[HN Gopher] ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Manages to Run Some Ba...
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ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Manages to Run Some Battlefield Games
Author : marcodiego
Score : 108 points
Date : 2022-04-02 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
| Koshkin wrote:
| Ever since upgrading to Windows 11 on my relatively modern
| desktop, I have been tempted to replace it with ReactOS. I do not
| expect the 100% stability or compatibility, but my question is,
| what should I expect from it as a "daily driver" in a home (i.e.
| non-critical) setting? I do not intend to use any software from
| Microsoft (which is known to sometimes rely on some undocumented
| features and assumptions).
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| Don't want to be that guy, but honestly, what you are
| describing is exactly what Linux has to offer. Its a modern OS
| with modern tools unlike ReactOS, and its only downside is that
| it is not compatible with all Windows software, which you seem
| to be okay with. I recommend you give Linux a try, specifically
| Linux Mint.[0]
|
| [0]: https://linuxmint.com/
| Shadonototra wrote:
| Linux Mint is the one i always recommend for linux beginners
| NexRebular wrote:
| But why go to linux when alternatives are available?
|
| FreeBSD is a great option for a modern stable OS that can run
| pretty much everything linux can. Desktop system is also easy
| to install via DarkMate[0] on vanilla FreeBSD or then go to
| e.g. GhostBSD[1] that has all the bells and whistles from GUI
| installation onwards.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/broozar/installDesktopFreeBSD/
|
| [1]: https://ghostbsd.org
| sreevisakh wrote:
| Most of these projects - ReactOS, Haiku and even Hurd badly
| needs a 1.0 release. That would get them enough developer
| attention to achieve their more ambitious goals faster. They
| should aim for simple bare-metal booting reliably on 1.0. Get
| this done at least on hardware with open specifications. With
| this in mind, take them into beta with the intention of
| stabilizing bootup.
|
| Haiku seems to be headed that way, though.
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Developer mindset is a finicky thing. Haiku has been around
| for 20 years, actually boots on large amount of hardware, now
| even has ports for Qt, GTK, X11, Wine and loads of other
| applications people are already familiar with. This year I
| handed over old Acer Aspire to a friend in need, slapped
| Haiku on it and he has a working computer. By all fairness,
| Haiku is already actually 'useable'.
|
| But majority of indie OS mindset was suddenly captured over
| past couple of years by SerenityOS. It is a good project in
| itself, but goes to show 1.0 does not matter for capturing
| Dev mindshare.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| A lot of these projects require the rare resources of people
| willing to do the work for free.
|
| HaikuOS is a hobby project, it doesn't have the industry
| relevance to be serious enough for a solid release.
|
| Gnu Hurd's only benefit is having a micro kernel. Minix, QNX,
| and possibly other actively developers OS's have that market.
| It hasn't been updated in 6 years and will fade. There's
| already Linux anyway.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Unless you're content with a severely outdated browser and
| notepad for your productivity, ReactOS is not even close to a
| daily driver.
|
| In my opinion, for production use it's currently best suited
| for use as a free virtual machine for old software that no
| longer runs natively on Windows. If enough APIs are covered, it
| can be an excellent replacement for an XP VM to run some
| ancient tools.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Do you mean that Firefox will not install or work in ReactOS?
| opencl wrote:
| Only the Firefox releases that supported Windows XP work on
| ReactOS, which was dropped in Firefox 53 in 2017.
| 0des wrote:
| Stop saying shit like "open source windows". Not only does it
| undersell the accomplishment here but it is a low brow way to
| bring the wrong kind of heat and attention.
|
| Michael should know better than to publish that headline. Is this
| what we should expect from phoronix for 2022 onward?
| squarefoot wrote:
| I would expect even better compatibility in the future as they
| work closely with the WINE team. Months ago I played Far Cry 5 at
| medium settings on my AMD 4300GE (no external GPU) using WINE and
| it ran perfectly: graphics, sound, everything.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| I've tried to set up some modern games in ubuntu with wine for
| a friend and it was pretty much impossible. Old games, yes, new
| games, a nightmare.
|
| That was my experience at least.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Note that wine in ubuntu repositories is quite old. Try with
| a specialized tool like bottles.
| lostmsu wrote:
| What's the TL;DR; setup for bottles on Ubuntu? Get bottles
| from official Ubuntu repository, and let it install latest
| Wine version?
| wongarsu wrote:
| I just realized that ReactOS is only 5-7 years younger then the
| Linux kernel. Both projects that feel like they have always been
| there. And while ReactOS will never catch up with the current
| version of Windows, Microsoft has made ReactOS and Wine a lot
| more important in recent years when they decided that it wasn't
| worth it for them to keep backwards compatibility forever.
| richardfey wrote:
| ReactOS might become a real alternative to Windows for the older
| version of me, and I hope it will be ready by then! If they open
| up a "bughunting Friday" for games I might participate for the
| sake of old games conservation.
| grishka wrote:
| A possibly dumb question. I know that ReactOS developers work by
| observing what the real Windows does, documenting that, and then
| reimplementing from those docs, instead of straight reverse
| engineering. This is supposed to avoid legal trouble. But
| wouldn't it be better to take a Windows installation and start
| replacing components, one by one, with open-source
| reimplementations, until there is none of the original
| proprietary Windows left?
|
| Or, to rephrase it: what would happen if I took Windows XP and
| replaced the kernel (ntoskrnl.exe) with the one from ReactOS?
| Would that not be the ultimate binary and API compatibility test?
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| I feel like showing off a game from 2002 comes off like "anti
| news". Like look how slowly we've progressed.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| What exactly does ReactOS provide that Wine or some emulation
| environment on Linux can't?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > What exactly does ReactOS provide that Wine or some emulation
| environment on Linux can't?
|
| Support for NT kernel interfaces. This allows drivers written
| for Windows to work under ReactOS. Most of the userspace should
| work just fine on Wine and Linux.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Okay, that makes a huge difference lol. I always felt like
| the project seemed pointless and unsuccessful, but a free os
| that can run existing NT drivers is exciting.
| ecef9-8c0f-4374 wrote:
| Windows driver support
| Koshkin wrote:
| Problem is, Windows is, and seems to become more and more,
| with each version, something of a moving target - and so may
| be (are?) device drivers, which begs the question whether one
| can only use devices from ten years ago or such...
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| On another thread an HN comment complained that Win32 was
| becoming standard API for games instead of Linux native, thanks
| to Wine.
|
| The reply kind of opened my eyes. If Wine/ReactOS do continue the
| trend of becoming better more stable platform than Windows
| itself, thanks to Microsoft hell bent on destroying their
| reputation, eventually, Wine/ReactOS can even Embrace-Extend-
| Extinguish Windows itself.
|
| A man can dream..
| smoldesu wrote:
| I really do believe it's possible. 10 years ago it would have
| been a pipe dream, but the dedication people put into making
| Wine and DXVK function properly is nothing short of astounding.
| Aside from high-performance studio software like NLEs and DAWs,
| you can pretty much expect everything to "just work" through
| Wine these days. From Bonzi Buddy to Battlefield, nothing seems
| to escape it's compatibility.
| jchw wrote:
| We need to implement WM_POINTER* support in the input stack
| somehow, though. If we had that, Clip Studio Paint would work
| fine with a graphics tablet. Probably even Photoshop.
|
| Some hacking on Wine was able to get SAI2 running, but SAI1
| is elusive due to the design of Wine's wintab32
| implementation; XI2 events only go to the window that is
| being interacted with, whereas wintab32 events can and often
| are pumped to hidden background windows (for reasons unknown
| to me, though I guess if the window is on a different event
| loop it probably helps to mitigate events lagging. WM_POINTER
| magically coalesces events when the loop is tied up, and lets
| you grab the coalesced events, so it has less of this
| problem.)
|
| I've thought about it a lot, but... The Wine input stack is
| fairly complicated and I haven't grokked it all. I do have
| some projects I made for (clean room) examining behavior of
| the WM_POINTER events though. (Also, testing for this will
| _suck_.)
| GranPC wrote:
| Something I found pretty interesting, in that same line of
| thought, is that the VKD3D developer apparently added a
| specific hack [0] to work around a game bug that causes heavy
| stuttering even on Windows systems, effectively making
| Wine/Proton a better platform to play this game than Windows
| itself.
|
| [0]; https://github.com/HansKristian-
| Work/vkd3d-proton/commit/f39...
| collegeburner wrote:
| I thought graphics driver vendors often did the same for big
| titles?
| johnny22 wrote:
| they do, but this solution affects all cards (or hopefully
| does) across all card driver versions.
|
| One example is folks stuck with the legacy nvidia driver.
| If the game can still run, they can still get fixes this
| way. It's nice when we can sidestep the process of waiting
| on nvidia or whoever in the various closed source drivers
| on both linux and windows.
| rubenbe wrote:
| I did notice this first hand when trying trying to play an
| older game under Linux natively (Enemy Territory: Quake Wars).
| The Linux binaries refused to function (IIRC due to
| incompatible user space ABIs), but the Windows binaries worked
| perfectly using Wine.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Perhaps those creating developer tools etc can aid this
| scenario by making their "cross platform" story
| Linux/MacOS/ReactOS or Linux/MacOS/Linux.Wine, rather than
| Linux/MacOS/Windows.
|
| This might also facilitate developing cross-platform support
| for the Win32 option in a VM rather than on a live Windows
| machine -- e.g. a ReactOS VM. Besides avoiding licensing
| issues, some kinds of developer on-boarding could be
| facilitated by just pointing them to an available VM, rather
| than a gauntlet of environment setup.
|
| In a sense, all this points toward an alternate reference
| implementation for Win32, or at least some subset, for some
| purposes. And/or a possible phrase: "ReactOS-First" development
| on Win32.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Yea well for business users of Windows in the enterprise it's
| very attractive to have a service and support contract with
| them.
|
| On the other hand if ReactOS and or wine try to do the same
| thing then we could see some shift but I don't think it is
| likely.
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Eventually, there will be businesses offering support
| contracts. And if history is any indication, MS cannot out-
| litigate that future. RH/IBM rose despite SCO lawsuite. If
| the code is there and it works, people will make use of it.
| choeger wrote:
| Now wait for pretty much every game to come with kernel-level
| drivers ("anti cheat").
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I'm really after letting ReactOS be useful for a boring office
| environment, has anyone been able to achieve this yet?
| emteycz wrote:
| Why not Linux?
|
| I'd worry about stability and security in business context.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Why more monoculture? The Linux driver situation is already
| bad enough, but it is even more terrible that it's
| practically the ONLY operating system which has some hardware
| support.
| emteycz wrote:
| I support alternative open source OSs as much as I can, but
| monoculture or not, using ReactOS for business - especially
| connected to the internet - is asking for problems. Turns
| out that's not the intention anyways.
|
| There is plenty of Linux-certified hardware as well as
| support plans.
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| What is the Linux driver situation and how is it bad in
| ways that other non-Windows FOSS OSes would be able to
| mitigate?
| lostmsu wrote:
| Linux does not have a stable ABI for drivers.
|
| Presumably ReactOS uses Windows driver ABI, so you can
| just use Windows drivers?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I dont mean for a literal business, just for personal use,
| but being able to run stuff like MS Office and such would be
| nice. Maybe even do Windows development on it for web things.
| I like the idea of an OS not bloated by "telemetry"
| basically. I hate tweaking Windows beyond the norm, it breaks
| things typically.
| striking wrote:
| Think of ReactOS as a replacement for Windows XP. The
| selling point is more that it has compatibility with things
| like NT-based drivers, rather than being the future of
| compatibility with Windows. I have heard that you can set
| up Office 365 on Linux under Wine with a few tricks
| applied.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I've got office 365 on linux. Legally. It is buggy and
| slow.
| alar44 wrote:
| I just run Windows in a VM if I need to do things with
| Office that I can't do with the Office for the web
| products, which isn't very often.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| You can run MS Office in Linux via Wine.
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