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

Misleading summary

[Fnkmaster]

If you read the actual post, what this guy is doing makes a lot of sense. He's not re-writing ReactOS from scratch, he's just taking the parts of ReactOS that have worked out reasonably well (the kernel, bootloader, etc.) and tossing the stuff that hasn't worked out so well (the Win32 API subsystem). It just so happens that another project, WINE, did a really impressive job at getting that Win32 API layer implemented, and rather than maintaining two completely independent versions of it, piggybacking off the WINE work should make ReactOS usable relatively soon, and able to run a large number of existing Win32 applications.

Whether you think ReactOS is a sensible project or not, clearly some people think a complete, Open Source, Windows-compatible OS has some real value, and kudos to them for figuring out how to make that happen, or at least getting very close.

Re:Ummm...

[cbhacking]

Why has not one of the highly-rated comments addressed the most important point thus far? One of the critical features of ReactOS is not that it runs Win32 programs (which most operating systems can do to a reasonable degree via wine) but that it runs NT drivers. This is a huge deal: you get full hardware compatibility with anything that has a driver for Windows, which means pretty nearly anything at all. Consider, for example, ndiswrapper (Linux kernel module that provides an NT5 Network Driver Interface for the Linux kernel); with ndiswrapper you can use most network devices in Linux even if there's no native driver, because you can just download a driver intended for XP and it works fine.

Now, take that same idea, and extend it to every driver, 100% compatiblity. It's not Linux underneath, of course - the driver stack has to be engineered for exact NT compatibility and who knows where they'll get their scheduler or memory manager from - but it's a completely open-source operating system that can run any Win32 program or any NT driver. In fact, if they implement the alternate subsystems (Win32 is a subsystem on top of NT, but there are others) you could get (for example) a Linux-compatible API on top of NT and run the best of both worlds (there actually already is a POSIX subsystem for NT, which I use to run bash, ssh, subversion, and more from within Win7).