Hacker News Reader

Comment by barking | Hacker News Reader

I can see that this is an awesome achievement but why would people, not involved in the project, choose to use it instead of other operating systems such as windows itself?

View on HN

What are the differences between Windows and ReactOS?

There are mainly two. Firstly ReactOS is open source. Secondly ReactOS is Free. Also Windows (especially the newer versions) are known to monitor all your activity by default. So if you're concerned about your privacy or just don't want to share any personal info, we promise (and you can check our source code) that we don't track any of your data.

And it could be used for legacy software from what I've read.

"Monitor all your activity by default" is serious FUD here. There is some telemetry data collected and phoned home, but it's not like they're monitoring what websites you go to, what you write in your Word docs, etc.

Not contents but behaviour. They do monitor if you use Chrome or IE, if you use Excel and for how long, etc. This alone is powerful enough.

Last time I checked, Edge still sent all your keystrokes to Microsoft in plaintext and over HTTP (not HTTPS).

So yeah, they are (at least were) monitoring not only what sites you went to, but also what you typed into them.

Went looking for it just in case it's true and... nothing. There's a case of predictive text system in windows 10 which can query for suggestions (there's an option to disable it), but no keylogger either in edge or windows that I can find. And the predictive text didn't use HTTP.

Cannot confirm--what toolset did you use to determine this?

Can you provide a source / proof of that statement?

You should check more thoroughly, because that claim is complete bollocks.

I grew up with DOS and Windows, I have no interest whatsoever in moving to Linux; in fact I have an active disinterest in doing so, if for no other reason than the fact that all my software is for Windows. ReactOS is my main upgrade option, because I don't want to be tied into all of the Win10 nonsense.

On top of that, I have several old (XP-era) laptops which still boot, still can play my older games and get on the Internet, etc. They're not really capable of running even Win7. ReactOS allows me to run a newer OS on those old IBM battleaxes.

Damn! Are you saying that you won't buy a new PC, that is, condemning all the effort of Microsoft to sustain economical growth and, therefore, kill employment. I can't believe it, that is so against the current economical paradigm. :-)

Fair enough, I can appreciate that wanting to be able to continue older software a valid reason. Just to add that I've had good success running a vb6 application on WINE on Ubuntu.

Old Windows versions are not available from Microsoft (or at least not without some expensive special contracts). I see the main use case for ReactOS is running legacy software for which upgrades are not available or are not otherwise feasible.

One reason would be price. Another reason would be software compatibility. Many people praise Windows backwards compatibility, but that's not the case in my experience, a lot of poorly written software breaks with new Windows versions, so people forced to stay with XP. I'm not sure if ReactOS would have better compatibility, but it's a chance. Also some people just want to use free software for their own reasons.

I keep trying to use each version of ReactOS in order to run the Windows XP programs, I still need some of them. In 2017 I can't even buy Windows XP in Microsoft Store.

Do Win XP programs run yet?

They do on WINE on ubuntu anyway

Yes, that's right. I was wondering if they worked on ReactOS yet.

...for good reason? Technologies from XP are by now insecure and obsolete. Why would Microsoft sell XP still? Does Ford still sell 1998 F150's at their dealerships?

It's a fairly straightforward cost-benefit analysis. Some of us rely on software that would otherwise be too difficult or expensive to replace, software that only runs on Windows XP for a variety of reasons. In my case it's a device driver that interacts with a very expensive flow cytometer. We've taken other precautions in order to protect the computer, and we're reasonably confident we can operate it safely. The same goes for many, many other Windows XP or Windows XP Embedded installations, where it's basically treated like firmware and carefully walled off from the outside.

Does "VM it" work? I mean, there is PCI and USB-passthrough in qemu, so this might be an option, especially since VMs are easy to sandbox (easier than physical machines where someone might simply plug a cable in so he can watch YouTube, for example).

Mitigations only make sense in a cost-benefit analysis when there's a corresponding threat. Why would someone bother with watching YouTube on a junky old PC in a corner of the lab? It doesn't even have an audio card, let alone a modern web browser. Besides, it's on an isolated VLAN and monitored (and backed up) like a server, so anyone messing with its network connection will cause the equivalent "server down" alert in our NOC, not that it will do them much good: This particular lab is in a pretty remote location where network bandwidth is at a premium, so we block YouTube campus-wide.

Frankly, I'm only really worried about malware somehow sneaking aboard the thing, which is why it's on-network in the first place. I don't want people plugging flash drives into it. And fortunately, there are still antivirus products that support Windows XP, which keeps the riff-raff out.

There are a number of old software that won't work on modern versions of Windows and old versions are no longer maintained. Even "offline" use, e.g. in VirtualBox with no network access can be problematic; for example my XP installer comes with SP2, but it is no longer possible to download SP3 from Microsoft.

Having said that, ReactOS still needs quite a bit of work to cover that niche, in my opinion.

You can still get SP3 for Windows XP, but you have to download it directly from the Windows Update catalog:

https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=KB936...

Thanks a lot ! When I did a search, all the links would point to the old (deleted) pages.

Here we go! These folks are waisting thousands of hours making something that already exists.

You appear to be far too bothered what other people are doing with their own time. If they're not doing anything illegal or immoral, I fail to see the problem you have with this.

Well, I guess, the same could be said about FreeBSD vs. Linux (or, is it the other way around?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com