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Operating Systems Graphics Software Windows

ReactOS 0.4.5 Released (reactos.org) 118

Posted by BeauHD from the quick-to-act dept.
An anonymous reader shares Colin Finck's forum post announcing ReactOS version 0.4.5: The ReactOS Project is pleased to release version 0.4.5 as a continuation of its three month cadence. Beyond the usual range of bug fixes and syncs with external dependencies, a fair amount of effort has gone into the graphical subsystem. Thanks to the work of Katayama Hirofumi and Mark Jansen, ReactOS now better serves requests for fonts and font metrics, leading to an improved rendering of applications and a more pleasant user experience. Your continued donations have also funded a contract for Giannis Adamopoulos to fix every last quirk in our theming components. The merits of this work can be seen in ReactOS 0.4.5, which comes with a smoother themed user interface and the future promises to bring even more improvements. In another funded effort, Hermes Belusca-Maito has got MS Office 2010 to run under ReactOS, another application from the list of most voted apps. On top of this, there have been several major fixes in the kernel and drivers that should lead to stability improvements on real hardware and on long-running machines. The general notes, tests, and changelog for the release can be found at their respective links. ISO images and prepared VMs for testing can be downloaded here.
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ReactOS 0.4.5 Released More

ReactOS 0.4.5 Released

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  • It is making progress (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Soon it will catch up with GNU Hurd

    • Re:It is making progress (Score:4, Insightful)

      by The123king ( 2395060 ) on Friday May 19, 2017 @09:52AM (#54448093)
      I didn't know GNU Hurd could run MS Office 2010!

    • ...somebody really needs to talk to these writers pimping the distros about appropriate language. Who unfamiliar with Linux would ever spend time with an operating system touting how much better its stability or font choices are now, compared to the previous release? It's like Ford saying, "Hey, get this new Camry, the brakes work pretty well now!" Or Chevrolet touting its new Silverado with "At Last! The radio stations all come in clearly! Yay, us!"

      Again, I love Linux, and have been using it on my deskto

  • What about OS/2 ? ArcaOS ? (Score:3, Informative)

    by martiniturbide ( 1203660 ) on Friday May 19, 2017 @09:10AM (#54447873) Homepage Journal
    Slashdot posted this on the main page and didn't want to post that ArcaOS was released ??? https://www.arcanoae.com/produ... [arcanoae.com]

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You missed the "Stuff that matters" part.

    • Slashdot posted this on the main page and didn't want to post that ArcaOS was released ???

      Why don't both of you OS/2 users have your own forum?

      • They could join the 5 Windows Phone users and the 15 desktop Linux users!

        • Your numbers on Linux desktop users is quite a bit off... I have over 30 users on Linux desktop, two small businesses and a bunch of neighbors/friends/relatives.. One of the businesses flat refuses to allow ANYthing MS on any computers in his home or office..

          • I have more than five Linux users in my family. No one uses Windows except my step-mother, my real (90 year old) mother is an Apple user, and has been since Apple ][ (prior to that, IBM 709 and 7090).

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday May 19, 2017 @09:36AM (#54447999)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wjcofkc ( 964165 )
      Have you seen the pricing for ArcaOS? They say they are charging this to ensure continued development, offer consulting, etc... Their list of partners is not at all inspiring, and they don't seem to know how to work WordPress. Anyone buying this is going to find themselves with an unsupported product. The market for what they are trying to do on the level they seem to be expecting quite simply does not exist. Not newsworthy unless you are desperate for a story who's posts max out at 15 - 20, all saying what

  • Cut the Putin/Russia/KGB-bullshit please (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ReactOS may have started with mainly Russian developers, but is today an open-source project with collaborators from all over the world. The project has no allegiance to any country or political organisation.

    ReactOS is a safe, secure, open-source and Windows binary compatible OS, that's all there is to it.

  • Office 2010 runs under ReactOS? (Score:3)

    by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Friday May 19, 2017 @10:13AM (#54448189) Journal

    Holy cow, I am more than happy with Office 2007, for my scientific publishing! If Firefox (for Zotero) works, too, I would be 70% there to ditch Windows.

    • Replying to own post in spite of poor form (or so they say?): Firefox works!! Maybe I can find a version of SolidWorks that runs in ReactoOS, and I'm set.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sremick ( 91371 )

      Not meant to be snarky, but genuinely curious: I don't do scientific publishing so I recognize that I'm out of my league but what sorts of things do you do in MS Office that can't be done in LibreOffice?

      • Looks like no researcher has answered your question, so here goes: the great majority of journals (at least in the natural sciences) have a word document template which you must use to submit the article. Some accept LaTeX, but they're the minority.

  • I thought this is supposed to be free. Built by the sweat and tears of volunteers. Why would they need funding if it's free? We're told software (and by extension, music) doesn't cost anything which is why "sharing" (with 100 million of your "friends") doesn't cost companies anything.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Wulf2k ( 4703573 )

      Are you having a stroke?

    • They mention funding because in many cases it is someones job to provide free software for the betterment of the whole. Linux-based OS's are free, but the Linux foundation (the folks behind development of the kernel) is funded by partners like RedHat, Dell, HP, Intel, and even Microsoft.

      ReactOS is free as in beer and as in speech, but if you like it or want to support it in some way, sending a few dollars their way is the best way to do it.

    • Even Free stuff developed by volunteers need money for their basic operating fees (ie : do you think their website hosts itself out of thin air?)

    • It's free for you because people like me donate money and the developers donate significant time and energy. You're welcome.

  • Trying to basically create a clone of an operating system that is past it's prime -- and by the time it is "fully functional" all the software that you wanted to keep running on a WinXP clone has long past it's prime....

    Effort would be best spent trying to create a new OS or new UI for an existing open source OS but this just seems like taking a love of an old UI to an insane level. For gods sake, it started it's history almost 20 years ago....

    • Re:An effort in insane futility.... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Friday May 19, 2017 @11:19AM (#54448697) Homepage Journal

      I dunno, I wouldn't mind a Windows-compatible OS that is open source and doesn't include a bunch of weird Microsoft marketing telemetry.

      I'm a professional Linux developer, and I think there is room in this world for more than one open source operating system. And I still run "legacy" software, why replace software it is working fine and serves my needs, or if it is irreplaceable like a favorite old game?

      • I dunno, I wouldn't mind a Windows-compatible OS that is open source and doesn't include a bunch of weird Microsoft marketing telemetry.

        I think this is largely the answer. Right now, there isn't quite an uproar over Windows 10 because the majority of the people who have an issue with it are camping out on Win7. If Microsoft keeps the trajectory of Win10 the way it's going (telemetry, forced updates with poor QA, 'features' that satisfy relatively few people, auto-installed apps, near-insistence on MS accounts for login, etc.), 2020 is going to be a year of reckoning for Microsoft.

        Meanwhile, with Apple all but abandoning the pro market, and

      • It's not that there's no demand for it. It's that there's not enough demand to actually make it happen. It's a much harder job than making a Unixlike OS, which is actually excruciatingly well-documented and understood; Windows is just a collection of hacks at this point. Even Microsoft has little understanding of the way any of their complex software works. That's why they can do things like write a spec which says "do what Word does here".

    • It's their time, they can spend it however. Personally, I've seen enough struggle with old software on Windows 10 that having drop-in user mode libraries to debug at source level might be useful. Just being able to see the arguments passed in might make the difference in creating a custom solution or just providing a shim to make it work.

      Classic Shell is no longer open source, but ReactOS is devoting effort to make explorer work as a drop in replacement. Use it as the shell on vista or server 2003, fix what

    • Trying to basically create a clone of an operating system that is past it's prime -- and by the time it is "fully functional" all the software that you wanted to keep running on a WinXP clone has long past it's prime....

      Effort would be best spent trying to create a new OS or new UI for an existing open source OS but this just seems like taking a love of an old UI to an insane level. For gods sake, it started it's history almost 20 years ago....

      General purpose operating system market is maturing to the point where in majority of cases value derived by improvements will never outweigh cost of change absorbed by end users.

    • For the purposes of software preservation, this is plenty useful. If you want to run old software for any reason, this is far better than WINE (even with what they share) and more ethical and more secure than trying to track down a pirate copy of XP.

  • Numbering system (Score:5, Funny)

    by ISoldat53 ( 977164 ) on Friday May 19, 2017 @10:43AM (#54448385)
    0.4.5 Does this mean that it is half way to being half way to being released?

  • What the hell is "ReactOS"?

  • I've been donating to the project for a few years. I hope it is helping the developers focus more time on working on ReactOS and getting the resources they need. My long term plan is to switch to ReactOS once Windows 7 is killed off by Microsoft. (extended support ends January 14, 2020)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      I've been donating to the project for a few years. I hope it is helping the developers focus more time on working on ReactOS and getting the resources they need.

      I just want to say, good for you. Too often the only thing people contribute to a project are complaints that it's not going fast enough.

  • What's the point of putting a failed OSS project on the front page. ReactOS has been trying for 20 years, at this point when they are done with their XP clone there will be no software that runs on it.
  • Leave comments. I'd like to know. I've been struggling with trying to get Linux Mint working with WINE for the one or two pieces of software that there are no Linux equivalents of, and if this ReactOS is looking decent I'd try it. Please don't query me about 'what Windows software I can't do without' or similar, please stick with the question I'm asking, thanks. :-)

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dudds ( 132159 )

      ReactOS is an interesting project and that's about it so far. It has a lot of unimplemented APIs, or "just enough" APIs. This doesn't sound too bad when you realize it can run low level drivers for networking, basic video and Firefox, but it becomes much more apparent how incomplete, and unfortunately unstable, this OS really is:
      - The UI can hard lock randomly
      - A lot of the Win32 layer is based on Wine, which means it's a port, and has a lot of issues running programs, even Firefox
      - Video acceleration is co

  • Improved graphics in ReactOS is like improving the quality of a jump off a cliff: the improvements may be nice for an observer, but as the person jumping, my patience for testing ReactOS is nearing an end. If you get it working and charge 10% of what Microsoft charges, you will retire early, and I'll ask you to STFU and take my money.

    But so far I haven't found a version of ReactOS that gets past my first attempts at using the internet: something bizarre always goes wrong that I can't find documentation f

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