't what you'd like to be writing an applications user interface in, and unlike many commenters here I do see the appeal of putting applications inside of web browsers. There are a number of projects that are trying to make a Qt-like interface for rendering things to the DOM, but when last I checked they hadn't gotten too far. It will be interesting to see what the future brings. One of them is being built by PayPal, and the Qt interface is just part of what they're putting together. I saw a talk by Crockford [youtube.com] about it a while back that I found interesting (yes, he's a shill for PayPal now -- sorry Yahoo!).
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday August 28 2016, @07:19PM
I was really interested in ReactOS back when they were targeting running Wind95 programs after MS had stopped supporting them, but years passed, and they never delivered. Now they aren't even promising.
It's my expectation that the only MSWind programs it will run are the same ones that WINE will run. And in that case why should I use them rather than Linux, even on a virtual machine? (OK, I've been told that they kernel is quite small, so as a virtual machine they take up a lot less room. But they take up more room than WINE does, and I've already got Linux installed.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Monday August 29 2016, @12:05AM
If your goal is simply to run a particular application, there's no reason necessarily to use ReactOS over wine assuming that your app runs both places.
If your goal is, as others have pointed out, to use (obscure and/or expensive) hardware that has drivers only for older windows operating systems, then ReactOS is the only one of the two that can do it. Wine doesn't do windows drivers, but ReactOS does by design.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 29 2016, @06:24PM
Wine doesn't do windows drivers, but ReactOS does by design.
Yeah, and now you have to take all the other Windows bullshit along with it: the clunky old UI (they're emulating old versions of Windows), the terrible case-insensitive filesystem, the crappy administrative tools, etc. If I wanted to use Windows 2000 forever, I'd just use that.
What they *should* be doing is working on making a device driver interface layer, much like NDISwrapper worked for WiFi on Linux back in the early days of 802.11. Make it so you can run a crappy old Windows device driver on a modern Linux system, probably in userspace, and then allow the application running in WINE to work with that. If you do that, then you don't need to recreate an entire operating system, and you'll allow people to run whatever version of Linux they want, instead of being stuck with an OS that has far too few human resources to keep it up-to-date.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday August 29 2016, @07:22PM
Granted, ReactOS' model is to replace Windows by being a free windowslike alternative. I am not interested in that; I don't have any windows-requiring devices that can't cope with various Linux workarounds. I am not the target audience of ReactOS. But I have run across lots of intelligent, talented people that nonetheless have a strong preference for "Windows" and all that comes with it vs. something else, like GNU/Linux (which I, in turn, prefer).
Although for me, and for many of my peers, most machine/server builds start with "what unixlike OS will this one be using?" and leaning heavily towards my favorite Linux distributions, and it sounds like it's about the same for you, I have observed that many people actually prefer Windows, even with its limitations, and don't want any version of Linux at all. From their point of view, running Windows-only hardware and the Windows-based software for it probably seems like it should be running on something that at least looks and works like Windows, which ReactOS does and Linux doesn't. If ReactOS reaches a maturity point where it can be solidly deployed for most use cases, I would think that a solution like that without problematic licensing would be welcome to "the Windows people."
Personally, I'd prefer the magic driver assimilator layer for Linux, but the itch being scratched, the impetus for progress on supporting Windows-centric things, belongs to the Windows people. It may be that only the Windows people want that itch scratched badly enough to put the work into it, and their scratch is probably going to look a lot like Windows. Still, I wish them well with it.
Meantime I'll be over here with no Windows computers at all (all GNU/Linux servers, workstations, and laptops; all Android/Linux tablets and mobile devices).
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:03PM
When you say that people want something that works like Windows, even with its limitations, are you talking about from a GUI point-of-view, or do you mean stuff like the case-insensitive filesystem, the confusing and arcane control panel and management functions (esp. regedit and gpedit.msc), the horribly limited cmd.exe shell, the awful browser (and which one? IE6?), the need for having a 5GB device driver pack just to print to a printer, etc.? If you just want a Windows-like GUI, that's easy: KDE is already like that in its default form. In fact, it's *more* like Windows than the newest versions of Windows, since there's no crazy Metro live-tile interface anywhere. I would argue that many distros of Linux really satisfy the need for a Windows-like UI better than Windows, with KDE, MATE, Xfce, etc. They're simple, easy-to-use, and reliable, and more sensibly set up than Windows ever was. The familiar WinXP-7 UI is a pretty good UI on the surface, it's when you get to lower details that things really fall apart. And don't forget the horribly broken package management on Windows. If you're arguing that people really want to stick with having to do registry hacks and use the broken management tools that Windows has, that seems suspicious to me; Windows admins might prefer it just because they know it (and even here, it's been changing from version to version), but I really don't buy the idea that casual users care that much. I'm sorry, I just don't see any value in re-creating Windows in its entirety, warts and all. With some effort, it'd be much, much easier to make something that can run Windows software and drivers, built on top of existing Linux/FOSS components, since most of this is already in place. I've converted several non-technical people over to Linux/KDE and it's gone very smoothly; it's really not hard to learn if you already know how to use Windows, and it doesn't have all the gotchas that Windows has.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday August 30 2016, @06:22PM
Thanks for your reply; let me first say that you're right, that modern GNU/Linux distributions represent a much better path in a myriad of ways.
I know some of this can be hard to believe, but I've seen things like this over and over. I haven't been a "Windows Person" since the late 90s when I started using Linux, but I vaguely remember having some of the issues that many, many of the Windows people that I run across have.
GUI point of view: yes, many people prefer whatever sort of GUI they learned initially and/or recently regardless of its advantages or drawbacks. The windows 95 thru Windows 2000 (and XP in classic mode) is pretty popular, but just about any "windowsy" gui would probably do. Including most unixy ones.
File system idiosyncrasies: yes, whatever they learned about "the file system" initially and/or recently, whether it be case insensetivity or breaking drives into multiple 2GB partitions, or whatever they learned already.
The odd control panel and microsoft management console: Especially this. Many people who learned to find what they need in this difficult-to-navigate, counterintuitive system seem to genuinely value that knowledge and want to be able to depend on its usefulness.
cmd.exe (and even COMMAND.COM): Even here, I have seen lots of people who learned how to do a few basic, productive things in the command shell that they first/most recently learned, and value that knowledge and want consistency in an arena to employ it.
Windows browsers such as IE: Good question. Outside having to nagivate badly-designed intranets and web interfaces that require IE, I don't see a lot of brand loyalty in this area. Lots of people could use IE or firefox or chromium or almost any other similarly-appearing browser and *not even notice* as long as you have to click on a blue "e" to start it up. (I think that's why microsoft edge has a "blue e" icon not far removed from IE's.)
5GB Printer drivers: Again, I think that a lot of the "windows people" have an affinity for that which is to them familiar, and if that's "when you reload windows, be sure to install that printer CD. When the icons for those ten unrelated programs show up on the desktop, that means the printer is working"-- then yeah, there's a class of people who prefer that as known and safe.
Personally, I want what you'd probably describe as a "Windows-like" gui and so use MATE or LXDE on Debian. Problem solved. But "Windows people" seem to roll with Microsoft's periodic changes in UI--I don't think the UI, within reason, is the biggest problem with being what many of the "Windows people" want, as long as a basic UI works in a windows-ish manner. I think that as an interface, for them, KDE would do just fine. In fact, the ReactOS folks offer KDE for Windows in their software install tool.
I think that with casual users, it might go either way; some, in my experience, don't even *notice* if you replace their computer with a linux machine. A few don't care one way or the other as long as they can pretty quickly figure out their key tasks and get to work or play. But most of the people I've worked with in "Windows counseling" involving OS alternatives have a huge, irrational fear of change, even of change for the better, in the area of technology, and whether Windows is good, bad, or in between, they have already made a place for it in their worldview and are not taking applications for additional residents there.
Then there's the sign shop that has a custom vinyl cutter and does not care a wish in the wind for even the computer itself, much less its OS. The machinist with the lathe and laser cutter connected to the computer with a serial cable. The payday loan shop that still uses Okidata ML-320 printers on parallel cables and some strange vertical market loan calculator and management system. For these folks, the computer-hardware-and-os is just a life support system for the (often crappy) software and the hardware that does their actual work. For these folks, having 99% faster CPU, 99% more CPU cores, or a 99% better operating system would make about zero difference to their tasks and workflow; for them, suggesting improvements to the system--to the hardware or to the OS--seems in my experience to generate a puzzled look, furrowed brows, and an abundance of don't-get-why. Things like "What we have works, we know it, why would we change it for no benefit???"
For you, there is probably no value in doing that thing. For a great many, in fact, there is no value in doing that thing. For the people--they exist, and I'll bet there are more of them than there are of us--who prefer Windows do or die, there's probably value in having a GPL drop-in windows replacement. I'm certainly not going to tell them that their work is pointless, because I can see how a functioning system of this nature could appeal to such a person. Heck, just "GPL windows without the microsoft spyware" sells itself to a certain segment.
I am not going to go running ReactOS on anything, nor Windows either, so I am not in their target demographic. But once ReactOS becomes stable, I can sure see installing it for customers as part of otherwise windows-centric solutions that they want.
You've converted people to Linux, I've converted people to Linux, this is a good thing. But you will find that it is by no means 100%--nor even 50%. Lots of people steadfastly remain unconvinced. If the ReactOS folks at least get people out from under Microsoft, if not out from under the Windows ecosystem itself, then I believe they are doing a good thing and I salute them.
Make sense?
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday August 29 2016, @07:45PM
What? It's that damn case sensitive Unix file system that needs to die a miserable and horrible death. Who actually organizes their files with upper case first and lower case second? I'll tell you who - absolutely no one ever! That is not how real people do it. And that is not even mentioning problematic annoying ambiguous files that have the same name but with different capitalization. To normal people, they look the same. I bet you start counting from zero too.
Because it doesn't have animated icons with advertising in the start menu, dumb translucent windows, or a depressing dark black theme?
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday August 29 2016, @09:58PM
Who actually organizes their files with upper case first and lower case second? I'll tell you who - absolutely no one ever!
The problem with speaking in absolutes is that it takes exactly one contradictory data point to prove you absolutely wrong. I am that data point. It's not that I purposefully organize my files that way, it's that I use a leading capital to mean certain things contextually and I expect capital letters to be sorted above lowercase letters because I understand that the letter-symbols I see actually correspond to numbers, and I expect those numbers to be sorted numerically; it's how I want them to be sorted. If you want to sort them based on the alphabetical characters they correspond to, adding this to the hidden .bash_profile file in your home directory should probably do what you want:
LC_COLLATE=en_US.utf8; export LC_COLLATE
That assumes things about your system which may not be true, but probably are.
And that is not even mentioning problematic annoying ambiguous files that have the same name but with different capitalization. To normal people, they look the same.
To people who pay attention to capitalization, they look quite different.
I bet you start counting from zero too.
I can't tell you how Grishnakh counts, but for me the answer is "it depends on what I'm counting."
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @08:09PM
If it's not Linux, it's crap!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @04:05PM
As filesystems go, I hear that Reiserfs is a killer!
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday August 29 2016, @07:35PM
Yes "a great deal of humanity's historical computational effort" indeed! Maybe I can resume my career as a VB6 programmer now?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)