ReactOS 0.4.16

(reactos.org)

79 points | by marttt 7 hours ago

9 comments

  • mysterydip 1 hour ago
    Looks like a lot of improvements on long-standing hard-to-find issues. Kudos to the team and thank you for providing an alternative OS that keeps getting better
  • MisterTea 36 minutes ago
    I do a lot of industrial automation and it is the one thing that keeps me boat-anchored to Windows. Every little programmable doodad like signal conditioners and temperature transmitters have their own USB programming cables and their own, mostly crappy windows config software. PLC software is another abomination, hopelessly Windows anchored, bloated GUI monsters, some built on top of Visual Studio (Beckhoff TwinCAT.)

    I have donated to ReactOS in the past in the hopes of one day freeing myself from this hell.

    • Almondsetat 34 minutes ago
      Why not spend some money on an uncensored LLM to reverse engineer or create an open clean room reimplementation?
      • kvuj 2 minutes ago
        The reason industrial PLCs cost so much is because of their reliability. They need to be working flawlessly 50 years in the future. Trying to vibe code your way into a PLC compiler feels like it could blow up in your face after a little while.

        That is also ignoring the safety PLCs with safety instructions that are certified for use with ISO 13849, a bunch of documentation that isn't online and thus AIs weren't trained on it, etc.

        For personal project, that could be fun however.

      • wpm 4 minutes ago
        Because that requires breaking the almost assured stipulation in a software license agreement that says "You will not try to RE this software", which is fine to ignore for home gamers, but not something you generally want to mess around with in a business setting where the risks are much higher.
      • bluGill 16 minutes ago
        That is only recently become an option you could try, and we don't know long term how well it will work. Remember laws may change (and there are some legal issues around LLMs that are not clear at all)
  • Aldipower 1 hour ago
    Love it! Haiku, ReactOS and sure Linux. But if necessary, the real art of computing can be kept up!
  • giancarlostoro 52 minutes ago
    One of my favorite projects, maybe someday it can be a true daily driver, I wonder if that's the goal for 1.0 is to claim that they've gotten it stable enough to run as though it were Windows 7 or something to that effect.
  • montroser 1 hour ago
    Quite the dedication have these people!
  • thataccount 1 hour ago
    This reminds me of the feeling of when Linux got graphical installers instead of long text based ones asking you many, many questions.
    • forinti 31 minutes ago
      It's not only that it was text based, but that it failed in all sorts of ways.

      I had a particularly bad afternoon in early 2000s when I tried to install Linux on various machines (4 or 5, each one with different hardware) and failed with all of them. Of course, I wasn't as savvy as I am now, but it's been years since I've seen an issue with a Linux install; although I might have to download and compile a driver for one thing or another, the install itself doesn't fail.

      • thataccount 25 minutes ago
        Mine was in the 90s and concerned X11 failing or crashing due to the video card typically. Redhat 5.2ish or Suse.
  • guitarlimeo 48 minutes ago
    TIL that the GUI of ReactOS isn't based on React. All these years spent baffled that who would like to build an OS with JS, thanks to me only reading the headlines lol
    • kijashdkujdfhas 37 minutes ago
      Well ReactOS did have a 15 year lead on the name over React...1998 vs 2013, going by first public release of each.
  • tiahura 1 hour ago
    This seems like the sort of project that ai would excel at. /goal excel runs flawlessly.
    • actionfromafar 1 hour ago
      Well, Excel has AI now, so maybe it can help.
      • aussieguy1234 1 hour ago
        Excel writes Excel, which writes Excel...

        Now we have an infinite loop

    • plutokras 1 hour ago
      [dead]