The ReactOS Team is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.14. As with every other release, we’re regularly noting improvements and updates to keep you in touch with what is being done in ReactOS. In this release, improvements range from FreeLoader fixes, Shell features, kernel fixes, NetKVM VirtIO bringup, further work on the Xbox port and support for NEC PC-9800.
A steady stream of improvements, and there’s more already implemented in the nightly builds that’s not in this release.
I like the ReactOS project, I potentially have significant use for it as part of a museum of legacy devices I need to support, perhaps forever.
But I’m also amused by the booster support ReactOS gets from the wider Linux or MacOS community, a community that otherwise slams MS at every opportunity, the two different positions appear to be somewhat arbitrary!
I always enjoy new ReactOS releases and it always ends the same way, I install ReactOS into a virtual machine, try to use its package manager to install firefox and libreoffice and try to play with them a bit. Usually it hangs or explodes some way in the process of installing something or doing something naive, but this time it worked.
I wonder what makes an OS interesting. For me using Linux it is having access to everything all the time, within a simple shell you can program anything and interact with anything and I guess it is the same with other open OS’s. I wonder if expanding ReactOS this way someday will make it attractive for more people to use it.
Personally I’m more interested in standards. ReactOS along with Wine/Proton is making the Win32 API standard available as a subsystem or standalone platform. That’s good for enabling ongoing use of so-called “legacy” software.
Microsoft notably has access to Linux and Android source while keeping Win32 locked up. As far as I’m concerned Microsoft have made their money back a million times over and are now indulging in “rent seeking” behaviour. Ditto Oracle and Adobe et al. Any business or nation state which allows this state of affairs to continue needs their head seeing to.
Any developer today who doesn’t plan from day one for coding cross-platform isn’t being smart.
You obviously have no idea how much work it takes to keep win32, or even Android, compatible with existing apps. Hundreds, if not thousands, of programmers make sure each and every change doesn’t break compatibility with existing programs. There is great irony that you’re commenting this nonsense about “rent seeking” on an article about ReactOS, a project with dozens of developers that runs over 14 million automated regression tests on every revision to see if anything major broke. Simply put, you don’t understand scope and the amount of human labor these things cost at all, so you complain about nonsense here.