Over the past couple of years with the Jenny’s Daily Drivers series, we’ve looked at a number of unusual or noteworthy operating systems. Among them has been ReactOS, an open source clone of a millennium-era Windows OS, which we tried back in November. It’s one of those slow-burn projects we know has been around for a long time, but still it’s a surprise to find we’ve reached the 30th anniversary of the first ReactOS code commit.
The post is a run through the project’s history, and having followed it for a long time we recognize some of the milestones from the various ISOs we downloaded and tried back in the day. At the end it looks into the future with plans to support more up-to-date hardware as well as UEFI, which we hope will keep it relevant.
When we tried it, we found an OS which could indeed be a Daily Driver on which a Hackaday article could be written — even if it wasn’t the slickest experience on the block. It doesn’t matter that it’s taken a while, if you’re used to Windows XP this has become a usable replacement. We came to the conclusion that like FreeDOS it could find a niche in places where people need a modern version of the old OS to run older software, but perhaps as it now moves towards its mature phase it will move beyond that. We salute the ReactOS developers for bringing it this far, and for not giving up.
You can read our Daily Drivers review of a recent ReactOS build here.
Over just the past week, ReactOS has been making some insane improvements to the graphics drivers, the Nvidia drivers up to the GTX 9xx series are now working, with 2D and 3D acceleration. ReactOS is finally coming into its own and honestly more drivers than not are working with way less crashes and glitches that just a year ago.
I predict ReactOS will be fully ready for prime time exactly the moment Microsoft scraps Windows for a Linux kernel with a Windows GUI layer on top. I say this partially in jest, but it’s coming.
That’s ok.
I’m sure Microsoft Linux will have a compatibility layer for running Windows programs that benefits from access to all Microsoft’s proprietary source code too.
But…
So long as it will run my stuff I’d rather run any old Windows stuff either in an Open Source old-Windows like ReactOS or in my favorite non-Mickeyfied distro with Wine.
“I’m sure Microsoft Linux will have a compatibility layer for running Windows programs that benefits from access to all Microsoft’s proprietary source code too.”
IMO, this is exactly what Microsoft will not/should not do; it is the darn attempt at backward compatibility that is causing such hell in the Win-11 OS and causing Microsoft great grief in release testing; many would say that MS is now relying on end-users to identify bugs.
MS did drop the 8-bit thunker and 16-bit thunker years ago in past Win-OS releases. In today’s 64-bit HW world, 32-bit thunking under Win-11 is still available for a few M$ applications like locally run 32-bit Office, but 64-bit compiles are the primary market.
Microsoft would be smart to put Win-11 into security patch only mode for 5 years when (if) they release an M$ Linux kernel and at the same time release all of their applications and utilities for native Linux 64-bit. Such a move would reboot Microsoft into Linux OS without the business baggage of prior software compatibility testing. End users could utilize Wine or preferably Microsoft could offer a discount for MS physical media returned for a credit toward a new Linux version. “Key” software s/n in ones MS account substitute for physical media.
Pirates would be S-O-L.
I quickly counted 7 Linux utilities, likely more, that empower Linux users to run Windows compiled apps: Microsoft needs not invest in this area as it represents an unnecessary cost.
i hope it goes beyond compatibility layers and encourage developers to target linux first. for every proprietary windows api there is an equivalent open source one that works on all platforms. i remember in the ’90s when “proprietary” was a dirty word among computer hardware people, id like to make that a thing again.
“I quickly counted 7 Linux utilities, likely more, that empower Linux users to run Windows compiled apps”
Uh huh. And I bet they are ALL based on the same code base, Wine. Every single one of them!
As is much of ReactOS by the way….
And don’t get me wrong, what Wine has accomplished is amazing and often it does run things well enough to be useful. But it is far from 100%, pretty much everything ran that way experiences at least a few small glitches and many things won’t run at all.
Microsoft is in a very different position than the Wine developers. Wine developers need to be careful of even how much Microsoft published documentation they allow themselves to see let alone source code lest they pollute Wine with Microsoft IP that could get them sued out of existence. They have to reverse engineer and then implement from scratch. Microsoft can just copy-paste their own code.
Backward compatibility doesn’t have to be such a problem for Microsoft. They have attempted to write it into their new OSs directly, which is hard. But with the power of most PCs today (and certainly anything meeting their requirements) they could easily just take old Windows versions, cut them down to just what is needed to run an application, merge them with a VM and wrap it all in such a way that the user doesn’t even know their old program isn’t running on the host OS directly.
20 years ago i was craving for this, mostly/only for games. Which was also the thing that really didnt work well (graphics drivers for the most, instabilities otherwise), so wine it was. Now? I don’t play (m)any games anymore, and the landscape is now quite different ..
Still big congrats!!
Actually things haven’t speed up much. My 2000 WinXP would startup 20 seconds faster than my current Win11, starting gimp takes a minute now compared to one second for PaintShopPro6 in 2000, same for LibreOffice writer nearly a minute now versus one second for WordExpress in 2000. Only copying things is 100 times faster, storage bigger and the resolution is HD+, and there is extremely much more at internet, but the daily experience of a computer is identical for me.
Are you booting from spinning rust? Windows boots in (low) single-digit seconds from any PCIe 4.0 ssd
i still haven’t been able to run it on hardware i own, so ive only seen it in vms thus far. getting it to boot on one of my older rigs sure would be something.
This is one of the gripes I have about most open-source OS’s: what computer spec do I need in terms of RAM, storage and CPU (type and speed)? Like, this is the most basic question, without which there’s no point in even downloading an OS. Yet barely any OS distros think it’s important at all.
At least for ReactOS, I think their compatible hardware list is only the machines the devs test on. The only official first class system supported is a VM.
Now that Anthropic agents are around, task them to complete the project..