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.
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.