ReactOS: Can It Replace Windows?! 

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It's harder to get away from Google than it is Microsoft these days.

Windows 2000 is my favorite windows too, it’s nice and clean. No waste of screenspace. No background processes that slow down your machine. It’s windows as it’s supposed to be.

The limit for 32-bit colour at that resolution is because of the amount of "video" memory assigned to your VM. You can increase that.

The #1 problem with ReactOS (IMO) is that they seem to be stuck at the idea of targeting XP and not supporting anything post-XP. That means running most modern software on it is a real pain and its even harder to get it running on any kind of modern hardware (since it doesn't support WDDM and other hardware interfaces that modern drivers need)

Same here. My A4000T was my main machine until about 2005. It was such and amazing computer. I still miss it.

Still a winamp fan to this day. I've yet to find a replacement that meets or exceeds it in quality and features.

At the rate they're going ReactOS will be ready to go by 2121.

Windows 98 was also my reason for leaving my Amiga behind. And I agree, Windows 2000 was Microsoft's slickest Windows ever.

The programmers working on ReactOS are probably learning heaps, and that's a great outcome in itself. But when a project hasn't emerged from alpha status after a quarter of a century, you really need to reassess your goals. Medieval cathedrals were built over the course of several lifetimes, but that's not a sustainable project plan for a desktop operating system.

Microsoft has "1.3 million programmers" working on it but 20 to 30 year old bugs remain untouched...

Hopefully the ReactOS guys get an appreciation of how massive a task Windows is; the breath of device support is truly incredible.

Originally, it was Write. But it changed to Wordpad later and was more compatible with Word. For all of those who were clinging on to Write after the change to Wordpad, Microsoft even had a stub EXE called *write.exe* that just pointed to and opened Wordpad.

Windows 7 was my favorite desktop environment. I wish we could have just stayed on that, but with security/driver/api updates. I don't like what Microsoft is doing with the operating system at all anymore, though. Unfortunately, unlike productivity software, you can't just replace a game with another program and call it good. And most of my computer use is for gaming. WINE recently had a big update though, so I'm going to check that out...

I kind of wish they’d stuck with the 95/98 target, in retrospect. While obviously, since they intended a working drop-in replacement for the current Windows of the day, which is an NT based Windows, targeting NT made sense for them, I think because of the slow pace of development, it might have been more useful to target the older DOS shell versions. Basically, if they had made a free 98 replacement, the kernel work would be done, stable, and actually have MORE features than the original, by now, in the form of FreeDOS, and they could focus on the APIs specific to the shell. There are a lot of legacy applications that could benefit from a free 98 implementation, and, when they changed to targeting NT, there were still quite a lot of 98 installs in the wild. A thriving free 98 stack would probably be quite welcome in the open source world.

ReactOS looks interesting, but they were building it for decades and it's still not really stable or usable. Every time I look at it I get a feeling by the time it will run WinXP - Win 7 software nicely it will only be used for retro computing purposes. All the best wishes to devs though. Hope you're having fun reverse engineering all those proprietary OS subsystems :)

As a fun fact, ReactOS uses the same MSSTYLES format as XP, so you can actually pull the real Luna theme from the files of XP and plant it into the equivalent folder in a React installation, and it'll work! What surprised me is that the Luna theme's start button even displayed the ReactOS globe icon in place of the Windows flag when applied to React!

Mate, if you want higher resolutions and colours you need to give the VM more than 4MB of video memory.

13:46 It probably reports itself as Windows Server because you set it into Server mode. I'm pretty sure it normally reports as 5.1 SP3 otherwise, which is XP SP3.

I always loved the win2k visual too. The most elegant and clean among the NTs versions.

I created what was effectively a Start menu in the bottom left corner of the screen on the Macintosh Plus back in circa 1987. The Mac was being embedded as a kiosk interface for operating a laser rasterizing imaging machine that printed Gerber files for imaging the film which printed circuit boards are manufactured from. The Mac Plus OS had added hierarchical menus support and that facilitated taking a Start menu approach. So I beat Microsoft Windows 95 to this manner of GUI desktop by more than half a decade.

Wow! That beautiful, satisfying sound of your keyboard...

16:20 if you "steal" the XP default theme from either a repack or an XP installation online, you can actually install it onto ReactOS. The only thing that won't change is the start menu. Actually, all sorts of themes you can get online for XP work with this.

I had an Amiga 500, 2000 and a 4000. The original Quake by ID software was the game that finally made me switch from my Amiga to a PC

The task bar and the start button that Windows added in '95 were based on a piece of software called Dashboard for Windows that was available for Win 3.1 - a co-worker got it and we all installed it back in the early '90s.

ReactOS has come a long way considering the development scale

If ReactOS ever gets far enough that its usable for gaming, I will IMMEDIATELY replace Windows 10 on my PC. I daily drive Linux and love it but there's still that small handful of games I need Windows for.

The Windows 95 start menu and taskbar actually came from PCTools for Windows, a Windows 3 application that also had multiple desktops, multiple "offices" (groups of desktops), was multi-user and allowed you to password protect any file, desktop or office. As always, Microshaft copied what others had done before but not as well.

Also, I wanted to say that I put ReactOS in a Virtual Box from years and years ago and even in 2021, it's still the same thing with the same issues I had almost a decade ago

5:26 GNU hurd looooool the existance of that always cracks me up

I was also a HUGE Commodore fan and my primary machines up until around 1996 were various Amigas. I just recently ordered a Raspberry Pi 400 with which I plan to turn into a modern day Amiga.

Reactos was started back in 1996 , years before the leaks.

To fix your resolution, increase the Video RAM in the virtualbox

Can confirm that Windows still has Wordpad. Btw, interesting selection of programs in the app manager. GoG Galaxy? I wonder if Steam is there. Agat Emulator? I definitely did not expect to see an emulator of a soviet computer there.

33:00 Two billion testers? I guess that is us.

Really like the look of REACT os. Looking forwards to the release version !!!!!

27:18 The error message you got after installing the Firefox update is related to a feature introduced in Windows 7 called "API sets," which requires kernel level support in the Windows loader for that feature to work. I really hate the API sets feature in Windows because it tends to break applications that need to work across multiple versions of Windows. Import/export tables are no longer cleanly defined by the EXE/DLLs for any given application and there is no simple mechanism to resolve API set import references (i.e. it's somewhat magical). Your experience with more up to date Firefox builds is not unexpected.

Short answer: No, it can't. Not yet. Long answer: It would be great if it could and it's a fascinating project, but the people power required for it to be a Windows reimplementation ready for a production environment is just not there and progress moves very slowly. Right now, in many ways it's less than a half-baked Windows XP that runs on FAT or experimentally BTRFS and lacks a lot of features including driver support for a lot of things.

In the VirtualBox settings have you tried increasing the screen memory to get true colour in higher resolutions?

Great video. Thanks for the tour.

I find it interesting that items on the desktop are using the same icons that one of the default xfce4 icon themes do!

Right, given this a good hammering for a while and the experience is pretty much the same as Dan's. May revisit this project in a couple of years to see how things have progressed. Great effort by the team though, it's never going to be easy to replicate a Windows OS!

In that package manager I saw Glide Wrapper. I wonder if anyone got the first 3 Tomb Raider games to work using that in ReactOS.

I've run every Windows since 3.1, except server editions and ME, I can count on one hand the number of crashes I've had on one hand. Then one year for a class (when I decided to go back to school) the class recommended a Mac, I bought a Mac book had it crash at least 2 times a week. Brought it in for repair 15 times in one year, and the last time I brought it in when the warranty would have expired in less than a week and them repairing it would have meant they needed to extend the warranty for 3 months they told me it had water damage, but refused to show me the board and where the water damage was. I took it home looked it over, no water damage (I fixed cellphones for years at a major us wireless carrier not going say the name for then to get free advertising so I know what water and corrosion damage looks like.) I called the 800 number and told them to look over my repair history and the operator said they should have replaced the MacBook after the fourth repair in 4 months and they never did, but they can't do that now since the warranty is about to expire, once I said ok I'll just forward all the receipt of the warranty repairs to the state attorney general, she said I'm going to send you box and you send the computer to us and we will send you the next model up for free, I told her no the only way they will get this old computer is if I can take the drive out, and do the exchange at the apple store so I have it the same day (so they couldn't take away the evidence that my board didn't have any water damage) after another 2 min on the phone with them (this lady was the only one that didn't hang up on me when I tried to find a solution to the issue) so fifth phone call, 3 hours total on the phone and them not following their own policies the exchange is for the next model up at the apple store, at the apple store I'm there to do the exchange, they try giving me the i5, 4 gig RAM version when I was told I would be getting the i7, 8 gig RAM version so after another 30 min at the store and getting the computer I was promised etc, I take it home, it still crashed at least once a week, and still had to be repaired 6 time that year. In contrast I bought a Lenovo y50 it has an issue 2 months in (bad backlight) , I called Lenovo they said sorry, they said we will send me a Lenovo y70-70 and a return box when I get it just send the y50 back after I do a data transfer, they never stopped apologizing, they gave me a free upgrade when all I asked for was a warranty repair, this is why I'll never buy another apple product, and every laptop I've bought since has been a Lenovo because they knew how to treat me like a valued customer, and more importantly a human being. For that class I ended up just using my Asus ROG laptop that I had at the time because the Mac was just more trouble than it was worth, and still passed that class with an A. I also cannot stand the menu bar being shared on the top with all programs, I like that each program has its own menu bar and I hate the shared menu bar on osx. I like that the and I missed the taskbar. Also the way you uninstall applications in osx, there are associated files, and dependencies that stay in the drive without a proper uninstaller, they will eventually slow down your computer a lot over time and fill up your drive faster. Due to this poor customer service, I will not buy another apple product, they have no idea how to treat customers, and there are several RU-vidrs who know they make lousy products, especially Louis Rossman. As for Linux there is too many gatekeepers in the community, I tried a few distros and asked questions on forums and stuff, and have had people, and devs of the distro go out of their way to answer the question but in a condescending way, like you shouldn't be trying to do it that way, or I can do that in the terminal faster than you can do that using the GUI etc., or acting like I was a loser for not knowing every little thing about the distro, or how to do every little thing on it, I have never had a question answered in such a condescending way in a Windows forum or been called an idiot because I did not know every little thing about the Operating System. For as long as I have been using Windows I still learn new things about it and new functionality that I did not know. Another thing Linux has going against it is there is too much for the average user, first pick a distro, then pick a desktop manager, then a display manager, find good programs that work with your particular distro, display manger, etc. then decide between the plethora of different programs that do the same thing, then so on and so forth. Sorry for the long reply, but Windows is what I prefer for the way it works, the convenience of having most programs written for it, the attached menu for each program, the brilliance and simplicity of the Taskbar. It is by far the best option for an Operating System for me.

98SE and 7 are the two i really enjoyed using. if they had left the ability to reskin your UI to the older versions like they used to, i wouldn't mind 10 at all. I run Open Shell and that helps, but i still would rather use 7 any day of the week. Aero Glass was just a beautiful look. As for this clone. It may save us all from forced cloud gaming some day, you never know...

Unfortunately the Dutch Amiga event has been canceled, so I don’t get to seen Dan Joe and Ravi in real life 🙁

family techsupport requests went from one a week to one every six months after i installed linux on their machines.

I worked at Xerox techical centre in the UK when they still had NeXT machines which were great and also earlier when the same site was a manufacturing site which was demolished to build the technical centre and spare factory space was used to build the Archimedes computer on which i was managing the QA, i used to reject so many plastic facia mouldings that came from a crap place in St Albans they had to lower the standard to get the numbers out. Computers were great though.

Nicevideo. But what i really missed is you trying to download and install firefox or any other windows program from the original source. Or does react os only run stuff from it package manager?

It is possible to use RU-vid on Firefox 48, you just need to press the remind me later button. Also Photoshop does work in linux under wine now. Office 365 might aswell.

Thanks for making this -- I've been ReactOS curious for years. I'll admit, it was exactly as broken as I thought it would be. That said, I really cheer these guys on. They're underdogs for sure and if they were able to make a true, functional replacement for windows, that would be an incredible achievement.

I would say all it needs is Windows 7 but with DirectX 11/12 compatibility layer. ReactOS could prove very handy for running older software. Especially if it gets proper 16-bit support. Since is OpenSource and uses Wine in the backend you could also do some interesting patches to create compatibility between say older and newer software. I think it has potential to be useful as a kind of PC "WinBox".

If you read the warning in youtube for that outdated FF, it just says that the experience may not behave as expected, not that you can't use it.

*This installs a new driver for : System device - automatically install Driver - ok - *The device could not be installed* Yup solid windows clone , right there

IMO you didn't do it justice using the nightly builds. Just use 0.4.13 ... I enjoy using it to cross-compile some moonlighting Lazarus stuff to Windows, while I do my main dev in Linux. The ReactOS VM starts up in 4 seconds, from a complete shutdown. That's 4 seconds. Some cameras take longer than that to start up. Certain use-cases can really benefit from this project, if only people would try, and that would build community support, and improve ReactOS in turn.

Informative thanks

Great show. I have been using Ubuntu for several years now. With Open office I have not missed MS Windows.

BSOD is the included feature of ReactOS to give full experience of Windows :) Joking. I love Windows 2000 and 7. After 7 I've switched to Linux: best OS ever :)

XP is still my favorite windows and that being said, i hated it at the beginning and wanted to stick with 98... because the DOS underlayer was very practical for running DOS games without any extra software and it also was still working with basically everything i did with it. But in 2003 there really was no way around it anymore and it started to grow on me and i saw how good it was (and way more stable than 98). I keep 2 XP systems on 2 dedicated Thinkpad laptops for various purposes because the Nullties Nostalgia is just so strong. It is the only windows i used for the longest time. Pretty sure React OS will find a way onto one of my machines soon. My Desktop still runs on Linux and so does my main-Laptop. Only my Video Editing machine still has a Windows 7 in the bootloader. But it never goes online so it doesn't matter anyway. :P

I have to admit, I still run a 2nd old laptop with xp on it which flies and is at least 18 years old, and it never amazes me that on my other 3 year old laptop, it still grinds to an a halt with an almost empty hard drive, good specs and windows 10 just because it takes so long to load the bloatware.

Great video! In my small experience with it, BTRFS is a better option, since it's quite well-supported and it is an FS with modern features

Instead of Firefox, you can use Basilisk UXP (Firefox fork optimized for Windows XP)

If I'm not mistaken, the WINE project benefited massively from ReactOS development. So while the ReactOS itself might still not be something useful, by the benefits towards WINE, it is certainly a positive outcome. It would be nice if they could improve the stability and driver support. But I can't tell how easy or hard it is. Though many other OS-es, including non-Linux ones, like Haiku and SerenityOS have already a better record in the "managed to install it directly on the hardware" category.

The UI makes it great to stimulate the good old computer days. 30:01 They should do something about BlueScreen, error report and self-healing and there you have a stable OS!

19:07 It is. Gecko is part of Firefox's browser infrastructure, it's specifically the HTML renderer (which renders basic page layouts, while SpiderMonkey runs JavaScript.)

I play a lot of games that are windows only but I mean I could turn my integrated gpu back on and isolate my nvidia gpu to a virtual machine and use hyper-v to play my games

Yay for WinAmp!! Haven't seen it since 2004!

20:01 Yes. WordPad is in windows8. 1 but also it has icons for using mspaint with it. MSPaint is removed in win10. 21:43 Device Manager (even just the basic view) for dealing with drivers and IRQ is something I'd like to have seen in your ReactOS video. When people remember than win7 looks just like server2003 (which is vista based, having been xp based) upon disabling the fancy overlay, they get on with that server2003 style fine.

Windows 95 felt like a step back for me coming from the Amiga Workbench which has had some amazing concepts.

hmm maybe they can get it up to Win 7 soon and modern browsers like Edge running on it that would be awesome IMHO and i commend them for their efforts and ingenuity even if it has been 26 years now ^^

Win 2000 was peak windows imho

Would the 32MB of video ram you gave the VM change anything about which resolutions worked with the 32 Bit colour?

Great video. Thank you. An unusual question, what mic are you using?

It's impressive that ReactOS exists in any form at all but it's still a long way from becoming ready for prime time.

Looking forward to actually using ReactOS on an actual computer even if it is only at XP stage. Congratulations on the effort and hard work so far to the developers!

Nice presentation, will keep an eye on ReactOS for use with old Kit. Thanks.

If your BIOS has VT (Virtual Technology) try turning it on for a memory boost. I tried it on my Asus Z170-A with a Skylake 6700 running at 4GHz and with it on seemed to be a lot smoother. Very good video. Word pad got swapped out for MS Word, then you couldnt open the .RTF files in Word so you reverted back to it. in office 97.

ReactOS has been going at a snail pace. I'd say it would most likely release in the year 2525. Of course, that would all depend on IF mankind is still alive. }||[Z&E]||{

Thanks for going over ReactOS with us. Does it have a screen magnifier? I ask, because I'm legally blind, and I'm frantically exploring alternative operating systems, for when Microsoft stops support for Win10, in 2025. Oh, I was a hardcore Amaga user, all the way up to the early 2000s. I still dabble in Amikit, now and then. :)

It's looking ok. Windows is just the wallpaper in my machine. Ultimately it's whatever runs the applications I need to use.

Correction the lastest build is 0.4.15 as of 3/24/2023. The main website page has not been updated to the latest build yet.

I think the idea behind ReactOS is cool, the problem is, I don't see it ever being a real option to Windows. With the state it is in now, it's not usable on real hardware, and the moment you have to run it in a virtual machine, it's already not usable as an OS. I truly hope I'm wrong though, and that suddenly it starts getting more finished. It would be cool to see it working as a proper OS.

9:36 Those gradients were already in Windows 98. In Win 2000 the default color choices were better sure. My favorite-looking Windows to date. Windows Vista/7 transparent look was fine but I hate this modern oversimplified colorless looks we have had since Windows 8. That goes to all graphics design these days, oversimplification. Everything's just white, maybe black and white.

I started on Window ME... Now I've migrated to Ubuntu & have never looked back...

I was Atari ST, i picked Atari over Commodore simply because i used the ST built in midi interface to use midi on stage (early days), but had loads of Amiga Amigo's and we all went to a fortnightly meet up to errr "share ideas". Early days of consumer computing were great fun, but very much flying by the seat of our pants with everything hardware related, much easier now.

Might be worth taking a look at SerenityOS

Possibly the silliest thing about Windows is that you must press Start to stop it.

The Libre Office Write blue bar was because you were hovering over the header.

The progress of this project may help other projects with similar goals to better emulate windows on other non-windows machines. Which is great!

Your screen resolution is limited because you only assigned 32MB of video RAM in the Virtual Box configuration. Bump that up a bunch and try again.

I prefer windows 10 over Mac OS actually. Mainly because I prefer explorer over finder

Wonderful review, thank you very much!

that was surprisingly entertaining. im using ubuntu at the moment. i wish it would run native instruments audio software

Fun fact: Mizu is Japanese for “water”.

Thanks for this! Great feeling to know that this ReactOS alternative keeps pace (a step behind) and we can safely jump into this sea when W10 has become just too, too bloated and too, too self-centered for this older man's (age 88) patience. But really, except for Excel, Microsoft apps are obsolete and no longer a reason to follow Windows over the cliff of consumerism. I mean, how much intrusion does Gates think we humans can tolerate? Don't answer that...because maybe we consumers really ARE sheeplike

Honestly the best Windows OS I ever used was Windows2K RC2. It was for some reason much more stable than the realease version of win2k. Was able to have yeard of uptime with that OS on several different machines.

I moved to Linux about 20 years ago. The only reason I needed Windows was for pdf editing. Once I found a decent pdf editor, coupled with Gimp, Krita, Blender and Open Office, Windows lost its appeal entirely. I have tried ReactOs many times, but it's just too unstable for real work. I do keep a Windows 2000 PC for my legacy programming in VB3, my motto being why fix it if it ain't broke.

The guys participating in this project really need to re-evaluate the scope of this. Given the pace of NT development, and the pace of this project, if you're constantly trying to play catch-up with Microsoft you're just going to fall further behind. Extrapolating the current rate of progress, version 1.0 of ReactOS will be out in time for our grandchildren to try out.

I think I'd sooner install TempleOS on a box.

2:28 I couldn't believe it when I saw a picture of my desktop. I don't run Office on wine anymore tho