Hacker News Reader

Comment by iillexial | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious now, is this project has a purpose to get some share of users from Windows? Or is it just a fun/hobby project? I'm asking it because the OS itself is 25 years old, however it is not really ready for everyday usage.

Funny thing, I have seen it once on the screen of a cashbox in a supermarket in Kyiv. However, it is not clear if they really used ReactOS, or just their logo/graphics to avoid buying license for Windows.

UPD: Found the photo https://i.imgur.com/5biLbTj.jpg (2016)

View on HN

I feel like 10 years ago or so, everyone would have seen this and thought it was understandable that a project like ReactOS would still be in alpha after all these years and still somewhat unstable. However, since then lots of open source OSes have started and have had some stability, although no widespread usage yet, primarily because these OSes are being developed on the side by people like google or facebook. And so may be that is why people look at reactOS after all this time and are surprised it's still a small shop.

It's similar to GIMP. GIMP was "impressive for open source" in 2013 but now it's behind the times when things like Photopea exist. May be ReactOS hasn't kept up with the progress people now expect from open source projects.

I feel like ReactOS should try to see if they can get with Steam / Valve to work something out where they both work on Proton together, and Valve lets them use their efforts for ReactOS, and gives them well needed funding. My understanding is they are reaching for similarish goals. One benefit of ReactOS is it tries to support Windows drivers, I'm not sure if Wine does this or not? But for something like SteamOS if it doesn't have driver support, it would make way too much sense to support it via Proton / ReactOS.

I think they should focus on embedded devices, and a story as a replacement for appliances using either Windows or Windows CE.

Even in todays rather unstable state, it would work fine if it was easy to bundle it such:

  - an application EXE

  - boot with a readonly root file system

  - read-write partition for application/user settings

  - builtin watchdog to reboot when/if the system crashes

There's a shit-ton of stuff running Windows of some sort behind the scenes.

I'm sure there's also some kind of cloud application I can't quite put my finger on which would be useful, but maybe more niche. I have been known to test Win32 applications I have written against ReactOS. If it works there, it will run on every Windows version still running under the sun.

Maybe as part of a CI pipeline generating Win32 EXEs?

The only "downside" to the CI pipeline for generating Win32 EXEs is you can already do this from Linux, I don't recall if C does, but I almost want to say gcc will do it from Linux, I definitely know on Linux with FreePascal/Lazarus I've generated an EXE file. So you don't truly need ReactOS in this regard, but maybe the CI pipeline for testing and confirming that it works might be worthwhile to ReactOS to create some sort of profitable project. I'm thinking of things like Puppet or other web automation testing tools, but for GUIs on Windows using ReactOS as the host, with automated UI tests that output screenshots.

I would love to see ReactOS get more serious funding, and get farther ahead than where it is today.

Lazarus/FreePascal 32bit does work on ReactOS. Also some older versions of Tcl/Tk / Tclkit works. ReactOS has GUI package manager with some programming languages etc.

I didn't actually mean generating the EXE from ReactOS, that's easy in Linux. (I develop for Windows in Linux and MacOS.) But I meant regression testing on ReactOS.

What about MSI installers? Any tips?

You can use Conveyor to generate MSIX packages from Linux or macOS if you want to ship Windows apps from a Linux machine. (https://hydraulic.software/)

The ones I know of are WiX[0] and NSIS[1].

0: https://wixtoolset.org/

1: https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Main_Page

Ah fair! I misunderstood.

I think that one of the "very" early developers is now mainly interested with embedded devices.

https://github.laoxienet.cn/reactos/reactos/blob/34593d933be...

Re: cloud thing, https://www.balena.io/ ?

For a greenfield project, sure, why not. I was thinking about existing stuff, like the gas station pumps with dodgy touch screens I worked on once upon a time. A bunch of stuff already written and moving to Balena would not exactly have been cheap.

But if there was a ReactOS BSP or SDK of sorts, or even a HOWTO for embedded ReactOS, it could make sense to take the plunge.

DirectX (not sure which version) has been show to run, the patches are in master now (that was 7 months ago). No idea about Vulkan etc.

edit: I've just seen Space Cadet Pinball running, what more do you want? :)

Space Cadet is definitely one I miss. I have seen devs in the past suggest making ReactOS into an omniuse OS that could someday also include Linux packages, so you could in theory also "apt-get install" whatever you wanted to install.

You a have a libre implementation of Space Cadet Pinball to compile it against SDL2.

That would be cool, they could leverage Flatpak I'd imagine, if didn't want to manage a distro as well as ReactOS. Just a very minimal shim to provide linuxy stuff.

Space Cadet Pinball uses GDI. Mostly Bitblt.

At Steam, there is usually mention about ReactOS, if game works on ReactOS.

Alpha or not, is it usable? Because by all accounts windows 9x systems were alpha quality as well and millions of people were depending on it and accepting the shitshow.

So if ReactOS is still rated as alpha but has a similar stability as XP it is something I believe some people praising the windows 9x/NT UIs would be happy to use them.

I only tested it on a VM once in a while out of curiosity, tried some apps I knew but since I have been primarily a Linux user for decades and wasn't particularly fond of the windows UI those were all opensource apps I could run on Linux so I had little incentive to spend much more time on it. From the little I explored it was working.

It hangs for me pretty easily when I run my own code on it. Feature wise, it's definitely XP or better. I just wish it was rock solid. There are constant bugfixes, at some point it should tip the balance and stop crashing. For it to crash, it must be in the kernel code, so while large, it's not an inhuman task to fix it. "Not crashing" is a lower bar than "perfect compatibility".

There aren't that many developers working on it though. I wish some company would adopt it and run with it, like how Wine really took off after Codeweavers.

I’m not sure what you mean saying “gimp being behind the times” compared to photopea. Gimp absolutely blows it out of the water in terms of being a useful tool.

/me sitting here on a Wayland desktop, scowling.

There's sure something to be said about OSS projects and release health/hygiene. I'm not qualified to synthesize and say it, but I know which of my daily-driver projects release frequently. And I know which ones don't, and which ones my [distro] and others patch around because they can't bother to tag + publish releases, or lack the discipline to know when to ship.

I fully expect GIMP to ship gtk3 support after gtk3 is deprecated, at this point.

When wine, an entire, very functional win32 re-implementation and proprietary s***-a** discord is your brethren, it's a bad sign.

Gimp is an interesting example as it’s been used successfully as a platform for other commercial projects like Pixelmator, maybe ReactOS will be the seed of something else.

This project is a boon to all reverse engineers, especially when reversing malware that uses undocumented features of windows.

But if it is an undocumented feature of MS Windows, then the ReactOS developers must have guessed how it would be implemented or 'borrowed' from the original source code (win2k was floating around on the Interwebs, not sure about more recent versions). The ReactOS developer community is eager to leave the impression that the latter won't happen. If the former, then I'm not sure, how valuable this truly is for analyzing malware.

You can take two different programmers, give them the same requirements, and produce the exact same bugs more often than you'd think.

ReactOS is original code, developed outside of Redmond. Not 'borrowed'

https://reactos.org/faq/

I'm guessing its a little like FreeDOS. Its not really going to siphon users away from Windows, but it will find little niche uses. Weird embedded system type things where somehow it manages to support drivers that unsupported combinations of drivers and software that real Windows versions don't, for example.

Or perhaps as an underlying OS for a game console with games that can also run on Windows PCs for a wider reach.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com