ReactOS

Could this be the future of Windows?

  by Robert Menes

Let's face it: I'm not a fan of Windows. I never was, and never will be. Why? Crashes, buffer overflows galore, lack of security, and the oh so famous BSOD.

Yet I have to support it. So I did have to get used to it.

When I started using Wine on my Linux box to test some Windows software, I discovered ReactOS, and saw that it shared some libraries with Wine. I also saw that it reproduced the Windows look and feel, but did so ... [More] without any of the flaky Microsoft code under the hood.

That's right, this is a completely different beast here.

I've since downloaded and tried several of the alpha versions, and have been pleasantly surprised. Even from the start, ReactOS plays fair, listens to you (instead of you listening to it), and ran a good amount of Windows software right out of the box. Games that support OpenGL (e.g. Quake, Unreal) ran great, and with some of the recent work done, more complex applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org now run with little trouble!

Best of all, the system requirements for ReactOS are very low; a 32MB system will happily boot ReactOS, and the entire installation on my test machine (an old Pentium 120 laptop with 48 MB RAM and a 1.2GB hard drive) took up a slim 50MB. Most of the hardware on the laptop wasn't supported (the sound system wasn't recognized, but ROS currently doesn't have full sound support anyway), but what worked does so with gusto.

This certainly is a great project in the works. An open source Windows-like environment for those who either don't want to or are unable to run Linux; ReactOS is one project I am truly going to watch. [Less]

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