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ReactOS 0.4.5 Released (reactos.org)
An anonymous reader shares Colin Finck's forum post announcing ReactOS version 0.4.5: The ReactOS Project is pleased to release version 0.4.5 as a continuation of its three month cadence. Beyond the usual range of bug fixes and syncs with external dependencies, a fair amount of effort has gone into the graphical subsystem. Thanks to the work of Katayama Hirofumi and Mark Jansen, ReactOS now better serves requests for fonts and font metrics, leading to an improved rendering of applications and a more pleasant user experience. Your continued donations have also funded a contract for Giannis Adamopoulos to fix every last quirk in our theming components. The merits of this work can be seen in ReactOS 0.4.5, which comes with a smoother themed user interface and the future promises to bring even more improvements. In another funded effort, Hermes Belusca-Maito has got MS Office 2010 to run under ReactOS, another application from the list of most voted apps. On top of this, there have been several major fixes in the kernel and drivers that should lead to stability improvements on real hardware and on long-running machines. The general notes, tests, and changelog for the release can be found at their respective links. ISO images and prepared VMs for testing can be downloaded here.
Slashdot posted this on the main page and didn't want to post that ArcaOS was released ??? https://www.arcanoae.com/produ...
ReactOS is an interesting project and that's about it so far. It has a lot of unimplemented APIs, or "just enough" APIs. This doesn't sound too bad when you realize it can run low level drivers for networking, basic video and Firefox, but it becomes much more apparent how incomplete, and unfortunately unstable, this OS really is:
- The UI can hard lock randomly
- A lot of the Win32 layer is based on Wine, which means it's a port, and has a lot of issues running programs, even Firefox
- Video acceleration is completely absent, let alone 3d, 2d acceleration isn't there
- Due to no acceleration, scrolling in Firefox brings back the days of slow modems as you watch chunks of the screen fill in, even after the page has loaded
- VERY RUDIMENTARY NT kernel APIs... IE you need an external wireless manager to use WiFi, if you can get a WiFi driver running at all
- Most drivers won't work, even if you force them in... only basic ones, like some of the virtio ones, even work
- The networking is very basic and lacks any advanced functionality, firewall included
- No IPv6 support... you don't care until you do
- Bare bones NTFS support (readonly) and FAT support is really just "read and write files"
- File explorer is very buggy and simple, crashing with even the most basic of operations, ie moving files
- No UNC paths and poor integration of Samba means no file sharing or a long road to maybe getting smbclient to work
Aside from all those issues, really it's the random hanging of software, the UI, lack of acceleration and minimal implementation of APIs that makes this not really usable beyond curiosity. It'd be REALLY hard to use this in any daily situation without A LOT of frustration. Running it in a VM means it boots quick, but after the 30th reboot "just playing around," it's a no go for me.