[ros-dev] On the growth of the reactos project

[Aleksey Bragin]

Good post, and thanks for backing me - I keep telling the same for  
years!

And, keep watching, an end to "reactos sucks" era is coming very soon.


WBR,
Aleksey Bragin.

On Jul 17, 2009, at 10:54 AM, Samuel serapion wrote:

> Hello everyone. I find myself today thinking, as I sometimes do,  
> about the ReactOS problem. How come we are trying to clone the  
> biggest and arguably the most popular desktop OS in the world and  
> still have such a small community/user base?
>
> The obvious answer to this question is that ros doesn’t do what it  
> promises. Indeed it does almost run a lot of windows  
> applications... some of the time, but that’s not the whole picture.  
> Let us examine the typical(in my experience) first time encounter  
> of a random computer user with reactos.
>
> <fanboy> Look, this is a free open source windows clone called  
> ReactOS. It has solitaire and runs firefox. Awesome, isn’t it?
>
> <noob> so does it run my windows drivers and Office and COD4 and… !?
>
> <fanboy> well…. Umm…  not really.
>
> Let’s analyze what went wrong:
>
> 1)      ReactOS base distribution is fine and great, I totally like  
> my reactos with just a cmd window and dwnl.exe; but it’s not  
> enough, except perhaps for  someone that’s extremely motivated to  
> do something interesting with ros.
> The solution, host a reactos distribution. I think its been proven  
> that the reactos community doesn’t want to host more 3rd party code  
> in the repository unless it’s absolutely necessary. But that  
> doesn’t matter. We don’t need to build firefox, mono, or anything  
> from source.  The Windows model of software distribution is binary.  
> There doesn’t have to be an update manager, reactos is just a toy 
> (more on that later) and it needs to look useful so that people buy  
> into it. Maybe a nice list of packages and some checkboxes in  
> second stage installed with a script…
>
> 2)      Hardware support is very poor, on recent hardware it almost  
> never works(wild guess 75% fail rate on modern hardware) Problems  
> range from unsupported video cards/ros driver uses wrong/ 
> unsupported mode, wrong storage bus, random crashes from  
> unsupported usb devices + pcmcia other  similar alien buses and  
> just random bullshit. Even if nothing manages to bring down  
> reactos, it of course has the wrong nic card and since usb storage  
> doesn’t exist there’s no chance to get a driver and see ros crash  
> because of course we only support a couple of drivers.
> I know this can’t just be magically fixed, but we need people  
> dedicated to do hardware testing/debugging and provide real bug  
> reports with traces. (Suggestion: allow kdbg to take ownership of  
> the screen/give it back, provide visual console. I don’t care if  
> it’s not a windows feature.)
> 3)      Who cares about all the above? Not noobs, the question they  
> really ask is: “Does it run XYZ?”
> What is XYZ? Flagship applications. The ones everyone knows and  
> uses, commercial and opensource. The following, I think, are  
> universally recognized as very important.
>
> a)      Firefox + Flash (this works most of the time… maybe god  
> will kill that mouse move bug)
> b)      A recent version of Microsoft Office. (2007 would be very  
> nice)
> c)       Latest OpenOffice( imagine a make distro command that  
> would tell ros setup to install it automagically, wouldn’t that  
> make testing easier… heck we could have a super build bot that  
> wrote documents in office and compiled shit with gcc and took 3  
> days to run….)
> d)      .NET Framework (atleast 2.0) (This means fixing its  
> installer bug)
> e)      Java runtime. (it installs and almost launches limewire!!  
> Christ!!)
> f)       Visual Studio 2008 (installer fails, but the c++ compiler  
> works and the IDE almost works!!)
> g)      Recent versions of Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver or Flash.
>
> Extra points:
> h)      Msn Messenger (its expected by windows users)
> i)        Internet Explorer (screenshots floated around at some  
> point with IE6, I think.. or maybe it was a dream)
> j)        Virtual Box (with its drivers!) ( I just love the vm  
> inside vm screenshot)
> k)      Nmap (only pcap driver is broken!)
> l)        Silverlight (seems to install)
> m)    Itunes (with ipod support)
>
> (please dont be pricks about this list, make a poll or something if  
> you must, but someone has to arbitrarily set it)
>
> The sad truth is that most of these applications are known to work  
> to a certain degree. However, good bug reports don’t even exist.  
> I’m confident that with a bit of determined effort these apps can  
> be made to work. Atleast we need to compile a list of whats missing  
> in ros that is need to support these and other important  
> applications with real bug reports, and focus the project... give  
> defined tasks to noobs that stumble into the project but are not  
> knowledgable enought to dive into our huge code base and decide  
> what are the missing features/features that need work/bugs.
> But really, what is the point of this email…
> 0.4.0 will be a milestone release(nice round number), people really  
> want these and other similar applications to work(perhaps they are  
> the reasons people still use windows). It makes sense to try and  
> support them and would provide a nice PR boost if 0.4.0 can  
> honestly be said to support any or all of the above applications.
>
> ReactOS is a developer toy, a cute little model of windows that  
> almost works. If we can at least make it work for applications that  
> most users actually use we could maybe, oh I don’t know… spark some  
> interest. Yes, it’s about users, which we still won’t condone being  
> alpha and all. But users are the ones that get excited and twitter  
> and facebook and blog about the little OS that could; Excitement  
> that will get developers exited, that will provide testers (I’m  
> praying for some sort of reactos error reporting service, atleast a  
> minidump….. atleast in usermode… support event logs…. for Christ  
> sakes our bug reports suck and they suck10x worse when they come  
> from noobs!).
>
> Right now we are stuck in the vm, so atleast make that experience  
> enjoyable. There’s no need to rant about explorer, I hope…
>
> We have to start thinking about 0.5 and making reactos “beta”, and  
> I still haven’t seen plans on how that’s going to happen or what  
> exactly that means. ReactOS development needs to speed up and get  
> more organized….. that’s all I have to say about that…. probably not…
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Ros-dev at reactos.org
> http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev

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