Submitted by The ReactOS team is proud to announce the release of version 0.4.1 a mere three months after the release of 0.4.0. The team has long desired an increased release tempo and the hope is that this will be the first of many of faster iterations.
Due to the brief period of time between the two releases, 0.4.1 is ultimately a refinement of what was in 0.4.0.
I’m glad ReactOS has been picking up steam again. I still doubt it’ll ever serve a production purpose, but the effort is incredibly impressive nonetheless.
Alternative OSes are a good thing and more are needed.
charlieg,
I try react os every now and then, I’m definitely interested in it’s potential.
The GUI is reminiscent of windows 2K, which is fine by me because I don’t care about the eye candy that came with XP or any of the crap that came with windows 8. I’d be curious to try the windows 8 replacement shells in reactos…
I’d like for reactos to be technically good enough to replace windows for day to day use, but I’ve found it isn’t reliable enough to install & run applications consistently. Still, it keeps moving in the right direction and considering the project is in alpha state it’s pretty damn good, but it does keep it from being a viable replacement.
One thing I wonder is if it were a viable replacement, and people started to really use it, how well would it stand up legally? I mean, they don’t copy any code from windows and independently reimplementing software to be compatible with an API used to be entirely legal, but the oracle API case law could change all of that. If it really came down to a court case over fair use, I shutter to think that their right to work on reactos could come down to courtroom jurisdiction and who’s got the more expensive lawyers.
Would a company like MS ever (e.g. as you suggest “if” ReactOS ever actually took off a daily driver by windows-world-happy FOSS users) consider a sanctioned release source code of an older (but not totally ancient) OS of theirs into the wild.
e.g. the code for Win2000 in the year 2030 ??
I for one think they owe such a move to world for many rea$ons – altruism, and CS history just 2 of them.
Like this? http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-early-source-…
What’s the use apart from its oddity value? BTW, if they released the source, it would probably be under a non-free license
yes i was aware of that DOS release – thanks though.
w2k source code release (via the Computer History Museum or otherwise) even in 2030 or 2040 would probably be quite a bit more “useful” to projects as diverse as ReactOS and Wine amongst others
I’m not really sure of that. The few programs for Win2k and before that haven’t got modern equivalents are usually really well covered by current Wine, not sure about ReactOS’s coverage though. By the time 2030 comes around I don’t think that even any of those few will still be needed so I doubt Wine will need or benefit from the exact code that powered Win2k, or even XP
Don’t expect ReactOS to do anything as it is in Alpha. If it works for you be pleasantly surprised but keep your higher expectations publicly to yourself as it could show a misunderstanding of what alpha grade software is. Only test it in a virtual environment until compatibility is achieved and hardware support is provided, testing on real hardware is largely pointless.
All ReactOS coding is performed independently and re-engineers what Windows already does. The main issue is that a lot of what Windows does is simply undocumented. ReactOS coders are not allowed to refer to source code releases nor to Windows code stated in plain text in Windows manuals, it is expressly forbidden to prevent any accidental copying. It must be engineered from scratch. To investigate, determine, document and design as well as the actual coding are the limiting factors that make ReactOS progress slower than it would otherwise be.
A space analogy: Think about building an identical NASA spacecraft yourself by only watching movies of it take off, operate and land… No reference to NASA designs. It is a tough job.
Well, it has been there for quite a while. If you fire up ReactOS notepad and look at the “About” dialogue, you’ll find:
“ReactOS Notepad v1.0
Copyright 1997,98 Marcel Baur
Copyright 2000 Mike McCormack
Copyright 2002 Sylvain Petreolle
Copyright 2002 Andriy Palamarchuk”
Sorry, but we have 2016 now.
I doubt the source of MS’s implementation of Notepad has changed much since 2000 either
that’s not my point. My point is that they started code in 1996/97 and ReactOS is still considered alpha today.
Have you tried to code your own OS from scratch trying to be API/ABI compatible with a closed source operating system?
Consider also that ReactOS is developed by a bunch of developers working on it in their spare time and compare that with the army of coders working on Windows every single day, all day long, getting paid for do it.
Given those constraints, I find ReactOS a very respectable work done by amazing coders.
Edited 2016-05-17 19:02 UTC
No, I haven’t. But the Haiku crowd has, and even though Haiku is officially still at alpha stage, you can download and install a nightly build and it will actually run on real hardware. Last I tried (which is a few weeks back), it worked like a charm, including the Wifi. I wish I could say the same of ReactOS.
Though I do not know the source code of Haiku vs. the Windows one; I could speculate that Windows is several grades of magnitude more complex than Haiku; so, duplicating it should be a harder work. Again, just speculating here.
The Reactos team aren’t just creating any o/s from scratch – they are creating Windows from scratch, probably the most complex and advanced o/s in history.
To be fair, Haiku is chasing an OS (BeOS) that hasn’t been actively developed in 15 years, and wasn’t anywhere near as complex and mature as the Windows NT family is even back then.
Haiku also gets to extend beyond BeOS in areas where BeOS had no or only skeletal features.
ReactOS is chasing a moving target, a much more mature OS with much more stringent compatibility requirements than BeOS, and which is an order or two of magnitude bigger and more complex than BeOS.
ReactOS also doesn’t benefit from the publicity and passionate fanbase that the Haiku project benefits from. Most developers capable of and interested in working on ReactOS would rather be working on real Windows code or products for Windows.
But yeah they could be going faster I suppose
Yes. You see, that will happen when you’re doing something really really complicated in your spare time.
You should be completely amazed that it does anything at all, not be complaining that it isn’t perfect.
The problem I am having is that the impression the fundraising campaigns have been invoking is totally different. Not about the OS doing “anything at all” but about is becoming able to actually run applications and do stuff. I donated to the “ReactOS community edition, which was already the second crowdfunding campaign and promised a lot which the project since hasn’t delivered. So, yes, the devs are free to spend their time as they wish but they really should be more cautious with their promises.
I should also add that with a project which has over a decade, and counting in its predecessor, has had 20 years of development and has all the code from the WINE project to use, amazement at the code doing “anything at all” is not really warranted. It was ten years ago when I booted ReactOS 0.0.1, which essentially was a command line OS, which had some DOS command, but it booted and it ran on actual hardware. Today’s ReactOS is certainly flashier than that of ten years ago, but I haven’t been able to use it on real hardware, which defeats its one point of sale which is that it can use Windows drivers, which Linux can’t. If I can only use it in a virtual machine, I prefer to use WINE instead, which is so much more reliable and mature.
Edited 2016-05-17 20:39 UTC
They didn’t misrepresent anything. They just haven’t released the CE yet. The way things are being done, some 0.4x releases will have to come out first.
Notepad is from Wine, there is no need for ReactOS to write a newer version, it would be a waste of resources, like focusing on buying an expensive steering wheel while overhauling an engine.
Again, that’s not my point. Why I keep bringing up the enormous age of this project (with Freewin95 starting development in 96) is because the mantra which I keep hearing is that “ReactOS is still an early alpha”. Sorry, but if after 20 years and two crowdfunding campaigns (Thorium core and ReactOS community edition), which aimed at a soon-to-ship stable product, all you have is an early alpha, chances are very slim that you will release before HURD…
Notepad is a pretty simple application. So simple that, once it’s done, it’s done. So for something like Notepad, I can quite understand an old copyright.
But ROS is not exactly an “alternative” per se in that it isn’t it’s own, separate OS. No, it is supposed to be like Windows 2003.
Even if it never does replace Windows, it’ll be nice to have a legal, non-eBay option for sourcing OSes for building retro-gaming machines.
After all, ReactOS relies on Wine code for much of its userland and, with the dropping of 16-bit support in 64-bit Windows, Wine on Linux supports an entire era of Windows games better than a real Windows PC does… but ReactOS would look a lot more authentic than Linux+Wine.
Edited 2016-05-17 12:36 UTC
It already works for this.
Obviously, it is the decision of the ReactOS devs how they spend their time. But the recent “ReactOS community edition” campaign on indiegogo made the impression that they might have a usable product soon, which apparently is totally unrealistic. ReactOS versions of ten years ago worked better for me on real hardware than recent releases, which bluescreen immediately.
What’s the point of trying (and failing at) re-creating Windows NT? It is increasingly unsupported driver wise, and when you still have pre-alpha stability twenty years after development started (of its precessor, FreeWin95), it is increasingly unrealistic you’ll ever come up with something useful before the end of the century.
Of course, as a hacker project, it needs no justification for existing, it is entirely the choice of those folks who devote their skills and time to it, but for us users, Wine on top of Linux is presently a thousand times more reliable and will likely remain to be so in the years to come.
It is not recreating the version called NT, but Windows 2003 Server. Even Windows 10 has the “NT” kernel.
Edited 2016-05-18 21:51 UTC
You lot need to reconsider if you can’t find a use for ReactOS now and in the future.
Personally I will use it for the following:
1. safe browsing in a ReactOS sandbox virtual env.
2. a platform for VB6 development
3. a platform for Yahoo widget development
4. a windows platform not in the hands of Microsoft
5. NTVDM – a fully usable DOS environment for running all your DOS apps
6. you can install it multiple times without licence restriction, multiple virtual machines, multiple real machines.
-o0o-
1. is possible now to a limited extent dependant on the browser.
2. is required in case MS makes their own platform incompatible and redundant, VB6 has a future even if MS does not.
3. a platform for all legacy apps to ensure they do not become legacy apps. It will also be a platform for those apps that used to run on XP but no longer run properly on NT6. If you don’t have one then think yourself lucky.
4. this one justifies ReactOS in one line.
5. NTVDM is usable now for loads of DOS games that just run! ReactOS has a function now! despite only being Alpha.
In the forums you can already find examples of real-life usage of ReactOS where a simple Windows environment was required to test something. People are learning how Windows actually operates by investigating through ReactOS.
Edited 2016-05-17 15:29 UTC
Really? Have a link?
We’ve got 2 ReactOS machines running a data acquisition system with a PCI card for which only Windows NT5.x drivers exist. Manufacturer went bust years ago.
There is a similar system of another manufacturer but that one costs ^a`not100.000,- (measurement card + software), and doesn’t exactly have the same range of measurement as our current gear. If we would be switching to said new system we’ve got to put adjustment filters between the probes and the measurement card (which needs to be custom made). We also have to redo all our reference measurements to calibrate the new equipment in order to align the measurements with those gathered from the old gear (several hundreds, 2-3 hours per measurement)
We’ve calculated what it would cost us to switch to the new equipment begin 2015, and estimated an amount of over ^a`not 3.000.000 ,- including hardware, software and man-hours. For something that’s going to net us only an estimated 2,5 millions and goes end-of-life by the end 2017 the choice for going with ReactOS until 2017 4Q was easily made.
If your company would like to extend support beyond that with ReactOS reach out to me.
[email protected]
I believe we could work out some sort of arrangement with some of the development team.
1. is possible now to a limited extent dependant on the browser. Please read.
I have to say, as an online comment aficionado, I love your post. Especially #4.
Your fourth point is that your third point was really good.
Bravo. Have you considered writing for clickhole?
Glad you liked it. This is my blog, you may find some similar interesting stuff there:http://lightquick.co.uk/blog.html?Itemid=252
I must do a write up of ReactOS.
Back to the thread.
ReactOS WILL be usable in production. ReactOS may have a difficult time ever leaving beta as Windows is so massive it may well be that it always being developed to incorporate more functionality. However it is most likely that ReactOS will become usable way before it achieves 1.0 stable.
For me, as soon as ReactOS reaches a state where it runs the core applications I need in a stable fashion then I will consider it usable.
I have four or five core apps that a ReactOS virtual environment could take over. These would suit running in a virtual environment within real Windows. Think of ReactOS in this case as bundling an o/s with your app.
If you want to demo. an app then you can do so within a completely tailored ReactOS o/s. Legacy apps could be distributed in this way bundling ReactOS in the delivery.
For those who cannot think of uses for ReactOS I say this – take your head from the dark place between your legs and give those brain cells an airing, they need it.
Edited 2016-05-18 15:02 UTC
I am not questioning purpose of ReactOS at the moment. Just asking is there anything that ReactOS can run and Wine can’t ?
ReactOS IS Wine at its core. They share the same code a level below the Unix abstractions.
Edited 2016-05-17 16:38 UTC
Wine provides the majority of the ReactOS Win32 API. The only difference is that ReactOS provides a Windows-esque kernel and driver API. This makes ReactOS, in theory, more compatible than WINE for running Windows programs, as it’s designed to be compatible in every aspect.
Thanks both of you, but it doesn’t answer my question. Is there ay game or app which runs on ReactOS and does not run on Wine ?
I know that ReactOS is using code from Wine, it is not a news to me.
to my knowledge, there is not. The only thing that reactos could do which wine cannot is support certain USB/pci/pcie peripheral devices where there is no linux driver support. One possible candidate would be the 3DO Blaster, but I don’t think Reactos is adding support for win3.11 drivers…
Darkmage,
Interesting. I have hardware that never got the linux treatment, so there’s a chance that some of these drivers would actually work under reactos even though they don’t work under linux.
I bought a multidisk ESATA enclosure, hoping to use it on a linux box, but it turned out to be useless because the linux drivers are incompatible with my esata port multiplier. Linux sees all the disks, but they’re corrupt. I thought I had a hardware problem, but it works perfectly in windows.
I have a pinnacle video capture card that never worked in linux, although I have my doubts that reactos would support the video editing software anyways.
A got a scanner as a present, unfortunately it doesn’t work in linux. Maybe it would work in reactos.
The main thing I’d want reactos for is windows development, and proprietary windows software that I need for work, but it’s not ready for those things.
I want ReactOS for windows development too but it isn’t ready for that yet.
Your scanner/printer device will work on ReactOS as it reactOS will/aims to be driver compatible.
I love the concept of ReactOS and I really wish the best for their project.
But every single time I tried it, I was disappointed.
It’s not that I have a complaint about any particular aspect of the thing, it’s simply that it does not boot at all on real hardware.
I would be satisfied with the very minimum computing capabilities, like running the simplest programs (Notepad, an email client, etc). But I don’t get to use even those. Nothing.
So, I really do not understand all the hype. Are people getting excited because they can use ReactOS in a VM?!?
Seriously, I don’t get it.
Has anyone actually managed to boot and run ReactOS on real hardware?
How long will we have to wait for that?
Please, someone, give me some hope, because I honestly love the project.
Edited 2016-05-17 16:54 UTC
I think the devs care too little about real hardware and take to much pride in ROS’ ability to run in a VM. A VM is pretty standardized, while real hardware is much more unpredictable. They are too focused on supporting particular applications (which is taken care of by the WINE code they use anyway) and they probably lack the capacity to delve into the chaotic world of real hardware with all the work it takes.
I get that it’s frustrating if it doesn’t work on your hardware but that’s not the same as not working on real hardware at all. I’m sure you’re aware there are thousands of PC models out there in the world and nothing is going to work on 100% of them out of the box. The fact is ReactOS does work on a variety of machines and the devs do pay attention to real hardware support, for example this recent thread: https://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=14727 where a user reported an issue running the NVidia GeForce drivers and the team were able to troubleshoot back and forth and quickly fix the issue.
I have tried it on various machines, including a dated desktop PC, a Thinkpad T420, a Thinkpad SL510 and a Dell Latitude E6420. On all but one of them, I got a BSOD during first boot. Only on the T420 I was able to boot the OS without immediate bluescreen. I would have more comprehension if the OS would boot but ignored all the hardware for which it lacks drivers, but my experience was that it even wouldn’t boot and that it nuked the partition table of one of my hard disks.
I have tried a lot of alternative OSs (just for fun), but I never saw such a disaster. Even AtheOS and VSTa would at least boot and not destroy other partitions. Debian GNU/Hurd, Syllable, MenuetOS – all of them gave me a less frustrating experience on real hardware than current ReactOS.
yahya,
You know I’d be willing to bet that the reason for this is that most alternative operating systems are accessing hardware generically through the BIOS. Although it might be lacking features, it will work on most hardware. This is why DOS can continue to work on modern hardware after all these years.
As soon as an operating system becomes more sophisticated and implements native OS drivers, that’s when things can really go amuck. Each and every unique piece of hardware needs a driver and those drivers need to be tested and debugged on real hardware, which the developers may not even have access to. It takes a tremendous amount of manpower to tackle these problems.
Perhaps you need to read the instructions first. That would have told you to not install it on any drive with another partition. It is written plain but you chose to ignore that. How can you say that ReactOS is a disaster on your hardware. You are told that it will only run on certain types of hardware and is best suited for virtual machines and you still go ahead and blast your PC? The only thing that is a disaster is … you.
Actually, there is no such instruction in the installer. It happily lets you choose a partition, and, well, hard disks having more than one partition is the usual case. If an OS can’t handle this safely after many years of development, something is wrong! Of course, I didn’t try that with a hard disk that I needed for production purposes and by restoring a backup copy of the partition table, I was able to fix is.
However, if the installer modifies or overwrites the partition table without being told to do so, something is profoundly buggy. And yes, this is a bug, I have submitted it to Jira. I have never seen similar behaviour in any of the OSs I’ve tried, not even in Windows.
Edited 2016-05-20 10:06 UTC
Without even digging I found this on the installation instructions: ” The use of an emulator is preferable if the machine on which you will run ReactOS is your primary computer or if you have important data on the computer which you cannot afford to lose. ”
&
“Warning: Please bear in mind that ReactOS is still in alpha stage, meaning it is not stable or feature-complete and is not recommended for everyday use. Operating system bugs can and do result in corrupted file systems, overwritten partitions, and more. Do not install ReactOS on any computer containing important data without using a virtual machine or making full backups first.”
Some stuff is easy to find and some is deeply obvious.
https://reactos.org/wiki/Installing_ReactOS
…and the information wasn’t left in a locked filing cabinet behind a locked door in a room on a floor without any stairs behind another locked door with “beware of the tiger” on it, ie. it was very easy to find.
Edited 2016-05-21 17:41 UTC
I’ve had ReactOS 0.3.8 running on old (Pentium II) HW…
I had ReactOS 0.0.1 running on a desktop PC. Must have been around 2004 or so. I can’t run ReactOS 0.4.0 on the same PC today, it immediately shows me the BSOD.
You don’t need hope, you need guidance. Read what ReactOS is about and the current state and stop expecting it to run on your hardware. It will do so when it is ready and not until. ReactOS aims to be driver compatible and when it is the hardware will work.
It does run on real hardware but it depends on the machine, you may just be unlucky. I have two spare laptops and 0.4.0 installs and runs fine on both, and there are plenty of people on the forums and IRC who have had success as well. One common issue is that there is currently a bug preventing USB install from working and so you have to burn a CD. USB does work fine once the OS is running though so I’m sure this will be fixed at some point.
It wasn’t that long ago Linux had the same problem on arbitrary consumer hardware – in that case because there were a lot of just missing drivers
ReactOS has to reimplement the NT kernel driver ABI *exactly* to gain access to the vast library of existing Windows drivers. Since that’s the goal it’s not worth reimplementing many random drivers since they already exist in the form they’ll need to be in, but as the kernel compatibility isn’t 100% there yet they can’t necessarily be relied upon to actually work yet – assuming the windows-compatible ABI is actually stable enough yet to be exposed for a given driver type.
Interestingly this could start to cramp MicroSoft’s ability to force the upgrade cycle by doing an “End of Life” on a much loved operating system.
We aren’t there yet but … give it time.
There has been much talk about this, when Microsoft ended support for XP, that instead of moving on to Windows 7/8/10 they might move to ReactOS instead, yet it wasn’t ready back then. Should it become stable in, say, five years, it will essentially be obsolete by then. The perspective of moving to ReactOS instead of to the next version of Windows won’t be there anymore, as ReactOS is essentially a recreation of a Windows which is ten years out of date by now already.
I guess the more realistic possibility is that Windows itself will be eventually marginalized by mobile platforms such as Android. I think this is much more probable at this stage than ReactOS ever becoming a viable alternative.
It’s more that ReactOS only needs to get win32 compatibility implemented. As that’s what people are running windows for. .NET is already cross platform and becoming more so by the day. As long as ReactOS complete their implementation of Win32 eventually they can run .NET through other project efforts.
.. they focus on being compatible with 2000/XP/2003 –
while implementing some nice GNU/FOSS touches that MS never would put in Windows.
Somewhat like AROS does in regards to AmigaOS.
(Basically targeting 3.1 Classic with improvements from current times.)
Afaik AROS aims to be API compatible, while ROS also aims to be ABI compatible.
True !
This is not completely on topic, but I’d be interested to hear some opinions. Microsoft promised .NET implementation for Linux. I am not very familiar with Windows world and affairs, but it seems to me that majority of Windows apps are now being written with .NET. In theory, it means that Linux users should be able to run apps up to 10-15 years old on Linux without any compatibility layer. Is that correct ?
I can’t ignore the fact Microsoft Office XML is declared as open, but still only Microsoft Office creates documents which do open in Microsoft Office with 100% certainty.
For those of you who think ReactOs does not function or operate, have gander at the “Epic Win” thread on the reactOs forum, this shows hundreds of titles running and operating under ReactOs.
https://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10972&p=121708#p12…