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.
I think, your expectations are off for what a native integration would achieve. A kernel which has both a Linux API and a Windows API would be an insane maintenance effort. You’d naturally want the Windows APIs to simply be translated to the respective Linux API calls. This is what WINE does.
In theory, if it’s directly integrated, you could do some dirtier stuff, i.e. call kernel-internal APIs, but you want to avoid that as much as possible, since those kernel-internal APIs are not nearly as stable as the public APIs.
It should also be said that writing kernel-level code is hard. You cannot ever crash, you cannot ever make mistakes when managing memory, you cannot allow yourself any vulnerabilities. Again, you want to avoid writing kernel-level code, if you can.WINE has some additional ugly workarounds, like a virtualized filesystem. There’s not terribly much you can do about that. Windows applications may simply expect certain folders to be in certain paths. You can’t directly map that to a UNIX filesystem.
As far as I can tell, pretty much the only advantage of natively integrating it, would be that it’s installed by default, which can be achieved in other ways (distros), and due to those ugly workarounds will not be popular at all. As much as I’m touting its horn right now, I do not want WINE on my system, unless I need it.
It’s easy to be frustrated with WINE, because it does not handle all applications perfectly, and then think that the approach is just wrong. But yeah, no, some really smart folks came up with that approach. It’s just insanely hard to get the exact (undocumented) behavior of the Windows kernel APIs correct, whether you do a mapping or implement them natively.
I think reactos is just in a weird space of semi uselessness like haiku. It’s not good enough to use daily and doesn’t have as much retro appeal as game emulators so not enough work is done to it.
Also building reactos is terrible, or at least was years ago (it’s a whole os and userland after all, I know it won’t be simple). If the development workflow improves the project could get off the ground.
As far as posix support goes I would love to see reactos get to the point where a posix nt personality could be real again, but really I think humanity has learned enough about operating systems to build a new one from scratch instead of liberating proprietary tech at great cost.
I don’t have a substantial opinion about ReactOS. I’m aware of it, but that’s as far as I’ve ever gone.
However, I wanted to compliment you because that was a great opener to this discussion. 🙂
