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Comment by miguelrochefort | Hacker News Reader

ReactOS is the saddest thing.

Why would anyone do this? For 13 years? Why?

Operating systems are cool.

Just about every popular general purpose operating system is some variation on UNIX. That is sad, just like it would be sad if JavaScript, TypeScript and Coffescript were the only popular programming languages. The only difference in scenarios is that the OS is much more significant and critical than the programming language.

Windows is fundamentally different from Linux and UNIX. ReactOS is a clean room reimplementation of that, bringing NT's many excellent ideas to the open source community. That is a good thing, even if you never get to use it. Don't forget that, just like in every other part of life, different != bad.

Agree, NT has many excellent ideas. But re-implementing it today seems silly. Are you going to have messages with take two integers only, then stick two 16-bit fields into second one? Look at these articles, do you think anyone should be implementing API like this in 21st century:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070710-00/?p=... https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120913-00/?p=...

I am all for variety. Hurd, L4 -- these are fundamentally different from Unix and very interesting. ReactOS? well if you enjoy debugging windows kernel drivers without source code...

That's the Win32 executive subsystem, which is only a small (albeit important) part of Windows NT. The ReactOS project aims to get binary driver compatibility with Windows, amongst other things.

And yes, lots of people enjoy reverse engineering things like drivers.

Just about every popular general purpose operating system is some variation on UNIX.

Including Windows 9x which is based on DOS which is based on Xenix which is based on Unix. I didn't learn this until a few years ago, and it always seems to shock people in tech conversations.

DOS isn't based on Xenix at all. It's a clone of CP/M, and CP/M was its own thing for 8-bit CPUs (and later 16-bit).

Whoops, Thank you for that. I think I misinterpreted this thread when it was new, and then never questioned it any further. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7466952

I disagree, I applaud the effort even if in the current state few will use it.

Imagine a few decades from now, Windows has either transformed so much that it can no longer run certain things or it entirely disappears as a platform.

Something like ReactOS could become very useful to running legacy stuff or perhaps the code can be recycled for emulation/vm and legally offered for free. It can also be used on older hardware to bring back Windows applications/gaming, while also keeping it up to date.

Surely you would want to support Wine and not ReactOS?

The only advantage of ReactOS over WINE is that ReactOS has Windows 2003 compatible kernel. This means native Windows drivers, and faster emulation of some features.

However, a few decades from now, there will be no devices left which have Windows 2003 drivers. And hopefully CPUs will become faster, so Wine overhead will be negligible. And I doubt all the new devices will have ReactOS drivers.

Rather than keep going on ReactOS, I would much more prefer people making wine better.

You should look at the current state of Amiga, while emulation is possible there are only two Amiga like OSes (AmigaOS & MorphOS) and both are closed source/proprietary.

What am I saying is that having an open source OS for Windows, is a huge deal if you are interested in hardware preservation for the future.

Therefore in reply to the original post about the current endeavor being "sad" I would say that it is quite the opposite.

Wine is very important as well, but it is a completely different piece of software in my opinion.

What about AROS?

I agree AROS is very much like AmigaOS 3.x and runs on multiplatforms including old Amiga 68K systems. It even has a Kickstart replacement ROM that is legal to use in Amiga emulators.

HaikuOS aims at BEOS compatibility and also works nicely.

ReactOS I've donated to them so they could reach their 4.x milestone.

If I was some rich billionare or a CEO I'd donate a million dollars to each alternative project.

Interesting, I only recently started watching a few YouTubers regarding Amiga stuff, wasn't even aware that AROS existed.

Thanks for correcting me, looks like a pretty cool project will have to look more into it.

Link for anyone else wondering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System

It even runs on original Amiga hardware as well as on emulators and on PCs.

ReactOS and Wine share a lot of code, so supporting one will also support the other.

WINE cannot run most drivers.

Wine by its nature can not run drivers at all. Wine is an emulation platform for running applications. Drivers reside on a lower level and are the OS kernel's job. That is roughly what ReactOS does (and Wine can't) - provides a NT compatible kernel for the Windows drivers.

Windows is pretty focused on backwards compatibility. A large portion of their market comes from the fact that the latest version of Windows can still run 10-20 year old programs written for Windows 98, XP, etc.

This is only true for certain programs.

I've already run into many issues trying to run older software from Windows 98/XP days. For example certain older tools for Quake1 modding don't work properly on anything past Windows XP.

Even something like Photoshop CS2 has certain bugs running under Windows 7.

Don't forget old games. There many that simply don't work on Windoss 7/8/10 without many patchs.

But if you go a little further back, open source has the advantage: It's now easier to run 16-bit Windows programs under Wine on Linux or OS X than it is to run them on a modern Windows machine, and Microsoft has completely ceded the vintage gaming audience to DOSBox.

I for one think there's a _lack_ of serious OS efforts, optimized for various scenarios. I still miss the days of Amiga OS and its multimedia oriented design that gave it a huge lead in these areas on many contemporary competitors. The refreshing BeOS appeared but was unfortunately abandoned and while Haiku is interesting, I wish it had better traction and more attention from the public. :)

These days it's so much about only Windows, macOS, and Linux. And two of those are closed systems. Mobile devices are eating up more use cases by the day too, so I guess the golden era of desktop operating sytems are long passed. However, this sure makes me more sad than ReactOS being a thing!

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