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Ask Slashdot: Is ReactOS A Serious Alternative To Windows? (reactos.org)
dryriver writes: So I just discovered the ReactOS 0.4.4 Alpha... It seems like this is basically a free, open source Windows replacement in the making. Does anyone have serious experience with ReactOS?
Do you think that ReactOS will ever reach the point where you can basically say "bye bye" to Microsoft Windows, but keep using all your favorite Windows software under ReactOS? Will this be able to run Windows Games and DCC software that taps into the processing power of the GPU? Or will ReactOS wind up being "mildly compatible" with Windows software -- e.g. basic Office productivity type software works, but professional-grade 3D software like Maya/CATIA does not?
Do you think that ReactOS will ever reach the point where you can basically say "bye bye" to Microsoft Windows, but keep using all your favorite Windows software under ReactOS? Will this be able to run Windows Games and DCC software that taps into the processing power of the GPU? Or will ReactOS wind up being "mildly compatible" with Windows software -- e.g. basic Office productivity type software works, but professional-grade 3D software like Maya/CATIA does not?
In ten years, maybe, if your favourite software is at least 5 years old.
Not likely, because in 10 years ReactOS will only properly support Windows XP, while Windows will move on so much, there will be no modern GPUs to support Windows XP. Even right now, the absolute minimum requirement for modern GPUs is Windows 7 and ReactOS doesn't support it at all.
It already is.
ReactOS was a promising tech demo... like 10 years ago. Considering where it has gone from then till now? It seems to be moving along quite slowly, and has an interface that isn't even comparable to Windows 98 yet in terms of usability.
Need to keep legacy applications alive? Best bet is still VMWare with PCI Passthrough for any legacy hardware you need.
ReactOS is a project I've followed for a long time, and this alpha is not perfect, but it's brilliant, in the sense that a viable alternative to M$ Windows is under active development and maturing at a reasonable speed.
I've been following it, and have played with it, since it's inception. It is NOT ever going to be a viable Wiindows alternative. While I applaud the effort from a geek/hobbyist standpoint, thinking it will ever be a viable option is delusional.
Not true. Here's a distro list: https://without-systemd.org/wi...
GNU first got big because it had tools. It said it wanted an OS but it had tools first. And those tools were better in many ways and with very quick improvements compared to the competition.
People do tend to forget that there were basically no free compilers before gcc. Getting an assembler was easy enough, you might find a pascal compiler (why?) but finding a free C compiler? Nope. Then came gcc. If you weren't running BSD (as in, the BSD, not "*BSD" which didn't exist yet) you had to pay for a compiler.
Unix systems at the time were already very much open source oriented in a lot of ways,
They weren't Open Source, except BSD. What they were was Open Standard. They used documented interfaces, so anyone was free to develop a workalike. That's what made Linux possible.
It was mostly marketing I think, free versions of BSD were appearing at the same time but didn't generate excitement for a variety of reasons. The big deal about Linux was
The big deal about Linux as compared to the BSDs was the license, which attracted a community of people who were about sharing. The BSDs attracted people who were more like medieval monks. They were cloistered away in little clusters and hoarded their knowledge jealously, snickering snarkily at anyone who had less. Just getting BSD installed was a challenge. I had worked on real Unixes at the time I first tried to install BSD and the difference was absolutely night and day. But Slackware was even easier to install than SunOS4, SunOS5, or anything from SCO. (The SCO stuff was perfectly easy to install. Yes, this was before the big SCO v. Linux badness.)
Major contributors to Linux have stated outright that they contributed to Linux specifically because it used the GPL.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"