Remove the greatest weeknes of Windows

[Rako]

I hope that ReactOS will avoid the greatest mistake MS made: mixing applications and operating system.
Even before MS came into existence, there was a rue, that the OS is separated from applications.

I hope ReactOS will adhee to this rule.
In the systems-directory only the OS modules should be allowed. Drivers in their own - hardware-dependent directories.
The registry should be a separates file(-group) and mot mixed up with data and user files.
It should not be possible to write into the the system directory, except through special programs.
Ideally it should be possible to safeguard the system-folder through a hardware-switch.
If this is implemented in ReactOS, the hardware manufacturers would have an incentive to make a partition write-protectable, which attribute could be set/reset only in the bios or using a manually operated hardware-switch.
Thus it would be possible to have a protected, thus guarantied safe partition for the OS and for the trusted applications.
This partition would not contain data (except for static parameters).
There would be a program to enable tested and trusted programs to be copied from an unprotected partition to the protected one.
This is a simple task, but would result in increased security.
The whole thing could be simply implemented at the level of the %xxx% directory-access level.
Reading from the OS-directory, but writing to a different one.
As DLLs, OCXs etc are accessed (or are accessable) through the registry, there is no justification for storing application/non-OS files in the system-folder or in its subfolders.
They should go to either into the application-folder or into a "shared" folder under the developer's name. This "shared" folder would have two parts: Trusted in the protected partition and the new-files in the unprotected one.
Of course it complicates the access a bit, but the increased security justifies the extra effort.

Greetings
Stephan de Rakovszky

[GoBusto]

Hello, and welcome to the ReactOS forums.

The idea of removing the registry has been discussed before, in this thread.

[SdC]

Since the goal of ReactOS is to make EXISTING win32 code run, most architectural changes would make this impossible; requiring hardware manufacturers to make different drivers for ReactOS would be a nightmare and just would not happen, ever. ReactOS will just never drive the hardware development.
If you are looking for such a utopia, you'd better look at *nix.

If software makers follow the current SDK guidelines (and thus make their apps Vista compliant), their apps should already behave reasonably securely (in other words: not triggering UAC when the user runs the program).

[fdwhacker]

The purpose of ReactOS is to provide an alternative to Microsofts bloated and broken products, not a completely new OS. The security problems with Windows are because MS integrates core parts of IE, Office, WMP, and other apps into the OS itself. There is no problem with providing free, open-source programs with ReactOS as long as parts of them aren't integrated into the OS itself.

[GoBusto]

Microsoft

I'll just point out that using an $ in "Microsoft" or "Windows" is frowned upon in this here forum.

[fdwhacker]

Fine. Won't do it again. It's just that I've seen it on other forums (even in books). Just wondering why it's frowned upon.

[GoBusto]

Fine. Won't do it again. It's just that I've seen it on other forums (even in books). Just wondering why it's frowned upon.

Well, It's generally because of people like this dragging the good name of the dollar sign through the mud:

OMg bill gate is teh GAY he wants to take zover the WORDL Windows $UX LOL screw MS BUY A MAC

Also, the dev team use Windows, Visual Studio, etc. and actually have a fair amount of respect for the programmers in Microsoft's Windows NT development team - after all, why would they want to clone an OS model if they thought it was pants (not 1337 pants, either) and everyone should just use *NIX systems such as BSD, Linux or MacOSX instead?

Anyway, back to the registry now.

EDIT: Ironically, "M-dollar" now word-filters to "Microsoft", so this explanation is now pretty pointless. Oh well.