#ReactOS joins VCF Southwest for the first time!
Read the blogpost by our developer @cbialorucki1 here, and feel free to share!
https://t.co/ICRNKnlkZ1
Pleasantly surprised to discover late-2023 @reactos runs even on a 166MHz Pentium with no MMX and only 64MB RAM. Too little RAM to unpack installers, however, and more recent builds won't even load freeldr stage 2 on this hardware.
Never thought I’d see @reactos running this well on a late 90s Toshiba desktop with all the proper drivers being installed.
Yes that’s vintage Intel GMA graphics (i810) working too.
And this is #ReactOS ARM64 running on Raspberry Pi 5!
Back in 2022-23, our ARM64 port was only able to produce user-mode executables. While being in a experimental state, we could finally see ARM64 in action!!
For 8 months, our contributor @sidihmeed has been working on getting #ReactOS ARM64 port to boot. Here's the first success!
Being still in an experimental state, you may want to try it.
The build requires UEFI compatible ARM64 with GICv2 or v3 enabled and will support boards starting from ARMv8-A and upward, with the special case of RPI5 that have his own interupt chip.
@zukrmn No need to write a book on it. Simply put, #ReactOS is developed by a handful of developers and contributors who have deep knowledge of NT internals.
On the other hand, Windows is a product backed by thousands of paid developers working for a multi-billion-dollar company.
A group of developers tried rebuilding Windows from scratch.
Without Microsoft’s code. 🤯
They called it ReactOS. 🖥️
> Started in 1996 as FreeWin95.
> Goal: make Windows free and open source.
> Developers argued for years about the design.
> Barely wrote any actual code.
> Scrapped everything and restarted in 1998.
> Renamed the project ReactOS.
> Built as a reaction to Microsoft’s monopoly.
> Designed to look like Windows XP.
> Start menu. Taskbar. File Explorer.
> Almost identical to real Windows.
> But the real goal was much crazier.
> Binary compatibility.
> Meaning real Windows .exe files should just run.
> No emulators. No virtual machines.
> Firefox worked. LibreOffice worked. Adobe Reader worked.
> But there was one huge problem.
> They couldn’t legally copy Microsoft’s code.
> One developer studied Windows behavior.
> Another developer rewrote it from scratch.
> A process called clean-room engineering.
> Extremely slow. Extremely difficult.
> Nearly 30 years later…
> 300 contributors.
> 15 million lines of code.
> ReactOS is still in alpha today.
Most open-source projects replace apps.
ReactOS tried replacing Windows itself. 🔥