ReactOS Reviewed in Depth

An anonymous reader writes "NeoSmart Technologies has an incredibly detailed (6 long pages!) and mostly positive review of ReactOS, The Open Source Windows. The review covers the goals of ReactOS and how well it meets them, system stability, application compatibility, kernel design and development, and the networking stack. It discusses the use of WINE in ReactOS' kernel and the effect on both its compatibility and development times." For the visual learners, here are some screenshots."

Comments

Re:Too late? Are You Serious?!?!?!

[Nom du Keyboard]

With Vista coming out soon, many new applications written will only run on Vista because of the new architecture, driver model, etc.

That seems like a really careless statement on your part. Are you saying that virtually all new applications are being written for an OS that you can't even buy for 6 more months? Boy that's sure going to put a dent in the next 2 quarters earning statements for every major software company.

Oh, and btw, are they writing for 32-bit Vista, or 64-bit Vista?

Re:Too late?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

a coperation will switch to a system thats not 1005 compatabile or very tested and also not supported?

Somehow I doubt that.

*snort* - I bet you said the same thing about linux (or samba, or bsd, or whatever) back in the day hey? :-)

Don't forget - XP will get extended support from MS for seven years after Vista's release. In the unlikely event Vista is released tomorrow (or hell, even Janurary), its still going to be plenty of time for ReactOS to get tested, support options, improve compatability, etc.

Re:ReactOS and WINE

[Excelsior]

with many applications working straight away (OpenOffice, Abiword, mIRC, Unreal Tournament, InfranView, PuTTY as some)

When I first saw ReactOS I was very interested, at the very least as a dual-boot for apps that won't run on my Linux desktop. But what runs on it is less than interesting. Take your list:
OpenOffice - runs on Linux.
Abiword - runs on Linux.
mIRC - there are dozens of IRC clients for Linux, some of which are superior to mIRC, IMHO.
Unreal Tournament - runs on Linux.
InfranView - There are better options on Linux, IMO. The only reason I've ever used this app is because 5 years ago there were no good free image tools on Windows. Now, I even use Gimp on Windows.
PuTTY - only necessary on Windows to get at ssh servers running on *nix. ssh is supported by so many things on Linux, not the least of which is the original openssh client.

So, I'm having a hard time seeing any reason to try ReactOS out. Could someone point out something that ReactOS can run that doesn't run on Linux, and doesn't have a better option on Linux?

Re:ReactOS and WINE

[bubkus_jones]

I'm pretty sure linux users are not ReactOS's main target. Their target are Windows users who want to stop using Microsoft, but find Linux/BSD too intimidating.

Of course there are more/better Linux options. For one, Linux is vastly more mature, and has a much greater user/developer base. Second, ReactOS is still in ALPHA stage. It has a ways to go before a full release worthy OS, and they (the ReactOS developers) would be the first to tell you.

Yeah, sure, and DOS is dead by now.

[DrYak]

There's no such things as FreeDOS nowadays, which was developped to late to be anything useful, specially it's not used by many people (including hardware manufacturer and corporate IT staff) to build bootdisks used to flash and upgrade firmwares and BIOSes(1). Neither is it used by computer manufacturer who signed an agreement with a popular OS company that forbids them to sell a computer without an OS.

Whith such an exemple of another old system, we can be sure that nobody will find whatever use for ReactOS, given the fact that Windows Vista will retain no compatibility with a legacy of win32 APPs and has nothing to do with the NT family which is emulated by ReactOS and Wine. And ReactOS and Wine have stated that they will never, I mean really never try to implement more modern API like Win64 and thus won't be able to run all the huge amount of 64bit apps that are seen everywhere (and of which most aren't open-source anyway and aren't ported to linux either (2) ).

ReactOS is likely to die and go the Linux/BSD way. Netcraft is confirming it in Soviet Russia. In Korea, only old people find usefulness to free and open alternatives that retain compatibility to commercial versions.

Har, har, har.

1 - bootdisks and -CD are specially popular in big places where you need to quickly upgrade BIOSes and Firmware non-interactively just by pluging a disc. The same can't be achieved from windows yet (there are windows-based flasher, but they can't be deployed thru usual network channels as software update)
2 - Windows 64bits is once again a proof of the supperiority of open-source. The first softwares that was the most easily ported to Win64 API were the open-source one, were the developpement is much easier because of source code availability : 7Zip, Blender&Yafray, Mame, FireFox, PuTTY, POV, VirtualDub, and many other. Where as only a couple of commercial games (because they make nice tech demos in booths) were ported, and almost no commercial multimedia package (although multimedia was supposed to benefit the most from the increased memory address space and was hoped to be among the first ported to Win64).