ReactOS 0.4.16 serves '90s Windows nostalgia with fewer bugs

If you're pining away for the days when Windows ran well on 64 MB of RAM, there's a new version of open source NT clone ReactOS promising easier installation and fewer bugs. ReactOS 0.4.16 was announced over the weekend after a year and a half of development, and its list of improvements is substantial. For those unfamiliar with …

[just4this]

Microsoft are helping out..

At the rate Win 11 is degrading, ReactOS will soon outperform it without having to improve.

[Lon24]

Proxmox ready

Just fired it up as a Proxmox VM. Define it as WinXP/Server2003 in the options and it just works. Well it had a hissy fit over installing drivers on reboot but works nevertheless and able to access the internet (not sure whether thats good so may disable it). A lot easier than installing real WinXP as a VM.

[david 12]

Re: Proxmox ready

Real WinXP ran rather slowly in a VM, due to heavy context switching. I wonder how React OS compares?

[david 12]

Real WinXP ran rather slowly in a VM, due to heavy context switching. I wonder how ReactOS compares?

[HellDeskJockey-ret]

Now that I'm retired

I've played with it off and on for years. Got an old system coming in and I might just try running it. It's a bit light for Debian.

[therobyouknow]

Will it install directly on real hardware now?

...Is the question.

[thames]

Tried it in a VM

I just installed it in KVM on Ubuntu using Virtual Machine Manager. When VMM asked for OS type, I selected "Generic or unknown OS". I gave it 4 GB of RAM. I accepted most defaults except for language and locale.

It installed just fine, and reasonably quickly, certainly much faster than I can remember Windows itself taking to install.

It basically looks more or less the same as I remember ReactOS being the last time I tried it a couple of years ago.

The applications in the "app store" seem to be quite out of date. Python was 3.4 (more than a decade old, current is 3.14), while Firefox was 52 (nearly a decade old, current is 154).

The default browser is Internet Explorer. When I tried to view The Register with it, it locked up and I had to reboot the VM (they seem to have gotten that part of the experience right).

The download was only 200 MB. If you want to give it a try, then you can install it is a VM such as KVM.

It doesn't interest me personally, beyond just trying it to see if it would even install.

I would not regard it as being ready for professional use. However, if you like to play with operating systems, then the bar to getting it running in a VM is very low.

[TReko]

Too late

Sadly, this project is 25 years too late.

If they'd continued the momentum from the early 2000's they could have become an alternative operating system. If they'd got too big, though, MS would have sued them.

Countries that don't like the USA were interested in it as an alternative - Putin was briefly interested in helping them in 2012

[Blackjack]

Honesty I feel bad for people who is working on this. Wine can run way more Windows stuff things that ReactOs does. Yes it needs Linux but running over Linux means way more hardware compatibility that ReactOs has.

[just4this]

I’m wondering if you could get away with ReactOs on lower spec hardware then needed for Wine on Linux.

[sskras]

Quoting Blackjack:

> Wine can run way more Windows stuff things that ReactOs does.

But Wine can't run kernel-mode drivers for your hardware. ReOS can, even if not flawlessly.