So, if you’ve never heard of ReactOS, it’s an alternative to Windows, except it’s open source, and reverse engineered.
The end result is, if it works on Windows, it works on ReactOS natively.
Now, as you might imagine, there are some issues with this. The most glaring one being that they’re currently in the year 2003. That’s the level they’re at with software. It’s not even emulation. It’s running the software natively, and it’s written from scratch.
But my takeaway is that Linux running windows apps natively would improve people’s hesitation to running linux.
Now since ReactOS is FOSS, any improvements made upon it could then be forked over to Linux. And if someone made a ReactOS fork, that isn’t linux, that’s good too (as long as it stays open source). Any advancements made by this new theoretical fork of ReactOS could ALSO be forked into linux.
Right now, development is slow, because it’s a community driven effort without much of a community. If it had a large and engaged community, all legally reverse engeneering the ways of windows? That would allow basically EVERY OS to have FOSS unofficial native windows support.
So I guess my question is, for an OS that’s been in development since 1998, why doesn’t the linux community embrace ReactOS?
You ever heard of Wine? The majority of work to make Windows apps work on Linux is not with ReactOS. Last time I tried ReactOS it was more like a nostalgic OS for people to remember the good ole days of minesweeper. It wasn’t a serious project to actually become compatible with modern Windows. Even if it was, I wouldn’t trust the authors to do so. Wine however has made serious progress and there are multiple Windows apps that now run on Linux as a result. The Linux community should not embrace Windows. Microsoft needs to embrace the Linux community & make their source code open enough and documentation good enough to run Windows software on Linux natively. Otherwise you’re doing free work for a company that will be acting hostile towards you, and it just isn’t worth it. You’d be better off at that point at convincing software makers to make their apps compatible with Linux or using a hypervisor.
reactos is a serious project tho. in fact they were collaborating with and at about the same progress as wine until an incident in 2006; not sure what the status of such collaboration is now
- Microsoft hasnt sued ReactOS only because its not significant enough for them to care about (a few Windows devs have confirmed that some ReactOS code looks stolen)
- Companies have no reason to fund it, wine does everything they need plus enterprise software is being produced for Linux
- Regardless of how “clean” ReactOS is they cannot legally reverse engineer Win10 or Win11 due to the EULA (which Microsoft would enforce in court)
- Even if ReactOS has 100% compatibility (highly unlikley) it doesn’t means Linux will as well. In addition companies would add checks to drm to ensure a legitimate Windows kernel is used so we would just end up where we started.
- The only thing we would gain is an open source nt-based system, this would be immediately rejected by the POSIX purists if anyone tried to add it to Linux. Linux isn’t Unix based because NT is proprietary, people like the Unix standard.
- Not only is the means flawed the ends are arguably worse. Linux does not need to be like Windows/MacOS, Linux does not need complete compatibility Windows/MacOS software, and tbh Linux doesn’t need more Windows/MacOS users because objectively Linux is not Windows/MacOS. We arent helping older users bg watering down Linux, we arent helping new users by tricking them, and we arent helping future users by convincing them on lies.
Regardless of how “clean” ReactOS is they cannot legally reverse engineer Win10 or Win11 due to the EULA (which Microsoft would enforce in court)
How would they prove the developer signed an EULA? I know I haven’t been made to use Windows since the Vista era. And even then, that was a work computer so I never agreed to anything.
The rest I agree with. Windows is trash, why bother cloning it? Wine exists to run applications that are desired but don’t have Linux equivalents.
If any of the developers have a Microsoft account with their legal name and have used that to set up a Windows 10 computer (highly likley) they can be sued. Also my point is not only is Windows trash the fundamental technologies its based on are trash too, Unix Based systems will always be superior to NT/DOS based systems.
Regardless of how “clean” ReactOS is they cannot legally reverse engineer Win10 or Win11 due to the EULA (which Microsoft would enforce in court)
Its possible for them to clean room reverse engineer Windows 10 or 11 it minimizes the risk down to only patents.
Wine already exists and can run pretty new Windows software. A fork also exists for MacOS and the other BSDs can also run Wine.
Running Windows apps on Linux natively seems impractical to me, the OSes are structured very differently and I’m fairly sure this would introduce many hard to fix CVEs.
ReactOS does actually submit patches to wine sometimes because they use parts of wine! But they have their own windows-like kernel so they only need wine for userland, not the whole thing
What makes you think it does not embrace reactos. that project is one reason wine is as good as it is.
Mostly the fact that it’s been in development since 1998. Linux has thousands of developers, yet ReactOS has 30 developers who fight with each other, and haven’t had a stable release since 2021.
Probably because they’re afraid Microsoft would sue to shut it down. As you said, right now they’re nowhere near competitive with Windows.
