If you want to kick the tires on this, then I hope this script that I had lying around from one of the previous announcements helps save you 15 minutes of digging into qemu-isms
I am always fond of news from projects like ReactOS, Haiku, FreeDOS, et al. It's great they exist and continue to live. I do not have any need for them, at least right now, but the fact that there are communities willing to transform the spirit of legacy (often proprietary) technologies into open source world (and sometimes modernize them along the way) is genuinely heartwarming.
One could say there is no need for ReactOS if Windows is still developed (putting aside obvious price difference). Windows' kernel can be of high quality (allegedly held to much higher standards than rest of Windows ecosystem), but I personally feel like Windows 7 was the last one, where things were organized in a mostly coherent way, and later (power?) user experience mostly declined. More telemetry (bringing slowness), tiles (they pulled out of that), one Settings window to deal with majority of system configuration behind layers of menus and pages, etc. I do hope that ReactOS will eventually be able to successfully replace some older version of Windows on older hardware and be as good if not better than relevant Windows.
We have Wine, which also made good progress over years (ReactOS collaborates with them too). Not a standalone OS in itself, but a great way to be able experience Win apps on non-Win OSes.
Sadly one issue with windows from a development standpoint is a lot of cruft over the years. This means there's a ton of APIs for driver development that are deprecated but will likely never be removed (they are just no longer recommended). Microsoft seems to be making some steps to make life better for developers, but largely on the back of other motives (e.g., the cynic in me says their Windows port of uutils/coreutils to Windows is due to LLMs being trained on coreutils). I wish the teams responsible for the Windows shell unsloppified it, but somehow I find that unlikely.
mdaniel | a day ago
If you want to kick the tires on this, then I hope this script that I had lying around from one of the previous announcements helps save you 15 minutes of digging into qemu-isms
przemoc | 17 hours ago
I am always fond of news from projects like ReactOS, Haiku, FreeDOS, et al. It's great they exist and continue to live. I do not have any need for them, at least right now, but the fact that there are communities willing to transform the spirit of legacy (often proprietary) technologies into open source world (and sometimes modernize them along the way) is genuinely heartwarming.
One could say there is no need for ReactOS if Windows is still developed (putting aside obvious price difference). Windows' kernel can be of high quality (allegedly held to much higher standards than rest of Windows ecosystem), but I personally feel like Windows 7 was the last one, where things were organized in a mostly coherent way, and later (power?) user experience mostly declined. More telemetry (bringing slowness), tiles (they pulled out of that), one Settings window to deal with majority of system configuration behind layers of menus and pages, etc. I do hope that ReactOS will eventually be able to successfully replace some older version of Windows on older hardware and be as good if not better than relevant Windows.
We have Wine, which also made good progress over years (ReactOS collaborates with them too). Not a standalone OS in itself, but a great way to be able experience Win apps on non-Win OSes.
Cajunvoodoo | 12 hours ago
Sadly one issue with windows from a development standpoint is a lot of cruft over the years. This means there's a ton of APIs for driver development that are deprecated but will likely never be removed (they are just no longer recommended). Microsoft seems to be making some steps to make life better for developers, but largely on the back of other motives (e.g., the cynic in me says their Windows port of uutils/coreutils to Windows is due to LLMs being trained on coreutils). I wish the teams responsible for the Windows shell unsloppified it, but somehow I find that unlikely.