# Open Source Windows-Compatible OS - This is awesome to see =]



## EGS (May 5, 2010)

Hi everyone.

Sorry this is my post here. I always thought I was a member but I guess I was always a member at PC-BSD and got confused by the two. >.< Anyway this wasn't supposed to be my first post but I guess it's going to be because I can't keep this to myself.

I found this really awesome-looking open source operating system that is claiming to be a Windows-replacement operating system. I found it on Wikipedia and I never heard of it but it's been in development since the 1990's.

Wikipedia labels it as a "hobby software" and explains why: because it doesn't have enough developers, isn't funded, and isn't very much known. After reading about it, learning about it, and seeing it through screenshots...I want to help this software lift off. It's open source just like FreeBSD so I figure you guys could appreciate this very much.

This OS is written in C & C++ exclusively and is compatible with most Windows software & hardware; it even also uses WINE to help further as well as its own unique coding for compatibility. I think it's interesting because it's said to be faster and more secure, and a Windows-replacement. It makes sense since Linux would take a while when this is like completely already built for what everyone wants including its interface being very similar. I even saw games played on it and wow.

Anyway, I hope I can show this to you guys and you guys will be interested and spread the word about it at least to others. I am also hoping somewhere along the lines more developers would help with this project as it's only C & C++ and most people know that stuff.

When I get the money I'm going to sponsor it with what I can little-by-little. It's a start. Like FreeBSD, I support open source fully.

Anyway, the operating system is called *ReactOS*. You can search for it on Wikipedia.

Before linking you to more info I just wanted to show you some screenshots because it's really impressive, at least to me.

Desktop-






Unreal Tournament (graphics don't worsten which is great)-





More screenshots:
http://www.reactos.org/en/screenshots.html

About ReactOS and it's official site:
http://www.reactos.org/en/about.html

What do you guys think about it? For only a few developers I'm really impressed.
As stated I'm planning to donate soon. I also want to try it out on a spare PC as it's in alpha.

I really hope this takes off. It's already where what everyone wants in an alternative OS when migrating from Windows. =]


----------



## graudeejs (May 5, 2010)

I now about if for at least a year.... 
Last I tried it in emulator it sucked....
Personally I don't need Windows, so this system to me means as much as OpenDOS,
But if one day it will become enough good so you can run Fully featured professional CAD/CAM software on it, then I'll be dam, it will be very useful stuff


----------



## henker (May 5, 2010)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

> But if one day it will become enough good so you can run Fully featured professional CAD/CAM software on it, then I'll be dam, it will be very useful stuff



My exact thoughts


----------



## saxon3049 (May 5, 2010)

I have know about react for a while now, and it is far from ready one of the issues he has is the lack of contributors and with a lack of functionality people wont go near it and another possibly bigger issue when it comes to sponsorship from a company is the possibillity of being sued by MS when he breaches copywrite.


----------



## expl (May 5, 2010)

There are quite a few OSes out there that very few people know about and that are kept alive only by hobbyists. Typical examples are Haiku and Inferno operating systems.


----------



## EGS (May 5, 2010)

saxon3049 said:
			
		

> I have know about react for a while now, and it is far from ready one of the issues he has is the lack of contributors and with a lack of functionality people wont go near it and another possibly bigger issue when it comes to sponsorship from a company is the possibillity of being sued by MS when he breaches copywrite.



It's open source and Microsoft already looked at it to make sure it's not using any proprietary coding etc and it isn't. It was completely created, coded, and developed from scratch, thus Microsoft couldn't build a case against it and [hopefully] will never be able to. =]

Help spread the world. This could be a great foundation for even *nix operating systems, including BSD, to make migrating from Windows much easier and hassle-free, while even featuring backwards-compatibility, making a "why not move away from Windows to open source" solution. :stud


----------



## Ruler2112 (May 5, 2010)

I for one had never heard of this.  It'd be interesting to see how it fares, especially if more coders were to get on board.  I only use windoze to run apps for which there is no *nix equivalent; this would allow me to do so under an open source solution.


----------



## oliverh (May 6, 2010)

It's a nice study, but it's in my opinion a lost cause. It's a pity to see some good coders spending wasting their time.


----------



## respite (May 6, 2010)

oliverh said:
			
		

> It's a nice study, but it's in my opinion a lost cause. It's a pity to see some good coders spending wasting their time.



A lost cause? I think the availability of a binary compatible system of the most widely used operating system in the world could drastically change the landscape.  

Several linux distributions made it pretty far by selling support. Id assume a stable and robust open source operating system that could run windows programs natively would make a killing doing the same.


----------



## graudeejs (May 6, 2010)

Well, at least it has 1 feature, that *WinDO*[red]w[/red]*S* lacks - Virtual desks


----------



## oliverh (May 6, 2010)

respite said:
			
		

> A lost cause? I think the availability of a binary compatible system of the most widely used operating system in the world could drastically change the landscape.
> 
> Several linux distributions made it pretty far by selling support. Id assume a stable and robust open source operating system that could run windows programs natively would make a killing doing the same.



As I said: a lost cause. Trying to get some clues about Windows via reverse engineering is prone to fail. Remember? It's closed source. Microsoft will be always light-years ahead and such a clone vice versa light-years behind. Apart from that, Microsoft wouldn't tolerate any _successful_ clone. Building homes on Mars in the next 50 years is more realistic ...


----------



## fronclynne (May 11, 2010)

I agree with Oliver H here: if it actually become the least bit successful, MS would go full-bore patent troll and keep them tied up in court for the next 15 centuries.


----------



## expl (May 11, 2010)

fronclynne said:
			
		

> I agree with Oliver H here: if it actually become the least bit successful, MS would go full-bore patent troll and keep them tied up in court for the next 15 centuries.



Microsoft sees Ubundu as a big thread with its combination of user friendly administrating tools and wine, but they cant do a thing about it law wise. People overrate Microsoft and its greed. MS golden age has passed specially after governments who used MS products for years happily, started to publicly complain about the quality and security.


----------



## fronclynne (May 12, 2010)

expl said:
			
		

> Microsoft sees Ubundu as a big thread with its combination of user friendly administrating tools and wine, but they cant do a thing about it law wise. People overrate Microsoft and its greed.



For the first, I strongly doubt that.  MS went from <5% of the netbook market to >90% within a year with fairly minimal marketing effort & while Vista was a good gainer for the free software world, windows 7 got the ever living hell marketted out of its little ol' self and was exactly the sort of sales boon that MS needed.  They're not the least bit scared.  They'd need at least two, if not three, major roll-outs to completely bomb before they even started sweating.

As for the second, I can't speak for _People_, but I'm pretty sure if MS actually felt threatened that you'd see hundreds of stupid patent suits like this*, 99.44% of which would be just as invalid, every last one of which would be taken to court, wasting time & money that linux specifically & the free software world in general simply does not have.

& more power to the ReactOS bunch if they can keep their noses sufficiently clean and their lawyers happy, but it does seem like a bit of a useless exercise to me.


*not implying that MS had anything to do with said suit, merely that it was and is an excellent method of stifling and squashing free enterprise (and many other concepts which were once free) under the colour of legal authority.


----------



## Beastie (May 12, 2010)

I totally agree.

Plus, I'm not sure if it's true but Microsoft supposedly have already started fighting WINE by adding checks to some/all its software to make sure they're running under Windows proper not WINE. What would happen to ReactOS if Microsoft asked its device/chip manufacturing friends to add similar checks to all their drivers?

Anyway, to the OP: I've known about ReactOS for many years, I've tried it more than once and I must say they have done quite a good job so far. But IMHO, there's no point in recreating a system with a design such as Windows'. I think they should both focus their efforts on the bare minimum for running Windows applications: WINE.


----------



## expl (May 12, 2010)

Beastie said:
			
		

> I totally agree.
> 
> Plus, I'm not sure if it's true but Microsoft supposedly have already started fighting WINE by adding checks to some/all its software to make sure they're running under Windows proper not WINE. What would happen to ReactOS if Microsoft asked its device/chip manufacturing friends to add similar checks to all their drivers?



Who want to run MS software under wine anyways? I cant think of a single piece of software besides windows itself and maybe couple of APIs that I would want to run under wine. And I really doubt other corporations would spend money to include such features in their software for windows and risk competition law suits (even though MS itself can afford them).


----------



## Beastie (May 12, 2010)

expl said:
			
		

> I cant think of a single piece of software besides windows itself and maybe couple of APIs that I would want to run under wine.


Older Office applications on low-resource machines that cannot possibly run OOo, for example.


----------



## kpedersen (May 12, 2010)

Speaking of which,

Microsoft Office 2007 works much faster running in wine than OpenOffice does natively.

How did this happen?!?!

Around the university we are distributing wine wrapped installations of Office lol.


----------



## DutchDaemon (May 12, 2010)

Remember http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._Lindows ?


----------



## Ruler2112 (May 12, 2010)

DutchDaemon said:
			
		

> Remember http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._Lindows ?



Heck, I'd start an OS if I could get $20 million for the name!  :e


----------



## expl (May 13, 2010)

kpedersen said:
			
		

> Speaking of which,
> 
> Microsoft Office 2007 works much faster running in wine than OpenOffice does natively.
> 
> ...


Thats because OpenOffice has a lot of java(bad influence from Sun) code while MS Office is written with C++(MSVC).


----------



## Zare (May 13, 2010)

Agreed. I have a legal XP and legal Office running in VirtualBox on my FreeBSD work machine, sometimes it's easier to type something in Word. Org is too damn slow.


----------



## qsecofr (May 13, 2010)

*Doomed to fail*

Maybe not so much from MS squashing them as Apple out running them.  I have no beef with proprietary software per se (maybe I'm in the minority).  Anti-competitive or illegal behavior isn't synonymous with proprietary IMO.

Years ago I bought a cheap Walmart PC with Lindows (if I remember right) on it.  Wiped it and installed FBSD4.  No love lost.


----------



## harishankar (May 13, 2010)

Again going by the level of interest in Windows-compatible productivity in the Open Source/Free Software community I think it's not going to be the most active project around.

I also think the advancements in virtualization (virtualbox etc) have taken some steam out of these projects.


----------



## sk8harddiefast (Jun 13, 2010)

I know Reactos. I have read on a lot of forums for this.
I think that this Os has no future. Maybe i am wrong. I don't know.
Is under developing but his development is tooooo slow!!!!
Also i don't believe that could exist on a computer as primary os!


----------



## SR_Ind (Jun 17, 2010)

ReactOS looks like an interesting project.

Threat to Windows? No. Never. As an architect responsible for supervising a fairly large MS development team I'd submit that the slew technologies released by MS in last 2-3 years has changed the rules. 

Competing with Windows at OS level this point is useless. Its like saying I've designed a better chasiss than top 5 car makers. Sorry but customers don't buy chasiss, they buy cars.

However, I'll be most interested in knowing what kind of graphical interface system ReactOS has implemented. If it is functional enough and portable than I'll be ready take a stab at porting it to FreeBSD. But, at this point FreeBSD isn't ready (no framebuffer device??).

I think the lasting contribution of the ReactOS poroject might be a workable X11 alternative as a takeaway. If it works than it would have succeded in what Linux tried to do and failed i.e. open source desktop. API compatibility with Windows will also ensure porting of Windows apps fairly rapidly.


----------



## fronclynne (Jun 17, 2010)

*I'll change the rules right now:  you have to type everything in palindromes*



			
				SR_Ind said:
			
		

> I'd submit that the slew technologies released by MS in last 2-3 years has changed the rules.



But are they _forward-looking_ in this _time-frame_, or should I still buy^H^H^Hleverage a _B2B e-dot-com productivity enhancement suite .NET_?


----------



## SR_Ind (Jun 17, 2010)

fronclynne said:
			
		

> But are they _forward-looking_ in this _time-frame_, or should I still buy^H^H^Hleverage a _B2B e-dot-com productivity enhancement suite .NET_?



Could you please explain in legible English, what is "buy^H^H^Hleverage" ?

The new technologies are forward-looking and futuristic. Take it FWIW.


----------



## fronclynne (Jun 17, 2010)

SR_Ind said:
			
		

> The new technologies are forward-looking and futuristic. Take it FWIW.



What technologies?  You mean transparency effects?  Copy-on-write filesystems?  Network backups?  Networked desktops?  The ability to run World of Warcraft?  Journaling?  A graphical desktop?  Pre-emptive multitasking?  A mouse-pointer to control desktop actions?  Spending >$50M on OEM deals to lock out other operating systems?  Throwing chairs?  64-bit drivers?  A broken web-browser integrated into the base of the operating system?  File allocation tables?  Network settings now reside under Start->System->UserOp~1->Contro~1->New->Obscure->StayOut->Stop->Danger->Jaguar?  Soothing beeps when you click something?  A taskbar?  Automatic crash reporting?  A command-prompt shell?  Human-readable configuration files?  Encryption engine support?  Virtual machine management?  Swap files?  Filesystem defragmentation?  An e-mail client?  Word-processing software?  Microsoft Bob?


----------



## SR_Ind (Jun 17, 2010)

fronclynne said:
			
		

> What technologies?  You mean transparency effects?  Copy-on-write filesystems?  Network backups?  Networked desktops?  The ability to run World of Warcraft?  Journaling?  A graphical desktop?  Pre-emptive multitasking?  A mouse-pointer to control desktop actions?  Spending >$50M on OEM deals to lock out other operating systems?  Throwing chairs?  64-bit drivers?  A broken web-browser integrated into the base of the operating system?  File allocation tables?  Network settings now reside under Start->System->UserOp~1->Contro~1->New->Obscure->StayOut->Stop->Danger->Jaguar?  Soothing beeps when you click something?  A taskbar?  Automatic crash reporting?  A command-prompt shell?  Human-readable configuration files?  Encryption engine support?  Virtual machine management?  Swap files?  Filesystem defragmentation?  An e-mail client?  Word-processing software?  Microsoft Bob?



I see another flag waving fanboy 

Stick with your X-Windows abomination. Locks up everytime. Whereas Windows 7/2008 quitely restarts the WM if you do something stupid. 

Touchscreens anyone?

Of wait last week my FreeBSD kernel whined and crashed because I added an partition to the FreeBSD hosting drive, where as the Windows 2008 server on the first partition quitely showed the partition in disk manager.

Web servers? Alas that's not the responsibility of the FOSS OS developers, that pretend that they are shipping a "server" OS. 

Development environments? What's that? My sympathies, please stick with vi. 

Debuggers? Locks up in multithreaded apps. My sympathies again. But hey, what's a thread, we fork all the time ain't it?

[ insults removed ; user infracted - Mod. ]


----------



## DutchDaemon (Jun 17, 2010)

Thread closed.


----------

