ReactOS 0.4.16

108

mmarttt about 8 hours ago 28 commentsRead Article on reactos.org

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

33% Positive

Analyzed from 667 words in the discussion.

Discussion (28 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

MisterTea•about 2 hours 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.

ploxiln•21 minutes ago

You can forward USB devices into a VM. About 15 years ago I was using a Windows VM on Linux to program PIC18F??? devices with the custom (JTAG based?) programmer provided by Microchip. The upside is that you can preserve and share this windows environment for other coworkers, and have separate VMs for different projects (perhaps one you can update, and one you can't ...)

Almondsetat•about 2 hours ago

Why not spend some money on an uncensored LLM to reverse engineer or create an open clean room reimplementation?

wpm•about 1 hour 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.

Almondsetat•43 minutes ago

Reverse engineering is protected under certain conditions, even if the EULA prohibits it

kvuj•about 1 hour 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. Can you imagine getting inspected because your safety subsystem cause injury and you explain how you don't use the officially licensed software to program it.

For personal project, that could be fun however.

Almondsetat•37 minutes ago

You completely stripped what I said from its context. GP explicitely said they donate to ReactOS in the hopes of one day being able to run that industrial software on it instead of on Windows. In this context, running the software on ReactOS instead of official Windows would already fail your hypothetical inspections. This is why I suggested trying the LLM route.

bluGill•about 1 hour 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)

mysterydip•about 3 hours 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

giancarlostoro•about 2 hours 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.

Aldipower•about 2 hours ago

Love it! Haiku, ReactOS and sure Linux. But if necessary, the real art of computing can be kept up!

MisterTea•about 2 hours ago

Now all we need is an alternative clean-room implementation of Mac OS.

Lizard5260•about 2 hours ago

You should take a look at ravynOS! https://ravynos.com/

montroser•about 3 hours ago

Quite the dedication have these people!

thataccount•about 3 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour ago

Mine was in the 90s and concerned X11 failing or crashing due to the video card typically. Redhat 5.2ish or Suse.

tiahura•about 3 hours ago

This seems like the sort of project that ai would excel at. /goal excel runs flawlessly.

TonyTrapp•32 minutes ago

It's also the kind of project where LLM license-washing is going to be the most dangerous for the project itself. Projects like Wine and ReactOS have to be extremely careful about what kind of code to accept, because taking code from one of the countless Windows source leaks is just a recipe for legal disaster.

tiahura•4 minutes ago

Some of us are old enough when very similar smelling FUD was being spread by MS about Linux 30 years ago.

actionfromafar•about 3 hours ago

Well, Excel has AI now, so maybe it can help.

aussieguy1234•about 2 hours ago

Excel writes Excel, which writes Excel...

Now we have an infinite loop

binary132•12 minutes ago

Just what the world needed, excel implemented In an excel script. Thanks sloppers

guitarlimeo•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours ago

Well ReactOS did have a 15 year lead on the name over React...1998 vs 2013, going by first public release of each.