r/reactos • u/j8t1090 • Sep 13 '26
reactOS should have been the big FOSS os project, not linux?
I kind of wish a project like reactOS had become the main FOSS windows competitor and not linux. a decently big FOSS os with a hybrid kernel would be nice.
windows diverges from unix in a few ways that are good, while linux inherits more unixy-ness. linux is built to run on a lot of different machines, windows is made for desktop computers. linux has a lot of features that make it incredibly powerful and versatile, but they can be kind of cumbersome. I often wonder if something that's built with the assumption that its being used on a desktop could be more streamlined.
In my ideal dream world we would have reactOS as the main FOSS competitor to windows, and linux as a super modular thing you can use for things like kiosks and weird DIY projects.
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u/Math_Science_Geek Sep 13 '26
Windows is trash bro. Starting with the kernel
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u/the123king-reddit Sep 13 '26
It’s really not.
In fact, NT is almost itself a clone of another OS called VMS. VMS still exists and is supported
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u/Alarming-Estimate-19 Sep 13 '26
If there's even one thing worth keeping, or that's good about Windows, it's precisely its kernel.
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u/mooky1977 Sep 13 '26
The only part of the windows dev team not filled with numpties. At least historically. I wouldn't be surprised though if the Microsoft management has tried to enshittify it over the last decade though.
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u/SebbiUltimate Sep 13 '26
Dave Cutler's work is excellent. The recently added bloat nowadays is what makes it trash.
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u/Patient-Tech Sep 13 '26
True, but does it have to be? As much as I dislike new MS, I still have a soft spot for Win2k. Things were simpler then, hardware wasn’t as powerful and spyware wasn’t really a thing.
What if we took that old base, and just made it more compatible with new software. Kinda like react is trying to do?
Sure, all software has engineering trade offs but I think it’s a bit premature to write it off before even trying.
How many people could appreciate a PC that just does the thing. The OS is a background idea, only there to help you get to where you’re going.
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u/j8t1090 Sep 14 '26
it actual has some advantages compared to the linux kernel. linux uses a monolithic kernel while windows has a hybred kernel. this allows windows to have fewer drivers run in kernel mode. Because linux has a monolithic kernel it has a lot more stuff running as root and therefore a larger attack surface. windows has a lot wrong with it but by bashing every aspect of it in this chauvinistic way the FOSS community prevents itself from copying what's good about windows.
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u/Independent_Cat_5481 Sep 18 '26
I admit this experience can vary from person to person, mainly depending on the hardware. But the hybrid kernel model of windows has given so much more grief in missing drivers or incorrect drivers and having to sort that out. Just yesterday I installed windows on a laptop that had been running linux with no hardware issues, and now I had no wifi adapter. I wasn't in a situation I could access ethernet at the moment so I had to research, find and download the correct drivers on another device, and transfer it over to get internet access.
Outside of GPUs my experience with linux has always been that it just recognises and works with the hardware, because it's built into the monolithic kernel.
Not saying this experience is completely universal, but just suggesting that the monolithic kernel can actually go a long way in terms of ease of use on the user experience side.
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u/rasvoja Sep 15 '26
Modern one is pure bloat. However version react OS does (about server 2003 or so) is rock solid and light
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u/Southern_Worker4102 Sep 15 '26
For the sake of god stop believing that you are forced to use the latest version of it
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u/ScrabCrab Sep 27 '26
I mean if you don't use at least a relatively recent version of it you're not getting security updates or app support anymore, so you kinda are forced to if you want to use Windows on a computer that isn't just a hobby machine
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u/JG_2006_C Sep 28 '26
The problem is the micosoft layet cake not the the os constuct i do love the unix like ways but it dont thinj windows is bad NT feels snapy just the slop since windows 10 runied it for me
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u/HappyDaddy1971 Sep 13 '26
Oh yes I would love that.
I absolutely love Linux, but I’m also very nostalgic for the Windows 2000 era.
I’d absolutely love to be able to relive that love with ReactOS, which would be fully usable on modern hardware and with today’s applications.
And it would be so easy to convince everyone (or almost everyone) to use it instead of whatever Microsoft has in store for us in the future.
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u/edjak53 Sep 13 '26
a big reason why linux could grow faster is because it was developed in a preexisting FOSS environment, the GNU userland packages and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the *BSD ones too
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u/boukej Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26
I think this comparison misses the point.
Linux and ReactOS are fundamentally different projects - comparing them is really comparing apples and oranges.
ReactOS should be judged on its own goals and its own progress. Linux’s development is not an explanation for ReactOS’s slow development - and bringing Linux into the comparison risks obscuring the real issue: after decades of development, ReactOS is still far from delivering on its original promise.
That is the main question. Not why Linux became successful, but why ReactOS has progressed so slowly.
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u/codeasm Sep 13 '26
Also, i remember my windows 98 computer and my dad gave me a disc that would have installed linux, corel linux to be exact, onto my machine. I failed to understand English and apparently corel linux and linux back then where a bit harder to install and use anyway. While i borked my windows install, using my dads computer to lookup how to install windows again (remmeber a time before google? I think i used startpage and lykos) anyway, while infound tge right commands to partition and format my harddisk so windows 98 se would reinstall again, i did saw some projects to theme windows 95 and 98 by replacing explorer.exe, and remmeber reading some foss ppl trying to recreate windows 95. Memory os fuzzy, and i did just look at the wiki. I guess i was intrigued but it all was to complex for me and just wanted windows to work again.
That corel linux box is still with me, and the idea of getting windows to work from freely available parts stuck with me for years. My best guess is, too many brains with ideas, so little time each of those brains had.
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u/earthman34 Sep 13 '26
There's a bunch of fundamental things wrong with this proposal.
When you talk about Linux, you have to understand Linux was never created as a Windows competitor, Windows didn't even really exist at the time, at least not the friendly GUI/Win 95 paradigm most people would think of. Linux was never about that and most Linux users could have cared less. Linux is Unix-like because it's a Unix clone, duplicating the filesystem architecture and design philosophy, as well as many of the commands and programs.
Windows never had anything to do with Unix. Windows grew as an application interface on top of MS-DOS, which was built off the architecture of CP/M, which has zero connection to Unix. Windows does not preserve or retain it's original architecture or design philosophies the way Unix-like OSes do. Windows 1 (and 2 and 3) were all program interfaces that ran essentially as applications. They didn't boot the system. Windows NT-based systems are completely different from the ground up than the 9x systems that grew from the old DOS systems. Subsequent systems are all NT-derived.
Microsoft is a massive machine, with unlimited money. Trying to position yourself in the past as a direct and solitary competitor would be like standing in front of a tornado. It didn't work for Be, it didn't work for Lindows (although they asked for it), and at one point Apple was essentially on it's knees as well. Nowadays Microsoft doesn't care about ReactOS that much because first of all, it's a micro userbase, irrelevant to their market, and functionally it's probably 20 years behind desktop Windows. It's not a threat to anything. Microsoft is losing interest in the traditional desktop OS business, they're much more interested in the "agentic" desktop, and their web services like Azure. From that standpoint ReactOS is irrelevant. ReactOS could never have functioned as a "FOSS alternative" to Windows for the simple reason that so much of Windows is proprietary/closed source, and can't be copied, de-compiled, or disassembled legally. You'd get wiped out in court. Microsoft did regard Linux as a threat, mainly because Ballmer was an idiot, but modern Windows has heavy Linux integration...meaning Microsoft no longer sees Linux as a serious or at least combatable threat. If 3-5% of desktop users have shifted to Linux over 20 years, they're not losing sleep over it. Linux is not a unitary product or organization. It's too diffuse to fight with, might as well embrace it, which is what they've done.
"Windows is made for desktop computers", eh? Well, Windows has run on everything from desktops to tablets, to phones, to POS devices, to massive datacenter servers, in a million different versions, in case you're not aware. Linux wasn't designed to run on anything other than Linus Torvald's desktop machine. The reason it runs on a million different devices is because it's not legally encumbered and anybody can take it and make it run on anything.
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u/User_Typical Sep 13 '26
I can barely imagine the lawsuits from MS if ReactOS reached parity with a current version of Windows, either in the present or the past.
The first Linux kernel arrived at a perfect point in time. The BSD's were still in the midst of a legal battle between Bell and the Regents of the Universities of California, and the outcome of that legal battle was still unclear.
The Linux kernel, released around the same time, was written from scratch (minus some ASM or bootbode from Minix?). I am totally abridging the story, but people started submitting their code the the Linux kernel because it was legally safe, compared to the BSD's.
If the BSD's had not been legally suspect back in the early 90's, we'd all be running FreeBSD or the like with excellent hardware support, and Linux might never have existed.
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u/MrBizzness Sep 13 '26
The windows nt kernel was adopted to run on pocket computers and smart phones. At the end of the day a kernel is nothing more than a resource coordinator and the GUI that user interacts with is the part that has assumptions on what it is going to run on. The GUI is also just an application that runs on top of the kernel. You can actually change the shell that windows loads. I have done that for kiosk computers that I've setup and wanted no way for people to do anything but use the one program I made. The development behind these various kernels are all a result of the human drama behind their creators.
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u/Francois-C Sep 13 '26
In my ideal dream world we would have reactOS as the main FOSS competitor to windows
That’s what I’ve always thought too—at least, provided ReactOS (which inevitably struggles with the challenges of reverse engineering) manages to achieve a level of programming quality comparable to Windows 7.
However, when you look at the landscape—with Microsoft on one side, likely viewing an open-source OS that lets users free themselves from their Windows 10, 11, and beyond with hostility; open-source developers heavily committed to Linux on the other; and the small ReactOS community and its handful of users somewhere in between—the odds of success are slim. Unless, that is, some countries decide to sink Microsoft as a way to punish the delirious American imperialism of the present administration...
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u/Own-Replacement8 Sep 13 '26
Unix has always been the darling of computer scientists, so I'm not surprised Linux is getting all the love. Still, I wish ReactOS got half as much love as Linux. I could see Linux using it like WSL to run Windows applications in a subsystem.