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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.
Soon it will catch up with GNU Hurd
Slashdot posted this on the main page and didn't want to post that ArcaOS was released ??? https://www.arcanoae.com/produ...
ReactOS may have started with mainly Russian developers, but is today an open-source project with collaborators from all over the world. The project has no allegiance to any country or political organisation.
ReactOS is a safe, secure, open-source and Windows binary compatible OS, that's all there is to it.
You could say the same about every emulator author, about every piece of FreeDOS, about every legacy piece of software that people still use.
Nobody is seriously suggesting running a multinational corporation on this.
But it's a great project for someone to hack on, make visible progress, and which others can utilise and check the success of without having to licence software.
P.S. What's a license cost to run Windows NT in a VM? Because for sure it's a use-case that won't be covered under any non-volume licences, and the volume ones don't stretch below XP do they?
And nobody in their right mind would run MS software contrary to licensing in a business when any employee could dob them in, no matter how old the software.
They'd probably need to licence it. Or, if it was some random piece of Windows-98 based expensive CAD software that's not made any more, drives a huge machine, there is no replacement that less than the cost of all the machinery too, they'd probably want a Windows-like emulation environment that doesn't cost them anything and which they don't need to buy licenses for, and which they could customise to their usage... gosh, wonder where they could find that...
Also, the ReactOS bits feed back into things like Wine, and there have been success companies who made money on the basis of charging people to let them run bespoke versions of Wine to run their legacy Windows software on other OS. Crossover comes to mind. Which I own licences for. Because at one point it was the only way to run certain things on OS that I needed them to run on.
Just because YOU would just pirate Windows NT in a VM, doesn't mean that you're at all a use-case for something like ReactOS and can speak for everyone.
P.S. No, I don't use ReactOS or develop it. But I can see why people would. Hell, DOS, AmigaOS, RiscOS, OS/2 etc. and/or their clones were all still alive and well.last I checked.
Holy cow, I am more than happy with Office 2007, for my scientific publishing! If Firefox (for Zotero) works, too, I would be 70% there to ditch Windows.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I thought this is supposed to be free. Built by the sweat and tears of volunteers. Why would they need funding if it's free? We're told software (and by extension, music) doesn't cost anything which is why "sharing" (with 100 million of your "friends") doesn't cost companies anything.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I don't use ReactOS or develop it. But I can see why people would.
IMNSHO what people are actually confused by is the ongoing apparent insistence that one ought to use ReactOS for real work, not that it exists at all. Obviously it has hack value.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Even Free stuff developed by volunteers need money for their basic operating fees (ie : do you think their website hosts itself out of thin air?)
0.4.5 Does this mean that it is half way to being half way to being released?
What the hell is "ReactOS"?
if its a "business decision" as to using GIMP or Photoshop, then you will use Photoshop. Stating it as a business decision means that your business relies upon functionality and efficiency in workflow, neother of which describe GIMP. GIMP can do wonderful things in the hands of people who know it well. Photoshop can do equally wonderful things in the hands of people who know IT well, and they can do it faster, and their work will better interface with the workflow for any pro shop that does photo manipulation.
I reject your reality
I mostly blame the media for this, even the some somewhat geeky sites. Every time a bit of ReactOS news comes out, the breathless articles about the amazing "Windows-Exact Replacement OS!!!" pop up that seem to misunderstand or misrepresent what state ReactOS is in. People try it, find out it's still very much an alpha, and you end up with the sort of reactions you see on /.
If you can play games in Wine then there is some real possibility they will work well in ReactOS.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I dunno, I wouldn't mind a Windows-compatible OS that is open source and doesn't include a bunch of weird Microsoft marketing telemetry.
I'm a professional Linux developer, and I think there is room in this world for more than one open source operating system. And I still run "legacy" software, why replace software it is working fine and serves my needs, or if it is irreplaceable like a favorite old game?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I've been donating to the project for a few years. I hope it is helping the developers focus more time on working on ReactOS and getting the resources they need.
I just want to say, good for you. Too often the only thing people contribute to a project are complaints that it's not going fast enough.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No, FreeDOS actually does DOS' job, which is a tiny little job which someone else can reasonably do. Even Microsoft doesn't know how they do what they do these days, which is why they do things like write specifications that say "do what the software does here". Anything more complex than DOS leaves them mystified by their own efforts.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's their time, they can spend it however. Personally, I've seen enough struggle with old software on Windows 10 that having drop-in user mode libraries to debug at source level might be useful. Just being able to see the arguments passed in might make the difference in creating a custom solution or just providing a shim to make it work.
Classic Shell is no longer open source, but ReactOS is devoting effort to make explorer work as a drop in replacement. Use it as the shell on vista or server 2003, fix what it doesn't do right, then fix reactos, or Wine, so it behaves. Just that component alone is worth it to me.
Not sure how it works with later versions, but the source is there and available. The recent theming work is almost certainly in Explorer and related components, and likely fixes issues not uniquely within the scope of themes.
ReactOS is an OS. And is free. And open-source. And works as a plug-in Win32 API compatible replacement, including drivers and low-level interactions.
Crossover is just a program that runs on Linux. And costs money. And is closed-source but based on WINE. And is basically a shim to convert certain Win32 API calls so can't work for low-level drivers, etc.
If you don't know the difference, you haven't done a single Google search.
I dunno, I wouldn't mind a Windows-compatible OS that is open source and doesn't include a bunch of weird Microsoft marketing telemetry.
I think this is largely the answer. Right now, there isn't quite an uproar over Windows 10 because the majority of the people who have an issue with it are camping out on Win7. If Microsoft keeps the trajectory of Win10 the way it's going (telemetry, forced updates with poor QA, 'features' that satisfy relatively few people, auto-installed apps, near-insistence on MS accounts for login, etc.), 2020 is going to be a year of reckoning for Microsoft.
Meanwhile, with Apple all but abandoning the pro market, and MS putting pressure on moving everything to the app store model, it's going to leave a whole lot of high-end software developers looking for a home for their software to run...and as much as I'd love to run proprietary software alongside FOSS in Linux, either a whole lot of expensive hardware is destined for a landfill or we'll find ourselves in a world where we'll be paying for driver development.
Enter ReactOS.
I wonder if it is fully compatible with the wide range of viruses, trojans, worms and other vulnerabilities that Windows NT supports?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Leave comments. I'd like to know. I've been struggling with trying to get Linux Mint working with WINE for the one or two pieces of software that there are no Linux equivalents of, and if this ReactOS is looking decent I'd try it. Please don't query me about 'what Windows software I can't do without' or similar, please stick with the question I'm asking, thanks. :-)
Trying to basically create a clone of an operating system that is past it's prime -- and by the time it is "fully functional" all the software that you wanted to keep running on a WinXP clone has long past it's prime....
Effort would be best spent trying to create a new OS or new UI for an existing open source OS but this just seems like taking a love of an old UI to an insane level. For gods sake, it started it's history almost 20 years ago....
General purpose operating system market is maturing to the point where in majority of cases value derived by improvements will never outweigh cost of change absorbed by end users.
I don't think Linux is POSIX compliant since systemd.
You cannot really be that stupid.
wine and react share libraries...
For the purposes of software preservation, this is plenty useful. If you want to run old software for any reason, this is far better than WINE (even with what they share) and more ethical and more secure than trying to track down a pirate copy of XP.
Improved graphics in ReactOS is like improving the quality of a jump off a cliff: the improvements may be nice for an observer, but as the person jumping, my patience for testing ReactOS is nearing an end. If you get it working and charge 10% of what Microsoft charges, you will retire early, and I'll ask you to STFU and take my money.
But so far I haven't found a version of ReactOS that gets past my first attempts at using the internet: something bizarre always goes wrong that I can't find documentation for, and I admit, I'm not going to try very hard when I'm a Linux user since 1992 where shit works.
But I must admit: get this working, and you are on to something really, hugely big. I offer to carry you through the ticker-tape parade that will thank you for eliminating Micro$oft.
It's not that there's no demand for it. It's that there's not enough demand to actually make it happen. It's a much harder job than making a Unixlike OS, which is actually excruciatingly well-documented and understood; Windows is just a collection of hacks at this point. Even Microsoft has little understanding of the way any of their complex software works. That's why they can do things like write a spec which says "do what Word does here".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"