Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucasoshiro | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine we made a new Linux distro. This distro would provide a desktop environment that looks close enough to Windows that a Windows user could use it without training. You could install and run Windows applications exactly as you do on Windows; no extra work needed.

Why not use ReactOS?

View on HN

Linux has far greater hardware support than ReactOS does.

Maybe we should fund ReactOS for end-user applications. Win32 is well established and isn't going anywhere. So why not take advantage of Microsoft's API design effort

But who is "we"? It might have been valuable to games makers, but Wine/Linux based systems seems to be adequate for them. So who is left?

>So who is left?

People who like and need Windows apps, people who want to have an out of the box experience when running those apps, people who don't like the loss of performance when using Wine, people who generally like Windows but want to have an alternative in case that dislike where Microsoft is heading with Windows development.

That is a lot of people, me included. But since Windows experience is somehow still tolerable, there aren't many willing to invest time or money into ReactOS. There are no corporate sponsors since you don't make money from desktop OS-es unless you use them to sell expensive hardware like Apple did.

Someone like Valve could have sponsored it but they though they can reach their goals with Wine while spending much less money.

Another sponsor for ReactOS can be a state actor like China or EU, somebody with deep pockets who wants and needs to run Windows software but don't want their desktop to be under US control.

Any people who prefer Windows' primary design choices over Unix ones too.

> Another sponsor for ReactOS can be a state actor like China or EU, somebody with deep pockets who wants and needs to run Windows software but don't want their desktop to be under US control.

I would love to see EU to do this actually. Maybe we should pitch this as citizens.

ReactOS is too buggy to be used as a daily driver for your operating system, but it's awesome as Windows Kernel reference code. You want to know what a Kernel-mode function does? Ether read the documentation, or look at what ReactOS does. (Yes, leaked Windows code exists too, and it's even on freakin Microsoft-owned-Github of all places, but you can't legally look at that stuff!)

> but you can't legally look at that stuff!

Hi, it's me, Mr Hair Splitting: to the best of my knowledge it's not illegal to read the source, but it would be illegal to use the source in your own application because you didn't author it or have a license to it

That's actually why the Wine and ReactOS folks want to disqualify folks who have read the source for fear they would inadvertently "borrow" implementation ideas, versus being able to explain to a judge how they, themselves, came up with the implementation. The key point is that Wine and ReactOS merely disqualify someone, not imprison or fine them

I played with ReactOS a few months ago in a virtual machine, and even in that relatively controlled environment it still crashed a lot.

I’ve been hoping that ReactOS would be the thing that truly murdered Microsoft Windows, but that really hasn’t happened; it seems like that’s happening via combination of a lot of applications moving to the browser and compatibility layers like Wine and Proton.

Linux has pretty good driver support nowadays, and outside of drivers Wine will have as good or better support for applications, so I am not completely sure what that says about the future of ReactOS.

Is that even stable to use yet? Last time I used ReactOS, it was very unstable to use as a daily driver.

Some of the basic apps like Jetbrains it could barely run it. At best it was crashing frequently for me.

Because ReactOS doesn't work?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com