from Hacker News

ReactOS Newsletter 103 – Late 2023 News

by simjue on 11/5/23, 1:54 PM with 34 comments

  • by Worldblender on 11/5/23, 7:48 PM

    It's good to see a report like this. I hope that ReactOS can reach production ready status, even if it's just the basics, before the end of support for Windows 10 in October 2025 (or later if this gets postponed). Once Windows 10 goes out of support, I fear that there may be a spike in e-waste due to many older computers not officially supported by Windows 11 primarily due to its CPU requirements, even though the official ISO images don't stop Windows 11 from being installed onto these older systems at all. But then they can miss out on critical stuff like security updates that may or may not be worse than switching to a Linux distro, for example.

  • by snovymgodym on 11/5/23, 3:05 PM

    Awesome to see the updates with ROS booting on a variety of physical hardware.

  • by Kwpolska on 11/5/23, 4:47 PM

    ReactOS is sometimes very disappointing. Take the issue with toolbar icons, for example. Toolbar icons in at least Office 97, Office 2000 and Visual Basic 6 were affected, as was some game [0]. Microsoft Office is a complex Win32 application, making it a good guinea pig for testing compatibility. And yet, this was fixed a few months ago, and the Office bug was reported in 2016 [1]. The bug with no text wrapping for tray balloons is also an embarrassing thing to have lingering for years (I assume it was like this since the balloons were first implemented in ReactOS).

    Does the world really need a buggy Windows Server 2003 reimplementation? I think the efforts of the development team could be better spent elsewhere.

    [0]: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/5227

    [1]: https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-12377

  • by phendrenad2 on 11/5/23, 3:58 PM

    ReactOS is an interesting project, but I think they've become mired in complexity.

    > UEFI support in ReactOS is experimental and under heavy development. It is not yet ready for general use and is not currently present in our main repository. We currently cannot give an estimate as to when it will be done, so please stay tuned!

    Implementing UEFI boot is not like switching a car from gasoline to electric. It's like using an adapter to switch between China electrical plugs and UK electrical plugs. It's not really a huge undertaking. Normally! I suspect that ReactOS has become so complex that simple things take a long time. Probably a lot of waves of developers have worked on this project. Probably it has seen better days.

    It's probably a good space for someone to start from scratch and make a competing NT implementation.

  • by vasdae on 11/5/23, 4:47 PM

    Nice, we are seeing some improvements when running... err... Excel 97?