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ReactOS Now Runs Abiword
martijn-s writes "Reactos will now run, amongst other programs, AbiWord, IrfanView and its own Explorer clone. Screenshot here. I keep getting amazed by the quality of the code that is coming out of this project..."
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While I'm no great fan of the copy-cat mentality parts of the FOSS community are infused with, I must admit I think ReactOS is a good idea. It's ok to clone a Windows interface when the underlying operating system is Windows, the whole "Let's make GNOME just like IE!" thing has always worked terribly because the underlying OS is not Windows and doesn't look or work anything like Windows. The NT generation of Windows (NT, 2000, XP, 2003) is a reasonable design for an operating system too, so if you're going to start somewhere...
That's my 2c. Coming up, a skateboarding rabbit. That's after a word from our sponsors.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The code we re-used from Wine certainly helps to speed up development. But we can't re-use everything and have to develop a lot of stuff ourselves. For example, Wine uses X11 primitives to do BitBlts (bitmap copying). Since ReactOS is not X11 based we had to write that stuff ourselves. Also, in Wine, everything is in userspace, while ReactOS follows the NT4 (and later) design where there is a split between userspace and kernelspace, with most of the work actually being done in kernelspace. Still, we try to co-develop as much stuff as possible with Wine. Ofcourse, since Wine has been around much longer and the number of Wine contributors is larger than the number of ReactOS contributors most of the shared code originates in Wine. Ge van Geldorp, ReactOS developer.