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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: 1) by massa on Saturday October 24 2015, @03:22PM

    by massa (5547) on Saturday October 24 2015, @03:22PM (#253998)

    Naturally, the best way to deal with this problem is to apply customer's pressure to the likes of Autodesk and Adobe,

    but those are not the _real_ problem. The real problem is the tonnes of Win32 VB, Delphi, etc programs internally developed. Where I work we do have two hundred different Win32 executables, all developed in-house, with a small (currently 20) and _aging_ team of devs. The only way you rewrite one of the pieces is when technology gets _really_ in the way (we partially rewrote a dozen or so of those executables when we migrated from Office 97 to BrOffice in 2006) and you just don't have the resources to rewrite them all.

  • (Score: 1) by tftp on Saturday October 24 2015, @04:18PM

    by tftp (806) on Saturday October 24 2015, @04:18PM (#254013) Homepage

    The real problem is the tonnes of Win32 VB, Delphi, etc programs internally developed. Where I work we do have two hundred different Win32 executables, all developed in-house

    This is only a problem in relatively large companies. In this one we do not have much of in-house developed code. What we have is written by me and can be ported, if necessary. The problem is that there is nothing on Linux that compares to WPF and .NET in convenience for RAD that would make it appealing to developers with new projects. The GTK# is perhaps the best candidate... but it still trails far behind in most aspects, and development with it will cost more money up front. Data binding alone is a huge time saver.

    • (Score: 1) by massa on Monday October 26 2015, @11:53PM

      by massa (5547) on Monday October 26 2015, @11:53PM (#254938)

      We are not a really big shop (3000 employees). The next generation of software that is being produced in house are java web applications and js-rich apps with java webservices backends.

      • (Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday October 27 2015, @12:29AM

        by tftp (806) on Tuesday October 27 2015, @12:29AM (#254953) Homepage

        Your company is 100 times as large as my company. You can accept somewhat higher costs of Java Web applications, as they are balanced by easier deployment and higher portability - which matters, as you have many users. For us it is more practical for now to write the cheapest applications and just use a few PCs that run them locally.