ReactOS (FOSS "Windows") achieves 3D-accelerated Half-Life on real hardware
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
- a listing of all games that work well on ReactOS, similar to how WineHQ does.
Or perhaps a specialized variant of ReactOS with that focus in mind. Do we have such a list? I assume many games also won't work perfectly well; see WineHQ, that also had tons of issues with some games.
Trouble is there's never been enough interest in ReactOS to get it to the point where it's stable let alone warrant fancy extras. (After three decades of trying to clone the basics and failing is proof enough.)
In short, developers see it as a dead end. Why there's so little interest I've never fully understood, but it's fact.
If it were actually stable and usable as a basic operating system it could be used for lots of offline stuff but it's not—even at this point. If it were useable I'd readily adopt it to use offline (I've tried many times and failed).
Another point, this lack of interest shows up on ReactOS's website; there's so little new news and info the site may as well be dead.
The better the specs of a commercial product, the easier it would be to produce an open source version it, with coding and testing automation perhaps even a one-to-one offering.
More reliable than any specification, considering Windows itself is a patchwork of workarounds to not break backward-compatibility.
> given enough time
This has been a lifetime for a slice of the human population.
It’s getting into Sagrada Familia territory.
The article talks about construction on the exterior, the cross on the main tower, the Pope's visit and commemoration of the architect, etc. while on the official website the timeline says "Today, more than 140 years after the laying of the cornerstone, construction continues on the Basilica": https://sagradafamilia.org/en/history-of-the-temple
So which one is it? Is this one of those cases where we have to define "done" first?
The big achievement that happened recently is they completed the towers, so it finally reached its target height. Also the Pope's blessing.
Right, there is a long tradition in it taking centuries to build great cathedrals, Chartres, Notre Dame, etc.
I've little issue with that, however taking so long to build something such as an O/S that it's obsoleted itself many times over before being finished is another matter altogether.
Or "A million monkeys with a million typewriters writing Shakespeare" territory
Case in point, ReactOS is far behind what Windows 11 is capable of, and this not taking into account the ARM and CoPilot+ PC hardware changes in modern motherboards.
It is nonetheless relevant, especially in the presence of escape mechanisms to oppressive governments, and digital sovereignty.
Not just for that. There's an awful, awful lot of ancient embedded hardware running machinery sometimes worth dozens of millions of dollars, and it's running even more ancient software. Siemens, for example, recently searched for people capable of (and willing to) working with Windows 3.11 [1], presumably to deal with the HMI displays for locomotive/train drivers.
When dealing with hardware or software that has lifecycles measured in half-centuries, bridges to allow modern tooling to work with it are really, really important.
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Deutsche-Bahn-sucht-Admin-fuer-Win...
lol I guess, it doesn’t annoy you with endless ads and pop ups, doesn’t try to steal your data and passwords, doesn’t force you to buy an entire new computer just to run it. Far behind indeed.
Difficulty: QoL features added to undo the effects of bad design changes in Win11 don’t count, such as “compact view” in Windows 11 File Explorer.
Here is another one, enforced application sandboxing and signing, comming up in a future update this year, year another useful one for security.
Yet another one, ability to actually use Windows containers without having the same kernel version between host and guest, useful for Windows developers.
Three for the price of one, there you go.
Only downside is that defining custom sequences is… less than intuitive.
More importantly, as I've mentioned, ReactOS is not stable nor reliable enough to even use as an offline O/S sans the Win 11 dross.
If these stability/compatibility issues were fixed then it'd develop a reputation for being reliable which would lead to further development work.
Unfortunately for everyone except Microsoft this is not the case.
This is not always the case. Open source projects also die.
We need to improve the funding situation. I have no idea how to do that, but we really need to tackle that problem.
Maybe ReactOS will live after Windows as an option for people with critical applications that for some reason won't run on Linux.
If ReactOS had worked this well 20 years ago, I would probably have used it (I did try it a couple of times). Today I just don't need it.
do windows viruses get ported by such efforts as well?
so you can set an app to use a Windows XP compatibility profile, and this will simulate Windows bugs which were fixed in more recent versions of the OS
EDIT: Worth noting, Arch ain't hosted on AUR. That's the community side only.
[0] https://archlinux.org/news/active-aur-malicious-packages-inc...
I can still happily upgrade via pacman without fear. Haven't been able to update on Windows without concern for over a decade - the malware comes builtin.
[0] https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-03/CSRB%20Revi...
I only have 4 packages installed with AUR and I think that’s the intention. You’re only going there when the other solutions aren’t available or don’t make sense.
Only Apple has made that claim in their marketing and that was 20 years ago when security by obscurity was shielding them, and when Windows XP was such a cesspool that anything with a normal amount of malware would look virus-free by comparison.
Btw if you're running an OS that's never had a malware incident, please, tell us!
the ransomware campaigns would have happened on any OS enterprises use, because they were not security flaws in the OS
...is essentially impossible to pull off against commercial operating systems, because their core components are all written in-house by staff with photo ID badges, details with HR, tax returns filed with the government, and a cubicle that makes sure that they're locals and not some faceless anonymous hacker identifiable by nothing other than a throwaway faked email address!
I get that there was a lot of "stigma" about open source, the world largely forgot about it, but... actually, in this sense of allowing anonymous contributions it remains a very real risk.
"Jia Tan" was almost certainly a paid professional hacker working for a nation-state actor. Their "helpful contributions" to XZ utils was nowhere near a full-time effort. They certainly had "other irons on the fire", most probably in the Linux kernel or immediately adjacent to it.
He's probably not the only one doing this kind of "work".
For all you know, Linux has more remote exploits purposefully baked into it than Windows has security bugs inadvertently left in it... and don't forget Linux has bugs leading to security vulnerabilities too!
A rough count of "named" CVE 10.0 score (or close to it) vulns in the last 5 years:
7 for Microsoft: ProxyLogon, ProxyShell, ProxyNotShell, LDAPNightmare, PrintNightmare, noPac, Follina
10 for Linux: XZ Utils, regreSSHion, Leaky Vessels, Copy Fail, PwnKit, Dirty Pipe, Looney Tunables, GameOver(lay), Baron Samedit, Sequoia
As for "Linux", you'd need to specify the distro and environment, because Linux systems can be very different from one another. Your XZ example for instance didn't even affect most enterprise distros (like RHEL). regreSSHion didn't affect any musl libc distros like Alpine, but other systems would've also been unaffected had you set your LoginGraceTime to 0, which any sysadmin worth their salt would've done so. Leaky Vessels fails on SELinux enforcing distros (RHEL, Fedora etc) and sandboxed environments. I could go on, but you get the picture. Comparing the number of "Linux" vulnerabilities to Windows is completely pointless.
However, there is a permissions layer that is more nix than Windows, which means the first foothold is still better than XP - you have to choose to execute the file. Self-running things don't tend to infect systems.
Its not a panacea, and there is a risk factor. And there aren't a lot of antivirus systems that can run correctly under ReactOS, because they freak out and think the OS is the malware, because they're scanning hashes for Windows, not another system.
But for a hobby OS, keeping hardware and software accessible after the rest of the world broke access, it still works.
It's definitely a huge improvement towards "FOSS Windows."
So unlike Linux systems with Nvidia Kepler cards, you can still run the most up-to-date desktop environment. Or if you have an obscure WiFi card, you can use the Windows drivers.
I also have a feeling that I'll be dead for centuries long before it ever becomes a viable replacement.
On the plus side, at least it'll be finished quicker than GNU Hurd will be...
I think what is being claimed, but not explicitly in the article, is that this is running the NVIDIA driver stack (for an ancient GeForce 8 card) directly, as opposed to emulating DirectX at the API level on top of a Vulkan driver.
Eh. It's sort of like saying FreeDOS is laughable because DOSBox exists. I think that's missing the point.