jeditobe writes with this announcement from the ReactOS home page:
"The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.3.16. A little under a year has passed since the previous release and a significant amount of progress has been made. More than 400 bugs were eliminated. Some of the most significant include completion of the CSRSS rewrite and the first stages of a shell32 rewrite. 0.3.16 is in many ways a prelude to several new features that will provide a noticeable enhancement to user visible functionality. A preview can be seen in the form of theme support, which while disabled by default can be turned on to demonstrate the Lautus theme developed by community member Maciej Janiszewki. Another user visible change is a new network card driver for the RTL8139, allowing ReactOS to support newer versions of QEMU out of the box." You can download
release images here. Want to see how it handles Windows software? Here are demos of
Office 2003,
Photoshop CS2, and
OpenMPT.
Re:Hi
By Somebody Is Using My
•
2014-Feb-9 15:49
• Score: 5, Funny
• Thread
I see the new Beta is managing to attract new readers! Welcome!
A VM or "virtual machine" is a type of computer program that creates an emulated software environment. Not that any real person actually knows what that means. Think of it as a sort of a computer that runs on another computer. You can run multiple "virtual machines" on a single computer; then you give access to individual "VM" to all your clients or employees. Busy executives like yourself love VMs because it saves them so much money on hardware; why waste money on 100 servers when you can just buy one and make it look like you have 100 computers! All your peons down in IT would probably recommend against running it on Windows8, but that's just because they like running complicated things like Linux. Windows 8 can handle VMs just fine, and - thanks to its colorful and touch-friendly interface - it's so easy to use that you can fire all those overpaid geeks and have your secretary handle everything for you. Think of the cost savings!
I hope that helps; this is just one of those useful tips you'll find on the new Slashdot, now featuring shorter articles and nice big pictures. Not only has Slashdot has been redesigned to make all this computer gibberish more palatable and understandable for management and accounting types, but we've hidden all the comments from all those grumpy greybeards and nerds to make for a better C-level executive experience! Thanks for coming, and enjoy your stay!
Re:On Topic
By jordanjay29
•
2014-Feb-9 15:53
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
It's been around for years, quietly chugging away. The goal is admirable, but with the sluggish progress I've seen, I have little confidence that there will be an actual product someday that will operate as a FOSS platform for natively running Windows software.
Re:One day....
By TheloniousToady
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2014-Feb-9 15:57
• Score: 5, Interesting
• Thread
leaving Windows as a memory as the ReactOS community take the best parts of OSS development and apply it to making my very expensive Windows software run.
I honestly don't understand how anybody could think Windows is expensive. I really think it's cheap considering what an extremely complex piece of software it is. It's probably cheaper per byte than any other software, unless you consider free (as in beer) software. For example, I recently paid about $140 for it, but I paid $40 yesterday for a mere music program. If you think of Windows as a major component of a computer like an HDD or processor or whatever, its cost is about on the same scale.
I certainly wish the ReactOS folks well, but I'm not sure what problem ReactOS solves. Folks who are enamored with being able to customize their OS already have Linux and several other open-source choices. So, at best, ReactOS just saves me $140. I wouldn't turn that down with all things being equal, but otherwise, I would much rather pay $140 for an HDD or processor that works well than get one for free that doesn't.
Toy project
By ledow
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2014-Feb-9 16:41
• Score: 3
• Thread
Is it just me that sees ReactOS as a "lab" kind of software - it's theoretical and doesn't follow the outside reality.
I can't see how it can ever catch up to, say, a lightweight virtualised Linux with Wine for those people who want to avoid a Windows licensing fee. The overhead of a full Linux is absolutely minimal on modern hardware while the hardware support and control is phenomenal.
Sure, I imagine purists prefer a ReactOS but it's really only for the purists and always has been. Which is probably why Wine etc. get much more of a developer following.
Re:Toy project
By TuringCheck
•
2014-Feb-9 17:09
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
Actually the whole idea of ReactOS was to provide a binary compatible kernel so Windows drivers could be loaded unmodified.
At the time ReactOS was started the lack of drivers was seriously hurting Linux. Meanwhile the situation has changed and drivers for Linux are no longer something unheard of.
Also note that ReactOS and Wine share a lot of the higher level library code - in fact all libraries that are pure Win32 with no calls to native libraries.