ReactOS 0.4.3 Released | Hacker News Reader

ReactOS 0.4.3 Released

reactos.org

121 pointsjeditobe36 comments

Actually, they are trying to be like the Windows XP/2003 base and not the newer Windows. It is because Microsoft makes their APIs secret and undocumented in modern Windows and over time people figure them out.

ReactOS shares code with WINE to run Windows apps, the older the better. 64 bit Windows can't run 16-bit apps and that is what NTVDM does for ReactOS running 16-bit DOS and 16-bit Windows programs.

ReactOS has a small memory footprint of about 48M of RAM or so, because it doesn't have services for it like BITS etc and just runs Windows Apps and Drivers. So it is better for older PCs to run on because of the small memory footprint.

I have donated to ReactOS, HakuOS, and AROS before because I want to see them get ready for consumers to use them as an alternative to Windows that isn't Linux. ReactOS is a Windows alternative, HakuOS is a BeOS alternative, AROS is an AmigaOS alternative. It is a chicken and egg situation where people don't want to develop for it or support it until it has good enough apps for it that can surf the Internet, do Office documents, etc like Windows can.

*Haiku OS [1]

[1] https://www.haiku-os.org/

ReactOS runs Win16 in 64 bit mode?!

Good to know if I get around to exporting some of my late father's musical compositions from software dating from the Win 3.x era once I no longer have an XP installation.

ReactOS is only 32 bits I think, I might be mistaken. NTVDM is a virtual 16 bit machine so if ReactOS was in 64 bit mode NTVDM would run 16 bit programs.

It would be nice if OSFree ever gets to the point it can run some sort of desktop.

> improvements to ReactOS' implementation of NTVDM has seen several more DOS-era games now running successfully. Strategy fans in particular should enjoy a trip down memory lane with the likes of Age of Empires and Command & Conquer.

Isn't Age of Empires a Win32 game? (Its system requirements are "Win 95 or Win NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3".) Why would it need the NTVDM to run?

it does not need. But some fixes were made fot this game too.

I remember reading about ReactOS like 10 years ago in a paper computer magazine, I wish alternative OS implementations like ReactOS and Haiku would get more exposure.

I love the effort of ReactOS. I really hope they ever reach 1.0

Wow. I mean, jeez.

At this rate, one day I will be able to run Rainbow 6 Rogue Spear and Deus Ex on ReactOS.

I did not say that day was anywhere near now.

I'm impressed that they managed to get Blender working:

https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/14095/bl...

Wow. Firefox, too.

I'm running into quite a few bugs with Firefox 45.0.1 / 47.0.2, it's giving me some invalid SSL results on Let's Encrypt sites & generating 400 Bad Request "Request header is missing colon separator" errors on sites that work on other operating systems. But it's still a big improvement, I don't think I've been able to even get that far with ReactOS before.

Notably, this comment is being posted from ReactOS.

That is impressive. I don't care about it quite as much though, because that's OS.

"Because that's OS"? What do you mean? In this context it is quite ambiguous since it can't mean Operating System. I chuckled when I thought you could mean 'Old Shit':

I don't care that you can run Rainbow 6 and Deus Ex, that is old shit, can it run the latest Call of Duty?

It's Open Source. I don't need windows to run it.

Haha ok yes, that makes more sense ;)

_O_pen _S_ource

Part of me wishes ReactOS was a basis for TAILS. I like TAILS but a lot more normal non-techies could use it if it was more a more windows friendly transition.

ReactOS isn't particularly friendly to Windows users. You would be better off with something like LXDE.

Site certificate issuer's certificate has been revoked?

This page is secure (valid HTTPS). Valid Certificate The connection to this site is using a valid, trusted server certificate. View certificate Secure Connection The connection to this site is encrypted and authenticated using a strong protocol (TLS 1.2), a strong key exchange (ECDHE_RSA), and a strong cipher (AES_256_GCM). Secure Resources All resources on this page are served securely.

Firefox claims it's a valid certificate. Are you using Chrome?

I'm using Safari. It says, for the GlobalSign Domain Validation CA - SHA256 - G2,

    This certificate has been revoked

Both Chrome and Firefox work fine. How should I troubleshoot this problem?

ReactOS used to be a free and opensource alternative to Windows, with binary compatibility. It is an excellent project from technical point of view. However I am no longer sure about its utility.

windows 10 is last version of windows (continuously updated like a service), and free for most users. This takes away one of the advantage (free) of ReactOS. Microsoft may well opensource windows, before they catch up and hence taking away second advantage.

ReactOS system requirements:

   x86 processor, Pentium-class or newer
   96MB of RAM, 256MB recommended
   650MB of free space minimum, 5GB+ recommended if you intend to do testing
   VGA compatible graphics card, VESA BIOS 2.0+

Doesn't seem like it's comparable to anything after WinXP. For one thing, its disk footprint is sane.

This is a good reason for it to exist. I still keep a Windows 2000 VM around on my Mac so I can run a few Windows programs I need, and while I also have a Windows 10 VM, the Windows 2000 version is so much faster & less resource intensive.

I'm playing with ReactOS tonight and it's still extremely buggy, but I can at least start to see a future where that Win2K VM might get retired. Version 0.4.3 looks like a good improvement over v0.4.0 earlier this year.

One point would be to have a platform for legacy applications. There's probably quite many PC's running in various places, doing what they have been doing for the last 20 years (for example running some control software for some machines).

While I think this is the meaningful use case, that also puts a MUCH larger burden of "this needs to be 300% correct" to the project as a likely significant percentage of those legacy applications work BECAUSE of bugs and idiosyncrasies of that specific version of windows.

Whereas the easier target of "emulation", such as with DOSBox and WINE, can get away with a lot more.

Windows 10 just cost me $200, on a new computer. This after a different copy of Windows 10 killed my previous computer motherboard dead during a forced reinstall due to an incompatibility between Windows 7 and Windows 10 (the HD was accessed by Windows 7 on another computer, after still other Windows 10 problems that began the whole debacle.) So that's one computer and $200 that Windows 10 has cost me, lately.

"This after a different copy of Windows 10 killed my previous computer motherboard dead during a forced "

Wow, that's quite a claim!

I had a lot of problems after Windows 10 took over, but finally, an accidental unplugging during a Win 10 reinstall killed the motherboard. Not likely a coincidence, not something I'd have been doing except for numberless problems.

Ignoring the dubiousness of the claim, make sure that you log-in to your MS account with your new install to tie that serial to your account so that future activation is just "log-in". I recently reformatted a new laptop (probably paid for Windows in the price of that, but was reasonable) and made sure to do that as I had no serial to reinstall with. Worked like a charm.

You can't log in on a new motherboard or computer - OEM only these days. This was a forced reinstall as stated above, NOT a new install. The dead comp was four years old.

Lots of governments want to adopt open source solutions. If ReactOS was more mature, I could see a lot of them switching to it.

Windows Server just got more expensive with Server 2016.

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