ReactOS 0.4.12 | Hacker News Reader

ReactOS 0.4.12

reactos.org

135 pointsconductor32 comments

I ask here after every ReactOS release...does anyone here run ReactOS full time? Is it stable enough now to be used as a normal desktop OS? What does it give you over Wine?

I'm genuinely asking this; I'd like to get my grandmother off of Windows XP, and there was some piece of software (some weird productivity pack that she loves for some reason) that I couldn't get working with Wine.

I’ve used it to run some old Windows95 programs in a virtualised environment. I had easier ways of doing it but I decided to do it the hard way, and it isn’t a disappointing experience. Just an empty one.

I've noticed it's got less crashy in virtualbox.

Have you tried Lutris? I've had problems with wine in the past, and Lutris seems to do better if there's a recipe for it. Granted, if it's sufficiently weird, there's probably not a recipe for it.

I still have a major problem with USB drivers. If I try to install Reactos on real hardware as opposed to a VirtualBox VM I can't even get it to accept keypresses from a USB keyboard. Which is extremely annoying because the primary boot message telling me to hit a key to boot from the CD does accept a keypress from the USB keyboard.

What is the weird productivity pack?

Can I use ReactOS as a CI runner in gitlab to build a Windows installer?

I'm currently using msys2 as the build environment-- does that run reliably on ReactOS? If not, is there another free build environment that runs reliably on ReactOS?

I don’t know about ReactOS but you can use Docker with wine and WiX to build MSIs without a Windows server: https://github.com/suchja/wix-toolset

Off topic, but thank you, I have an interview on friday and the have WiX in their nice to have list, thought it was about the websitebuilder(didn't do to much research yet), which would be odd since its a C# job and well i never had to build installers. Naming things is hard

What's the environment that my `make` command runs in? Windows or gnu/linux? "wine" makes me think it's a Windows environment which is not what I want.

msys2 greatly simplifies cross-platform building for me because it just looks like a linux build environment (and has arch's pacman for deps like git and stuff)

I always wondered why don't commercial CIs use ReactOS for build/test of windows software. I just assumed it wasn't stable enough yet?

I like this project very much. Every time there is a release, I test it on VirtualBox.

What is ReactOS used for? I have been fascinated by it since I was a kid

ReactOS is a full OS so, unlike Wine, I believe you can load drivers that target Windows, which might be important if you have a piece of expensive hardware that only has official drivers for a legacy release?

I'm thinking running some legacy Windows applications in an embedded setting, like cash registers or kiosks.

If there's a matching SBC for react someday, I could see this taking off immensely.

ReactOS for ARM is already a thing so it's not out if the question

Is it just me or the release was rather... underwhelming? I failed to see any major progress in the device compatibility department - usually releases had at least a few such highlights.

They mention Intel e1000 NIC driver, among others.

That's the main network card simulated by VmWare and VirtualBox, since pretty much the dawn of virtualization. I can't stop but think that ReactOS must be broken as hell if it didn't even have this working.

I haven't tried this release yet, but what they've described for this release - filesystem, font rendering, network drivers - are all issues that prevented me from using ReactOS more extensively in previous versions.

As someone who plays with music software, the new MIDI support looks interesting too, but I still think I'll be using Windows 10 and old Macs for my audio work.

Someone should combine it with the DOS POS software from the other day.

That would be more of freedos territory, I believe. https://www.freedos.org/

I don't think it's in any way a coincidence, that the third screenshot on the freedos page is that exact POS software.

I know, but I'm thinking in this day and age, setting up a "Windows" machine may be more familiar, even down to networking. Also you might want to run something else on the machine in the background.

Freedos is awesome too!

Not much point given that DOS is libre software now

(FreeDOS is, in case anyone would get the impression MS-DOS was.)

No, I mean MS-DOS https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS

You made me curious enough to go check out the link. Yeah, those are sources, alright. Assembly code! Of course, the comments are nice, but that kind of code... could be had, more or less, disassembling DOS' files before, no?

No, this sort of Assembly has comments explaining things, named constants, jump labels etc which would all be missing from the disassembly

That's great! MIT license. Still, I think to be more useful it would have be to DOS version 3, but preferably 5 or 6. I don't expect MS-DOS 2 to have as good support for modern hardware as FreeDOS has, either.

This is not to be confused with react the js framework.

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