> given enough time
This has been a lifetime for a slice of the human population.
It’s getting into Sagrada Familia territory.
The article talks about construction on the exterior, the cross on the main tower, the Pope's visit and commemoration of the architect, etc. while on the official website the timeline says "Today, more than 140 years after the laying of the cornerstone, construction continues on the Basilica": https://sagradafamilia.org/en/history-of-the-temple
So which one is it? Is this one of those cases where we have to define "done" first?
Or "A million monkeys with a million typewriters writing Shakespeare" territory
Case in point, ReactOS is far behind what Windows 11 is capable of, and this not taking into account the ARM and CoPilot+ PC hardware changes in modern motherboards.
It is nonetheless relevant, especially in the presence of escape mechanisms to oppressive governments, and digital sovereignty.
Not just for that. There's an awful, awful lot of ancient embedded hardware running machinery sometimes worth dozens of millions of dollars, and it's running even more ancient software. Siemens, for example, recently searched for people capable of (and willing to) working with Windows 3.11 [1], presumably to deal with the HMI displays for locomotive/train drivers.
When dealing with hardware or software that has lifecycles measured in half-centuries, bridges to allow modern tooling to work with it are really, really important.
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Deutsche-Bahn-sucht-Admin-fuer-Win...
lol I guess, it doesn’t annoy you with endless ads and pop ups, doesn’t try to steal your data and passwords, doesn’t force you to buy an entire new computer just to run it. Far behind indeed.
More importantly, as I've mentioned, ReactOS is not stable nor reliable enough to even use as an offline O/S sans the Win 11 dross.
If these stability/compatibility issues were fixed then it'd develop a reputation for being reliable which would lead to further development work.
Unfortunately for everyone except Microsoft this is not the case.
This is not always the case. Open source projects also die.
We need to improve the funding situation. I have no idea how to do that, but we really need to tackle that problem.
The better the specs of a commercial product, the easier it would be to produce an open source version it, with coding and testing automation perhaps even a one-to-one offering.
do windows viruses get ported by such efforts as well?
However, there is a permissions layer that is more nix than Windows, which means the first foothold is still better than XP - you have to choose to execute the file. Self-running things don't tend to infect systems.
Its not a panacea, and there is a risk factor. And there aren't a lot of antivirus systems that can run correctly under ReactOS, because they freak out and think the OS is the malware, because they're scanning hashes for Windows, not another system.
But for a hobby OS, keeping hardware and software accessible after the rest of the world broke access, it still works.
so you can set an app to use a Windows XP compatibility profile, and this will simulate Windows bugs which were fixed in more recent versions of the OS
ReactOS isn't the one that just had one of its package repos owned (again).
Btw if you're running an OS that's never had a malware incident, please, tell us!
I think what is being claimed, but not explicitly in the article, is that this is running the NVIDIA driver stack (for an ancient GeForce 8 card) directly, as opposed to emulating DirectX at the API level on top of a Vulkan driver.
Eh. It's sort of like saying FreeDOS is laughable because DOSBox exists. I think that's missing the point.
- a listing of all games that work well on ReactOS, similar to how WineHQ does.
Or perhaps a specialized variant of ReactOS with that focus in mind. Do we have such a list? I assume many games also won't work perfectly well; see WineHQ, that also had tons of issues with some games.
Trouble is there's never been enough interest in ReactOS to get it to the point where it's stable let alone warrant fancy extras. (After three decades of trying to clone the basics and failing is proof enough.)
In short, developers see it as a dead end. Why there's so little interest I've never fully understood, but it's fact.
If it were actually stable and usable as a basic operating system it could be used for lots of offline stuff but it's not—even at this point. If it were useable I'd readily adopt it to use offline (I've tried many times and failed).
Another point, this lack of interest shows up on ReactOS's website; there's so little new news and info the site may as well be dead.
It's definitely a huge improvement towards "FOSS Windows."
So unlike Linux systems with Nvidia Kepler cards, you can still run the most up-to-date desktop environment. Or if you have an obscure WiFi card, you can use the Windows drivers.
Maybe ReactOS will live after Windows as an option for people with critical applications that for some reason won't run on Linux.
If ReactOS had worked this well 20 years ago, I would probably have used it (I did try it a couple of times). Today I just don't need it.
I also have a feeling that I'll be dead for centuries long before it ever becomes a viable replacement.
On the plus side, at least it'll be finished quicker than GNU Hurd will be...
