ReactOS 0.3.14 Released With Improved Networking Stack 176
An anonymous reader wrote in with news of the latest release of ReactOS, a project to create a complete reimplementation of Windows. The highlights of this release are the integration of a new network stack based upon lwIP, the ability to build using Microsoft's C compiler, and Wifi support. There are a few options for trying it out (emulator image and a livecd amongst others) and source code over at Sourceforge.
What's the point??!?!?! (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many possible reasons why people want a functioning clone of MS Windows that can use the same drivers etc.
If nothing else, it's an interesting project.
Why not Linux? Because drivers don't always work. Why not WINE? ReactOS and WINE share a lot of code, but WINE is aiming to solve a different problem. Why not just use old MS Windows? Because the source is not there, and neither is support.
People would find a use for a Free MS Windows clone the same way that people find a use for a Free MS DOS clone (FreeDOS).
I for one am excited about ReactOS. Here's hoping they continue the good work for many years
Only one minor disappointment. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll just keep building the USB branch until then.
Re:What's the point??!?!?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Projects like ReactOS, Wine [winehq.org], DOSBox [dosbox.com], etc. allow you to have another possible path in that uncertain future. Your program might not work out-of-the-box, but you have the source to tinker with and try to get it to work.
That is probably the same reason for running Wine on Windows [winehq.org], which is probably better than running an old program within a virtual machine [microsoft.com].
Soon enough, you will probably run all of your programs in a browser [slashdot.org] anyway. But I digress
Dooooooomed. (Score:3, Interesting)
Worst case: ReactOS succeeds, Microsoft sues either the devs or the users for infringing several thousand patents.
Almost like Hurd (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been hearing of this OS since the time I was a member of an Alpha-NT group. They've been taking all these years, and are not even on 1.x even now. These guys are giving Hurd strong competition on who takes forever to come up w/ an OS, particularly given all the FOSS OSs out there.
On the project itself, I think that it had a window of opportunity when MS abandoned the MIPS and Alpha versions of NT years ago. At that time, there were NT users for this platform worried about where it would leave them, and this would definitely have been a godsend. However, on the x86 platform, it's pretty much irrelevant - either people have Windows, and if that's not acceptable, they can run Linux. As it is, there are some things, like NTFS file system support that ReactOS doesn't/can't support, so it's not like even close to a complete substitute. The only people I can imgaine who might have (had) an use for it would be NT/RISC users, but that assumes that they never moved from NT to Linux or RISC to x64.
The race is on (Score:4, Interesting)
to see if they can they release version 1.0 of ReactOS before the X86 architecture becomes obsolete.
Re:I'm normally all for "just because" but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I guess this gives an alternative to an alternative for that old pentium 100 I have in the attic...
In all seriousness, I guess this COULD be eventually useful if they manage to get it working with modern DirectX games and such... While I'm a Linux guy, I do enjoy gaming, natively and in WINE. ReactOS as I understand it contributes code to WINE [reactos.org] (and vice-versa)...so IMHO it's still a win. Not necessarily epic yet, but it could be. That symbiotic relationship is worth something...I'm just not sure what.
ntfs3g, fuse, ext4 ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Without support for modern file systems, It can not be taken seriously.
They should not dismiss suggestions to adopt use of fuse based filesystems such as ntfs3g, as this may likely be the most direct way to get support for popular file systems.