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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @03:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @03:53PM (#394238)
    More choices is not good. More good choices is good. More bad choices is bad. More bad choices increases the odds of you or others picking a bad choice.

    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.
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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday August 28 2016, @05:02PM

    by Bot (3902) on Sunday August 28 2016, @05:02PM (#394256) Journal

    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.