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ReactOS 0.4.7 Released (reactos.org)
jeditobe writes: OSNews reports that the latest version of ReactOS has been released:
"ReactOS 0.4.7 has been released, and it contains a ton of fixes, improvements, and new features. Judging by the screenshots, ReactOS 0.4.7 can run Opera, Firefox, and Mozilla all at once, which is good news for those among us who want to use ReactOS on a more daily basis. There's also a new application manager which, as the name implies, makes it easier to install and uninstall applications, similar to how package managers on Linux work. On a lower level, ReactOS can now deal with Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, BtrFS, ReiserFS, FFS, and NFS partitions." General notes, tests, and changelog for the release can be found at their respective links. A less technical community changelog for ReactOS 0.4.7 is also available. ISO images are ready at the ReactOS Download page.
I've been following the ReactOS project for a while, and I find it really amazing the amount of progress they've made. Whenever they release a new version, I burn a CD and try it out on a number of old machines I have lying around, and it's improved a lot in the past couple of years. It used to not boot on a number of my machines, and it's gotten better or more stable with each release.
Not a chance.
It's 20+ years behind in some areas and nowhere near being any kind of replacement for anything.
The domain stuff... literally years away for any level of completeness or reliability despite being "worked on" since 2009 and before then. Hell, you can only just about trust Samba to run as a secondary. I wouldn't want to be in charge of a Samba-only AD tree (which still needs Windows tools to manage it!). And then you may as well just use Samba and the various OS clients that let you integrate to the AD tree for authentication anyway, and who cares what OS it's on?
ReactOS is nothing more than a toy, you couldn't do anything serious with it, and you couldn't even use it as a desktop replacement even if you were willing to make all kinds of compromises.
There's no way that people are going to look at Windows 10 and ReactOS and decide to run ReactOS instead. It would be less hassle just to move everything to Raspberry Pi, that's how incomplete things are.
ReactOS needed huge amounts of development over 10 years ago, it's not received it in the meantime. Even Wine is pretty much dead in practical terms, and yet that's had tons more developer time spent on it, and nobody would use either in earnest or in preference to just running a different OS entirely.
FreeDOS was a success, but it took 25 years to get the equivalent of DOS up and running and it's still an incredibly niche product - nobody is going to be running DOS as an OS like they used to, not in this day and age. BIOS-reset disks to make closed-source firmware update tools not require an MS-DOS licence? Sure. Desktop OS again? Never.
ReactOS is a much more complex task and hasn't come anywhere near close, and is suffering an even worse fate because of that.
If you could have had the current state of ReactOS, back when Windows 2000 was appearing, then you might have had the impetus to compete and make it viable. Coming to this point 20 years too late means that they can never do anything but play catch-up. It's a toy, an "emulation" almost, a niche OS. It's never going to be able to do anything useful, certainly not to mainstream computer users.
Hell, it doesn't even have full Win16/Win32 compatibility yet, and they are already dead and buried for the most part.
People's time would be better spent either running "real" Windows in a VM (and hence development effort into QEmu, Xen, etc.) or moving whatever ancient-Windows-thing they want to use to something else entirely.
As far as I see, ReactOS is like making a Win3.1/WinNT emulator, even if that's not technically accurate. And Wine does a much better job of that (and that's even less technically accurate). And the uses of such are vanishingly small anyway.
If you want a non-Windows desktop replacement, I would suggest investing into the Linux DE's and distros. Nowadays there's no reason to be running Windows.
I speak as someone who used a Linux desktop exclusively for 10 years (while managing Windows networks with thousands of clients for a living), who licensed Crossover Office for many of those years, who still uses only LibreOffice for every document, and who has 50:50 split of Linux:Windows VM's even in my workplace (where I manage all the IT). I quite get wanting independence of Windows, but ReactOS isn't it.
Currently I'm on Windows 7 (because it came with the machine) with VMWare and dozens of VMs to allow me to do "real work" on the same machine without having to faff about. I deploy 8.1 in work (made to look identical to 7, have no problems with it at all). I trialled 10 and decided against it for now, but there's no reason I couldn't put the same changes into 10 and make it look like 7 against and carry on regardless. I write cross-platform software in C that works on all the major OS.
But with that kind of competition, ReactOS has no place at all and won't without literal decades more of developer investment.
Congratulations ReactOS Team!
Twinstiq, game news
The domain stuff...
End users don't need or care about that. Most Windows users aren't joined to a domain.
Even Wine is pretty much dead in practical terms
It is? Funny, because the Wine that I use gets updated often and is so good that I have a hard time finding stuff that won't work on it. Hell, in many instances Wine is MORE compatible with more Windows software than Windows itself.
FreeDOS was a success, but it took 25 years to get the equivalent of DOS up and running
No it didn't. FreeDOS was at parity with MS-DOS ages ago and has long since surpassed it.
they can never do anything but play catch-up
ReactOS doesn't need to play catch up. It just has to be good enough. For most people, that's Windows XP compatibility.
I think perhaps you should stop worrying about what other people are doing. You seem awfully controlling and insecure. Maybe you should try doing something productive instead of sitting around whining like a petulant child.