17 Jul
2009
17 Jul
'09
10:41 a.m.
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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