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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."
Does that make ReactOS the Vista of the open source world?!!!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability
That sounds familiar
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.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
Maybe they should rename it?
Re-ReactOS?
ReactOSRebooted?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Fortunately, the developers of GNU, Linux, Wine, Open Office, didn't feel that way.
Perhaps because one does not wish to engage in copyright infringement?
F0 07 C7 C8
Because some people actaully want Windows without the Microsoft licensing. Wine running on *nix or Mac will always be a different experience. Filesystems are laied out differently, permissions work differently, desktops integration works differently, the UI of the system around the windows apps is different. It won't ever offer the *same* user experience and its not enteded to do so.
ReactOs on the other hand could feel much more Windows like if implemented in a complete way.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
So pay him, or STFU.
His freedom to do whatever he wants far outweighs your desire to have free stuff.
I'll probably get modded down for this, but if you want to run Win32 binaries, run Windows.
What version of Windows? The one that comes preinstalled on most PCs nowadays, or the one that Microsoft still sells? The last time I read the front page of ReactOS.org, the project's mission was to clone Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and specifically their device driver environment. (Windows Vista and Windows 7 have a different driver model.) Then you get to the issue where a retail copy of Windows for use in Parallels Desktop is no cheaper than a Wii-size Acer Aspire Revo PC with preinstalled Windows for use in KVM Switch.
But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability.
Wait, ReactOS or Wine?
Or as it says on http://www.reactos.org/en/about_whyreactos.html
"ReactOS offers a third alternative, for people who are fed up with Microsoft's policies but do not want to give up the familiar environment, architectural design, and millions of existing software applications and thousands of hardware drivers."
This is exactly why ReactOS interests me.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Of course, a lot of corporate IT projects fail, too. Software is hard. It's a wonder any of it works at all, sometimes.
It doesn't mean they're bad either. Or indifferent for that matter. Maybe if you had a crystal ball and could reliably foretell which projects will have have been important in five, ten or twenty years time, maybe then you could make that judgment. But without some sort of prescience it's impossible to make reliable judgments. That's why all those corporate projects flop; someone in authority makes a judgment about which strategy to pursue and in five years time one or more of their key assumptions is shown to be false and the software is rendered useless.
Of course, the same thing happens to free software projects as well. The difference however is that the Free Software developmental model tends to result in massive parallelism. Lots of projects fail, some are unexpected successes, and the successes aren't always the ones you'd expect. Think of it as a sort of software Darwinism: lots of projects die out, but the ones that thrive are well adapted to the needs of their userbase.
Looked at in that way, the lack of central direction in Free Software isn't the flaw that many perceive it to be. It is something to be celebrated.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
I agree completely with you, but I think this is the best reason for joining Wine instead of trying to create a whole new OS.
I started working with Linux in 1995 and have almost completely abandoned Windows since 2000 or so. However, I still have to do some occasional work in Windows, and I always feel how painful and difficult it is compared to a Unix-like system.
Windows lacks the advanced tools that Unix has, such as the Bash shell, for instance. I'm now occasionally do support for an industrial control system that uses Linux servers with Windows workstations. According to the manufacturer, it's by customer demand that they use Windows for the workstations. They use Cygwin for scripting a command shell.
And how about filesystems? The simple fact that the directory separator is the backslash, which is used as the escape sequence initiator in C-like languages, is a PITA. Plus you are limited to 26 different filesystems, one for each alphabet letter. And you cannot use a name for mount points, just one letter.
I could go on and on, for any professional systems administrator, Unix is far superior to Windows, there is no doubt about that. It's only for home computers that familiarity is a convenience, professionals can be readily trained to use a system that's intrinsically easier to use.
I somehow feel that trying to make a new OS that has exactly the same "feel" as Windows is like trying to make a modern car that has exactly the same feel as a Ford Model T.
Nonsense. His freedom to do whatever he wants far outweighs my interest in getting him to work on something else for nothing. I doubt if anything outweighs my desire for free stuff.
If it's based on Wine, why not just put their energy into Wine?
After having spent some time reading his presentation it seems that they want to avoid the dependency on X Windows that Wine apparently has. Thy main aim is to come up with a bootable version of WINE such that you can avoid the overhead of effectively running two operating systems. They also hope this will allow them to use certain drivers that WINE cannot as they want lower level access to the hardware than X Windows will ever provide.
Please not I am not an expert on any of this so please do correct me if I am wrong, but I did see some value in their approach since it is rather a lot of work to get Linux install up an running on an old PC if all you want it for is to run a few legacy windows applications and nothing else.
The idea of getting both groups contributing to the WINE higher level code also does now add to the WINE pool of developers too. This could actually help both projects considerably. So in a way, they are going to be putting their energy into WINE. They are not planning to fork the WINE source, they want to do regular merges into their tree. He quotes that it only takes 30 minutes to to this on a fresh WINE snapshot. It might then take a little longer to fix their code to take into account of changes in WINE but this is still pretty good.
It is thing like this that are only really possible with Open Source.
I dont read
What killed OS/2 was IBM basically blowing a 1-2 year lead on Chicago, not anything to do with Windows compatibility. IBM simply did not know how to market OS/2 Warp, bumbled around for over a year while Microsoft basically convinced developers to hang on for an operating system that didn't even exist (all those early "screenshots" of Chicago that first showed up in 1993-1994 were in fact artists' renderings). Even Microsoft wasn't really all that ready, as Office 95 was simply a variant of the 16-bit suite with a 32 bit wrapper. What's more, Windows 95 was an absolute horror story reliability-wise compared to OS/2. It was a piece of garbage. But Microsoft won because Microsoft understood the PC marketplace, and IBM had little or no understanding.
I know some of this because I was working for an IBM VAR at the time, and we saw just how inept IBM was, despite having what was, at the time, an extraordinarily powerful OS, with a powerful scripting language (Rexx), pretty good networking that included a full TCP/IP port, a fast and reliable file system and even it's own GCC port in the EMX system. I've told the story here before, but IBM was so bizarre that when they launched Warp 4, they didn't hand us VARs out OS/2 Warp 4 install CDs, they gave us a fucking movie that you played in a Windows machine. It was pretty much at that point that we figured out IBM had lost the thread of the conversation, and we pretty much abandoned selling OS/2.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The poster did not question his freedom to do so. He asked _why_ he would contribute to one particular project rather than another project. Your reply did not answer the question that was asked.
Slashdot moderators will give you +1 Informative for defending someone's freedom, but since they didn't attack his freedom you failed to answer the question. Wine and ReactOS are both free. So in neither case is he getting paid, and in neither case is anyone's freedom limited.
I still think, especially with Microsoft, there is some truth in:
“Those who don’t understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.”
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I started working with Linux in 1995 and have almost completely abandoned Windows since 2000 or so. However, I still have to do some occasional work in Windows, and I always feel how painful and difficult it is compared to a Unix-like system.
Too bad you left Windows just when it got good.
And how about filesystems? The simple fact that the directory separator is the backslash, which is used as the escape sequence initiator in C-like languages, is a PITA. Plus you are limited to 26 different filesystems, one for each alphabet letter. And you cannot use a name for mount points, just one letter.
Actually, NTFS has allowed you to mount to directories for a decade or so now. That provides for more than 26 filesystems and also for nice names. As for backslash, yes it's an escape character in C languages. Linux uses forward slash, which is the default delimiter for regular expressions. Which gets used more often?
I could go on and on, for any professional systems administrator, Unix is far superior to Windows, there is no doubt about that. It's only for home computers that familiarity is a convenience, professionals can be readily trained to use a system that's intrinsically easier to use.
Wait, you're a professional system administrator? Maybe you should learn something about the systems you administer. As it is, I can't imagine you do a very good job.
According to the manufacturer, it's by customer demand that they use Windows for the workstations.
I'm sure you never stopped to consider that there might be a reason for that other than stupidity. Windows can be far, far more productive than Linux for anything other than running a server or using the command shell. Two strengths do not victory make.
I can feel your point, but Windows feels like that on the surface because of a very well engendered Microsoft principle--backward compatibility.
.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.
:P
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
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
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Plus you are limited to 26 different filesystems, one for each alphabet letter. And you cannot use a name for mount points, just one letter.
This hasn't been true since Windows 2000 (due to changes introduced in NTFS 5.0). You can mount a drive to a folder on an existing mounted file system through a process called Volume Mount Point.
Works just like Linux. Granted it's a little more buried to find out how to do it than in Linux, but not that much.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You keep using that word, "solved." I do not think it means what you think it means.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
And that, folks, is why so many open-source projects never get finished, or improved.
Indeed, but it is also why practically all successful open source projects are successful: because the core people are passionate about their pet project and care about it.
I mean, to take your rational thinking to the extreme, there should be just one open source OS, one open source office suite, one open source browser, one open source desktop... That would be sensible, everybody working toward common single goal!
Except that never got humanity far anywhere. Humans need competition, antagonism, personal passion, or they will only produce mediocre results at best.
Nevertheless, I think it's not unreasonable, conversationally, to call into question whether what he's doing is really sensible.
It's perfectly reasonable to have a conversation as to whether or not ReactOS is a sensible project, in the sense of whether or not you think it would be useful to anyone. What is not reasonable to do is claim that this developer in particular should go out and do something else in his free time because this something else would be more useful to the population at large.
I do plenty of things with me free time that is not useful to absolutely anyone. I watch movies, I play video games. What you're doing is akin to saying, "you shouldn't be watching movies, you should be reading up some technical manuals that would increase your skillset and make you more useful to your employer. Sure, we can both agree that would be a more productive use of my time, but that does not mean in any way that we agree that's what I *should* be doing with my time. My goal for my time does not match yours, and I'd rather just watch my damn movie.
To me, it's not. I can't think of something I'd personally be less interested in than running a clone of MS Windows.
Good for you. I even agree with that statement. It's just not relevant to the original statement which said this guy "*should* just start working on WINE." That's not how your free time projects work. You don't do the most productive thing, or the more efficient thing, or what helps the most people. None of that is relevant at all. You do what you want to do, because it's what you want to do. He sees some value in ReactOS we don't and that's what matters.
Seriously, if you want to ask the question, "why would anyone use ReactOS," which appears to be the question you're really interested in, go ahead. It's a good question, might get some interesting answers. Implying the developer should go do something else for free just because it'd be more useful to us is just selfish. Why should he care which project benefits us more?
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
So I see you've used Linux ...
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Last night I was browsing the web on my Windows XP partition, which I usually use solely for gaming. It's completely up to date, and I'm running the RC of Firefox 3.6. I was viewing a web page and the browser crashed, and things started popping up, and my desktop wallpaper changed. It seems that Internet Security 2010 was silently installed on my PC through a buffer overflow in some Firefox module (I suspect an adobe plugin, but that's neither here nor there).
You want to know why *nix operating systems have inherently better architecture? You don't have to be an admin to use your computer, and userspace programs don't have the power to do to my PC what IS2010 did to me last night. Windows was always designed to be a single user system, and although that's improving, it's still obviously just stapled on top of the OS, because they don't want to break backward compatibility.
Another pet peeve of mine is Windows' driver support. It's atrocious. Answer me why I can't install Windows and have all my hardware just work? Linux is capable of doing this. But with Windows, I can't even expect my networking to work out of the box. I have to hunt for a driver CD and install the drivers from there. Granted, I'm talking about Windows XP, which is presumably the decade old OS you are talking about. But I've heard plenty of horror stories about Vista/7 from coworkers. (Primarily that even once the drivers are installed, the network is unreliable at best).
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).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...