Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Peeking in the Windows of ReactOS 0.3.1

Filed under
OS
Reviews
-s

With the internetnews.com article published today, I found myself a bit curious as to what ReactOS exactly was and what it looked like. Well, I had a bit of a hard time finding out what exactly it was, but I did find out what is wasn't. Apparently it isn't a wine on top of linux and it isn't Microsoft.

The ReactOS website states, "ReactOS is a free and open-sourced operating system based on the Windows architecture, providing support for existing applications and drivers, and an alternative to the current dominant consumer operating system." It also says what it ain't. It's stated as, "It is not another wrapper built on Linux, like WINE. It does not attempt or plan to compete with WINE; in fact, the user-mode part of ReactOS is almost entirely WINE-based and our two teams have close ties. ReactOS is also not "yet another OS". It does not attempt to be a third player." But it never says what exactly it is, at least for my mind. I think they are trying to say that it's an entirely new system largely compiled from c and c++ source that utilizes and interacts with the wine apis and dlls to duplicate the functions of the Windows NT system. That's what the code looks like to a lay person like myself anyway.

I decided the best way to try and see what ReactOS is was to download the livecd and take a look at it. Unfortunately, it wouldn't boot on my desktop machine, instead just stopping at the nice boot splash. However, it would boot in an emulator on my Linux desktop. I was able to look around just a bit, but there wasn't much there. Of course, with a 70mb image, I didn't expect much.

        


As you can see from the screenshots, the Programs menu is grayed out. I was able to open some of the system tools found in the Settings Menu. Most didn't work, but I was able to set a background and preview a screensaver. It didn't take too much clicking around before the system became unusable and I had to restart it. As an alpha grade product, this wasn't unexpected. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised it even booted (so quickly even under emulation) and worked at all.

        


I think it's an admirable idea and the developers are apparently skilled and dedicated, but I'm just not sure this system will take off. It's already outdated looking. I'm not sure who would want to run a desktop that looks like Windows 98 anymore or wants to run old NT or 2003 software. I guess there are a few probably who might be interested in a free and open source system that could run software designed for an older Microsoft system if it was ready to go right now. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but I'm afraid that by the time this system is ready to go, most folks will have already made their choice between Vista, OS X, or Linux. There may be a niche, but it will probably be small. I could be and hope I am wrong, so let's just keep an eye on this interesting project and see what happens.


I like the wallpaper

The GUI... not so much. This ought to remind many of us how pretty GNOME and KDE can be... I suppose the Wine team could reuse these, alongside Wine, but that would have broken compatibility with Windows UIs. Just a thought... minddump maybe...

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.