11/14/2023 0 Comments Reactos progress![]() So, what do you do if there's a security problem with one of the proprietary drivers you're running? In short, the ReactOS folks don't have the manpower to implement a bunch of open source drivers for common hardware on top of the NT kernel infrastructure, so they're hoping to leverage existing drivers - a tactic that is not good news for the security-minded user. Well, most manufacturers are going to stop supporting their drivers for Windows XP very soon, if they haven't already stopped supporting the hardware completely. ![]() Let's assume they succeed 100% with this goal. ReactOS has the goal of eventually supporting the kernel driver infrastructure of Windows XP enough that drivers written for the Windows XP kernel can run unmodified on ReactOS. So ReactOS has many fewer engineers working on it, and the work they have to do is much harder than the work Linux's engineers have to do. Reverse engineering work takes more time than forward engineering work, and since Linux is open source and Windows XP is not, almost all of the work that goes into it is forward engineering. ReactOS has a lot of grueling low-level reverse engineering work to do, before it can start to become a more stable, feature-complete OS. Comparing Xorg (the display server) on GNU/Linux to ReactOS, Xorg is orders of magnitude more stable, faster, more featureful, and can much better support the Wine API than can ReactOS's display subsystem. It'll crash more often and more readily than Windows 95 or Windows 3.1.īy comparison, GNU/Linux is an extremely stable operating system on the whole, with well-tested, fully-featured infrastructure to support fast 2D and 3D graphics robust networking excellent multi-tasking and multi-processor scheduling and world-class, advanced filesystem drivers. ReactOS will flat-out crash your system almost on a whim, for doing almost anything.With as few developers as there are to work on the project, I don't expect this to change any time soon.Īctually, Wine running on GNU/Linux with X11 is a better replacement for Windows XP than ReactOS is! You may question this logic, but stick with me here: Device drivers in ReactOS, as well as the kernel's overall architecture, are greatly simplified (simplified = lacking features and support for basic stuff) compared to Windows XP, or even Windows 2000. ![]() The primary area where ReactOS is lacking is in the very lowest levels of the operating system: the kernel. ![]() It may never be, but it certainly isn't now, as of April 2014. No, ReactOS is not a viable replacement for Windows XP. Is ReactOS a stable, functional replacement for Windows XP? I've had problems getting various bits of Windows software running happily out-of-the-box on WINE, so is using that just a matter of trying harder? To estimate the danger of inaction, what are the odds of a catastrophic security failure being revealed in Windows XP?įeel free to create the ReactOS tag for me. As such, the attraction of (the idea of) ReactOS is that it just drops in and replaces WinXP, whereas a non-binary-compatible OS (such as a Linux variant running WINE) would require re-installation and re-configuration of the user software. Even though "ReactOS 0.3.16 is still in alpha stage, meaning it is not feature-complete and is recommended only for evaluation and testing purposes", WINE has been around more than 20 years. I've already paid once for an operating system, so a free-as-in-beer operating system replacement of the OS will make retaining this low-end hardware viable.Īs an example, one of the computers I'm concerned about is a EEE PC 1000H, which has a 80GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM and a 1.6GHz Atom N270.įrom what I can tell, ReactOS and WINE provide code to each other to broaden and deepen their compatibility with Windows, so I presume that if a program will run under WINE, it will run under ReactOS, and vice versa. However, netbooks and low-powered laptops and desktops that don't have a lot of memory or CPU capability won't survive with all the extra bloat of the more recent Microsoft OSes. More powerful machines could reasonably be "upgraded" to Windows Vista. There's a lot of Windows-specific software installed on these machines, and that locks the machines into a binary-compatible environment. As Windows XP is now out of support and any freshly discovered vulnerabilities will not be addressed, it's time to retire Windows XP from my Internet-connected computers. ![]()
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