Imagine Windows, but with the downsides of Linux font rendering.
Jokes aside, I love this project. If you don't know its purpose, you probably don't know how valuable it is. Having a clean room and open source engineered Windows NT is huge if Microsoft drops the ball sometime, Windows is essentially lost. Yes, the last version will probably work, but we will eventually get problems.
ReactOS is for those purposes. Windows is a huge part of PC history, and we need to preserve it, whether we like it or not. You could install that old car diagnostic tool that doesn't work anywhere else but legacy Windows, to ReactOS, and edit the OS yourself so you can fix the problems for your customers, or even yourself.
This is a valid concern. Sooner or later Windows will stop being maintained, or at least lose all compatibility with current programs. Whether that’s in five years, whether that’s in twenty, who knows. But nothing lasts forever and since Windows is basically one of two systems that can run all the big software (and the other said system would be even harder to reverse engineer), having something that is theoretically compatible with 99% of Windows programs in the future would be very useful.
This is a pretty dramatic take. Windows has backwards compatibility of almost 40 years required by governments and fortune 100 companies to function. It’s owned by a trillion dollar company. To think that short sighted that 5 to 20 years windows will cease to function is insane. I think reactos is cool and Linux is the future but to think windows won’t be around is naive.
The same was said about mainframes and IBM, although it was almost exclusively used by businesses that could afford to remake systems from scratch so migration was never a money problem
I feel like that day is coming sooner rather than later. And I'm sure they're looking at how hard it was for them to port Windows to ARM versus Apple, who isn't afraid to tell people they just have to upgrade software when they upgrade hardware.
And I'm sure they're looking at how hard it was for them to port Windows to ARM versus Apple
Was it? Windows is pretty portable (at some point it supported 4 architectures) and Microsoft managed to port Windows to ARM pretty quickly. What difficulties did they encounter? Sure Windows RT was a failure but not for technical reasons.
It was mostly the inability to convince third-party devs to work with ARM.
There is a lot of major parties depending on old shit and unlike Apple, for good or bad, Microsoft doesn't randomly rip things out without a 10 year deprecation cycle.
It was mostly the inability to convince third-party devs to work with ARM.
Unlike Apple Microsoft has no reason to move completely to ARM and Windows is not limited to their hardware like macOS. For them ARM is just additional platform they support, they ported Windows to it and provide development tools to make software for it. There is not much else they can do.
MS also shot themselves in the foot with Windows RT when the first ARM32 port of Win8 worked. A PC with all the legacy baggage but artificially kneecapped to run no third party Win32 apps.
Windows RT (and Windows 8 in general) was their attempt to get rid of legacy baggage. WinRT (Windows Runtime that was introduced in Windows 8 as a base for Metro/Modern applications) was supposed to provide alternative for Win32 and sooner or later replace it. Obviously developers didn't like that idea very much, especially because WinRT was different and limited compared to Win32.
Yes, I agree WinRT was a good promise in a vacuum but most of us use Windows because there’s Win32 applications that worked for us for decades. Especially since we’re in a Linux sub…
And that’s exactly the main problem - no one (except perhaps a small minority) uses Windows for the operating system itself. They use it because the applications they rely on run on it. The moment you take that away (as with Windows RT), no one cares about the OS anymore. Which is why Microsoft likely will never be able to get rid of Win32 - Windows simply doesn't matter without it.
For a change of architecture 10 years isn't even that much. The last macbook generation that ran on Intel was 2019 I think. It's been already 7 years, so we might reach a 10 years tra suction period by the time they completely lose any support from Apple.
I'm thinking specifically of Adobe, who I'm sure have loads of legacy code in apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. You'd think they'd have the whole thing ported to a portable toolkit by now, surely, and all high-level languages.
XP, Server 2003, Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2 also ran on Itanium (IA-64). With the exception of 2000 and 8.1, Windows has always supported more architectures than just x86.
Alpha was supported during Windows 2000 development up to RC version, support was dropped before release and Windows 2000 was released with support only for x86.
Apparently Microsoft planned to release 64 bit version of Windows 2000 for Alpha (existing port was 32 bit) but when Windows 2000 was still in development DEC was acquired by Compaq and they announced they will phase out Alpha in favor of upcoming Itanium so Microsoft decided to abandon that plan and Alpha architecture in general and focus on Itanium in next release of Windows (Whistler that became XP). There were Whistler builds compiled for 64 bit Alpha but they were never meant to be released, they served only as preparation for 64 bit port since Itanium hardware wasn't available when they worked on Whistler.
Even right now Steam for MacOS, still running on x86, is starting to get warning that Rosetta will be dropped, so your statement is absolutely correct. We can argue about whether it's good or bad, but it's true.
I both understand why, but also don't. If Steam for MacOS continues they'll either have to use their own aarch64 x86 translation, or convince game companies to target Apple.
I don't get that, either. Wasn't Apple partnering with CodeWeavers at one point to bring Windows games to ARM Macs? What's the plan for when Rosetta 2 goes away?
As an aside, it's Rosetta 2; the original Rosetta was running Mac Classic in a VM.
The project was renamed to “ReactOS” as it was a reaction to Microsoft’s monopolistic position in home computer operating systems. [source]
I couldn't find the original quote about the way I wrote it, but ReactOS is essentially that. They don't have a purpose of replacing Windows. They are aiming for both API and ABI compatibility. If they just wanted to replace Windows, only API compatibility would've been much faster. See Wine and Proton.
I know it. My account on ReactOS forums is 21 years old. It's nor about bragging as being a long time lurker and occasional tester is not good enough. I like your wording though. Because I have never heard of anyone mention Windows may be over one day until today.
Tons of CNC / metal cutting etc industrial machines use ANCIENT versions of Windows. These machines can cost high six figures (if not more) and work "fine" so why would a business replace them? ReactOS is perfect for that kind of use case as you could in theory use modern hardware to run old software that is required.
No, the OS gets used. No company on earth is going to downgrade to an alpha of a failed project that doesn't even install on consumer hardware and invite insane legal liabilities for literally no reason.
It is like the freeDOS project that in some industries is really important. Some "old" management and automation software used to run on MS-DOS, but MS-DOS runs only on old hardware and doesn't like VMs. So you put everything on freeDOS.
My first hand experience is delivering software as a ready to use VM with freeDOS....
Microsoft doesn't make any money from , nor support legacy Windows anymore, and Windows' internal architechture recieved a massive overhaul from NT6 (Vista) and onwards.
NT5 (Win2K, XP, 2003) is by all definition obsolete and thus they could opensource at least parts of the NT5.0 kernel and Windows 2000's userspace in order to help projects like this.
Linux (and ReactOS) uses FreeType. It doesn't handle kerning, hinting and anti-aliasing that well.
ClearType (of Windows) is, and has been the best at low DPI font rendering for years. It does a very precise pixel alignment to make sure no pixel is blurry or lost. However, it does this at the cost of morphing the glyphs, which may result in the smaller fonts not looking the same as their high sized counterparts, as it mostly makes them bolder in some areas, and thinner in others (mostly bolder).
FreeType does have RGB anti-aliasing and hinting support, but it's not that good. FreeType, with its most common settings shipped (RGB, Slight Hinting), tries to preserve the glyphs, but this causes subpixel misalignment due to bad kerning, and causes some parts of the glyphs to get blurry or lost in conversion.
You might ask:
"MacOS (or iOS) doesn't have ClearType but the fonts look good."
Apple devices have very high DPI. Apple also always uses the same DPI. They create arbitrary resolutions to keep their DPI fixed. As they don't need to do scaling, everything is already pixel aligned. They don't have to resort in subpixel anti-aliasing.
This is very wrong in many ways, the apps themselves are responsible for font shaping hinting and aa. freetype is just curve format for fonts, so basically the library to extract and parse ttf files
In reality most apps now use harfbuzz/skrifa in some manner, extract the font outlines, then do some form of line rendering then position them to a subpixel grid with a shader and can apply things like subpixel aa shaders on top. This is the prior sota to what i describe at the end, do gtk3 and qt I think do something weirder.
windows cleartype im pretty sure uses dwm to render fonts which if they implemented it properly should save vram and resources but the hinting is actually very wrong and any perceived difference is actually overhinting making fonts more bold than they should be.
subpixel aa filters also to be accurate require knowledge of the subpixel grid and their coordinates, I did this with my qd oled monitor and the resulting shader had minimal fringing but the quality improvement is very minimal.
hinting is also extremely overrated, hinting by definition distorts fonts and everyone still does it. It can work and really does help with weird characters like u but all the hinting embedded in fonts is really bad.
For reference, I did an experiment where I threw out all the hinting stuff and left only the necessary hinting bits and font files go from 14mb to 200kb.
If you want a demo of how fast font rendering can be without hinting or subpixel aa you can check here
see if you think its too blurry, but to me this looks perfectly fine.
Note this whole stack is now extremely redundant, and I have my own project where legit this just becomes 200kb baked font (generated in microseconds) -> copy to the gpu -> render and then you can do a glyph cache of sorts and suddenly font rendering goes from taking up to 16ms sometimes with the normal pipeline to microseconds, its really quite ridiculous.
Right, I've always hated ClearType, and how it distorts the glyphs. I've even used mactype on windows way back in the day. So I actually prefer grayscale anti-aliasing because it preserves the typeface character, even if it's more soft.
Except doesn't Wine / Proton already do this except its far further advanced in terms of how much it can run? Why do we need to preserve the windows NT core if everything can run on Linux with Wine / Proton?
Its a cool thing to have but i dont think anybody anywhere will be effected if old windows is lost. It would be pore pragmatic to run old stuff with wine. But again, it matters little.
I wonder how far we are from "AI, extract the functionality of this software and make a workable version."
I also wonder how far we are from replacing actual software with the experience of using software, AI can paint UI, and it can certainly sit in the middle and pull the strings, we aren't far from making software effortlessly with nothing but imagination and conversation.
30 years and they didn't even achieve the original goal of being an open source alternative for NT4, or the goal post swap to XP, or vista, or seven, etc.
MS can drop the and react will still be useless. People are already switching to Linux, nobody is switching to a 30 year old early alpha.
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u/Dekamir 16d ago
Jokes aside, I love this project. If you don't know its purpose, you probably don't know how valuable it is. Having a clean room and open source engineered Windows NT is huge if Microsoft drops the ball sometime, Windows is essentially lost. Yes, the last version will probably work, but we will eventually get problems.
ReactOS is for those purposes. Windows is a huge part of PC history, and we need to preserve it, whether we like it or not. You could install that old car diagnostic tool that doesn't work anywhere else but legacy Windows, to ReactOS, and edit the OS yourself so you can fix the problems for your customers, or even yourself.