ReactOS Being Rewritten, Gets Wine Infusion

xlotlu writes "ReactOS was meant as a free and open-source operating system, binary-compatible with Microsoft Windows. But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability. Due to lack of developers, reimplementing the Win32 subsystem proved to be a much too complex task, holding the project back. Given the deficiencies of the current implementation, developer Aleksey Bragin decided to rewrite it from scratch, drawing heavily from the Wine project. Bragin's announcement on the ReactOS mailing list makes a compelling argument for this decision."

Comments

Re:Ummm...

[maxume]

Actually, it does put energy into Wine. Reading quickly, it appears that it implements a shim underneath the win32 support in Wine, bypassing the usual Wine requirement for an X-Server. So they can work on the Wine APIs and both projects benefit.

Re:Rewritten?

[ArsonSmith]

I don't know if you've heard or not, but two of those "embedded, server, desktop." Linux is not just mainstream, but dominates.

Re:Ummm...

[RulerOf]

I can feel your point, but Windows feels like that on the surface because of a very well engendered Microsoft principle--backward compatibility.

The command interpreter that was command.com from the DOS era was integrated into NT5+ as cmd.exe, which many of us know, love, hate, and have thanked for allowing us to continue to run .bat files well into 2010 (even though we really, really should have taken the time to master VBScript). Meanwhile, the more powerful, flexible, and truly modern evolution of that archaic CLI comes in the form of PowerShell, which gives you that bash-like capability and power contained in a CLI that was designed specifically for the Windows platform.

The primary method to access a partition in windows is certainly via a drive letter, but if you do manage to go past 26 partitions, you'll get "A-A:," A-B:," and so on. Still, you can actually access these volumes in a more "modern" fashion by using their volume names directly (e.g. \\?\Volume{volume-guid-goes-here}) and not just the mount points they've been exposed on, or you could always expose the same volumes as a folder on an already mounted NTFS volume as well.

The thing is that many of the gripes more technical folks have had about Windows over the last decade have been solved in one way or another, but the problem is that since all of the old methods continue to work, there's little to no incentive for users (including systems admins, IT pros, programmers, and so on) to change our behavior, especially when we already know how to solve a given problem, irrespective of whether or not our chosen method is actually the most elegant solution.

I have to admit though, if I hadn't been forced to manipulate Linux based OS's in the ways that are required to get work done, particularly with respect to volume management, I probably wouldn't know about any of this stuff in Windows in the first place :P

Re:Ummm...

[PopeRatzo]

Your reply did not answer the question that was asked.

Let me take a shot at it.

The question was: Why wouldn't Aleksey Bragin put his energies into working on Wine instead of ReactOS?

I would suggest that what Bragin has in mind, as described by the summary and article, is a full open source operating system that would be "binary compatible" with Windows. He is "drawing heavily from Wine" in re-writing ReactOS, which had never reached fruition in the past.

There's a big difference between an Windows-compatible opensource OS and Wine. I can imagine a lot of people who have rejected the notion of installing another open source OS and then installing Wine in order to run Windows programs would be more interested in an OS that just ran Windows programs. For the casual user, installing Linux and then configuring Wine in order to run their Windows programs is not trivial. Imagine just having to install Ubuntu and then being able to install and run your Windows programs on top of it. That would seriously shake up the OS landscape, no?

I have no idea whether or not Bragin will be able to pull this off. I can imagine the obstacles are nearly insurmountable. But if he manages to do it, it'll change the world for a lot of personal computer users who are not fully satisfied with the current OS offerings.

I wish Aleksey Bragin the best of luck. I hope he pulls it off.