Does anybody use ReactOS regularly? What's your experience with it?
Very curious to see how far it's come for practical usage.
Very curious to see how far it's come for practical usage.
It's still alpha, so it's pretty rough, and a lot of things don't work so well.
That said, it's a wonderful project and I will continue to follow it and hope it continues to progress.
it's been in alpha for 24 years
Patience is good. Persistence is good. Something that is rare in today landscape.
But I need PT a few times a year, so I'll keep trying.
I can also state that compared to version 0.4.7 (the first one I tried, iirc), the current non-nightly build 0.4.13 ran way more smoothly for me, at least on the GUI side. Issues with mouse stalling are gone, etc.
The "EPIC WIN!" threads on the ROS forum [1, 2] are fun to follow. Based on that, the OS seems to be quite usable for a range of cases.
I also liked the "What's the point?" threads [3, 4]. My respect to the developers for taking the time and patience to explain.
All in all, I keep hoping and installing new versions. I like how clean the system feels -- or, maybe this is the case with many systems when you don't bother to add Internet connectivity. Without wifi, every OS feels quiet and calm.
Greetings to ROS devs!
1: https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10972&start=12...
2: https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=20185
3: https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=19782&start=60
4: https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=20031&start=30
Filling a bug-report is the important first step to have your software working in ReactOS
Pro Tools, at least in its early versions, tends to show its moods even on a well-tuned Windows system. So I was almost sure that it won't run in ROS out of the box. I was actually surprised to see it installing so smoothly. My guess is that the driver for the audio interface (Mbox 2) needs some attention.
I like the ReactOS idea, but I think it will take decades to be compatible enough - and I'm even talking about enough.
If the objective was to run obsolete software, I personally had to distribute resources, I'd just do assign them to Wine. It's surely much more productive to make software compatible on a per-case basis, rather than writing a whole operating system with the objective of being compatible.
It has been under development for decades. That is more than twice the time it took to develop Windows 95. I've tried ReactOS a few times over the years, and it has never worked for me.
I know of two specific examples of ReactOS code that as of a couple years ago were identical with Windows code. There are likely other instances pointing to a non-clean-room implementation.
Cool; if they're specific then you ought to be able to cite them for the rest of us.
What I'm wondering is if you just chanced upon a submission that wasn't actually accepted into the tree at any point?
Perhaps because it literally says:
>/* This part was copied from Windows source /
> / We should obfuscate this somehow? */
And looks sketchy as hell?
I'm not part of their project (just a fan) and my knowledge of git/github is shaky at best -but that's the way it looks from where I'm standing.
Also, I'm not seeing the original windows source code itself; only a comment.
(Or was, last time I tried a couple of years ago.)
I think they should go for rock solid stable first. Then people could build on it. It's perfect for embedded, Point-of-Sale etc where the vendor want to keep their codebase untouched but hop off the Microsoft bandwagon.
My impression is that most of the work on the project is motivated by interest in learning about OSs, rather than demand from real use-cases.
If the problem had strong enough demand from real use-cases, I presume it would be stable by now.
I get further with it each time, but there's still a lot of huge stumbling blocks (no SMP, for instance) that keeps me from using it for very long.