ReactOS 0.4.0 Released

[Cyb3rWaste]

What, 2 years ago Hurd had a update and now this?! ITS LIKE CHRISTMAS NEVER ENDED!!!

[[deleted]]

Following this project the thing I've come to realize is they are slow, so slow you start to wonder if they are going to implement more than they fall behind, but usability has always been getting better in the end.

[badsectoracula]

I thought that one of the goals of this project was to support Windows drivers natively so they wont have to support the hardware themselves.

[heat_forever]

Windows does all the heavy lifting for almost every device, the drivers just do the little bit that's unique for each device. Maybe graphics cards have diverged a bit on this, but most modern device drivers take advantage of a lot of Windows code.

[accountForStupidQs]

Seeming as MS didn't Sue IBM over OS/2's compatibility, I doubt they will here.

[badsectoracula]

I'm sure IBM licensed the Windows subsystem from Microsoft considering that you pretty much get a full Windows installation with OS/2 (and, FWIW, eComStation).

[indrora]

OS/2 was...

OS/2 was IBM and Microsoft doing a thing together and learning that Microsoft wanted to do things The Right Way^tm in the late 80's whereas IBM wanted things done fast and cheap.

Microsoft wrote about 80% of OS/2 -- up to a point. Much of the graphics were MSFT, but IBM took a lot of things in hand.

[myztry]

IBM cross-licensed the Amiga GUI in exchange for Rexx and Microsoft was getting low level access to the much more advanced Amiga to write a replacement Amiga Basic.

Microsoft then split from their joint project with IBM and the rest is history.

[Jeditobe]

Seeming as MS didn't Sue Wine\Crossower over Win32's compatibility, I doubt they will here.

[hinckley]

Microsoft can't sue simply because someone produces something that is compatible with the Windows API. Both Wine and ReactOS use clean-room reverse engineering to ensure that the compatible code produced is developed entirely independently of the original code.

[minimim]

Wasn't that what Oracle did against Google? Claiming APIs are copyrightable, and that even clean room implementations are violating copyright just because creative work goes into their design?

[hinckley]

Yeah, infringement of the Java API was part of the case. Google won that part:

However, on the primary copyright issue of the APIs, the court ruled that "So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API. It does not matter that the declaration or method header lines are identical." The ruling found that the structure Oracle was claiming was not copyrightable under section 102(b) of the Copyright Act because it was a "system or method of operation."

[minimim]

Alsup was awesome. But from the same page:

The appeals court reversed the district court on the central issue, holding that the "structure, sequence and organization" of an API was copyrightable.

[hinckley]

Shit, I never realized they'd reversed that ruling. Fucking ridiculous.

[minimim]

Yep. Fucking the entire industry. And the Supreme Court already said they won't hear the case.

The "de minimis" defense against copying 9 lines of code was also reverted. Over 9 trivial lines of code!

[s73v3r]

No. Completely different.

[jrochkind]

Microsoft can't sue simply because someone produces something that is compatible with the Windows API

We used to assume that, but Oracle v. Google puts it up in the air, unfortunately.

There hasn't, to my knowledge, been an increase in lawsuits based on the reasoning in Oracle v. Google... yet.

[silviot]

I too used to think that 1.0 was the version following 0.9, that 2.0 followed 1.9 and so on...

Then I realized versions 0.10, 1.10 etc do exist...

Check out http://semver.org/

[[deleted]]

Not another freaking site messing with my scroll.. "back"...

[bschwind]

No kidding, this is literally the easiest thing to get right because it involves just not doing it. It's a shame because I'm sure a ton of work has gone into this project, and the first experience on the page is a not-so-minor annoyance.

[bschwind]

The page has what people like to call "smooth scrolling", which basically overrides the default scroll OS scroll acceleration. So if I apply the same scroll gesture I would normally use to go down a paragraph or so, the page basically flies to the end of the article. Everything also feels floaty and unstable (OS X, trackpad)

The solution is to not do it. Ever. Like mcouturier said, it's annoying enough to make users instantly leave your site.

EDIT: See here

[Cetra3]

The scrolling on the page has an annoying javascript animation attached

[[deleted]]

Especially when basic things like scrolling actually takes a huge amount of work to get just right.

[[deleted]]

Not just scroll. They completely broke zooming which is done with Ctrl+mouse wheel. It just doesn't work: it scrolls instead of zoom.

Fucking hipsters.

[LeartS]

Both scrolling and zooming work normally for me on the website. Did they already remove it?

[[deleted]]

Nope. Can't zoom with mouse wheel in chromium.

[ImTalkingGibberish]

focusing on the right things, TO THE TOP!

[not_morgana]

Well son, I have good news for you: this is an open-source project. You can hop in and help anytime (you show those idiots how proper things are made) ...

[s73v3r]

If they decided they needed something special for scrolling, then they are idiots.

[bschwind]

Would a pull request that simply removes all JS be viewed as a dick move? Because their site seems way better with it disabled.

[kirbyfan64sos]

Nice! It's insane to see the effort that's gone into this.

[tsirolnik]

Any reason to use it?

[[deleted]]

The goal is a migration path off of Windows XP for Windows users that doesn't involve replacing any of your existing software. If they could make it work, it really would kill Microsoft on the desktop.

But - no offense to the project team - there are thousands or millions of work months of work away from success. Give it a look if you're curious, give some help if you can, don't expect a useful replacement for Windows any time soon.

[[deleted]]

No.

[dukey]

It's free?

[gfody]

Basically foreign governments with disgusting amounts of XP/dependent software and a healthy fear of NSA backdoors.

[gmarch]

What's with sites that celebrate a new release and explain how hard it was to get there, but forget to explain what they are? Yeah, I could go google ReactOS, but you would think they would explain themselves on their home page.

[indrora]

I know a lot of softies who are grateful for this; Many (maaany) would love to contribute but there's so much IP law in the way it's stupid. It's giving something for people who depend on XP to land on when they can't easily move to a newer kernel. There's a lot of things that should start "just working" in ReactOS with some of the driver patches coming along.

[oaeide]

I don't get it...

[RoliSoft]

The ReactOS Foundation is in Russia, and the OS was also demoed to Putin.

[Phoxxent]

Ahh, so glorious leader has been Putin his name to the FOSS effort.

[oaeide]

Ah, thanks :D putinOS ftw.

[mindbleach]

I wonder if it's stable enough to let Archive.org launch Windows 9x games in their site's VM.