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I do a lot of industrial automation and it is the one thing that keeps me boat-anchored to Windows. Every little programmable doodad like signal conditioners and temperature transmitters have their own USB programming cables and their own, mostly crappy windows config software. PLC software is another abomination, hopelessly Windows anchored, bloated GUI monsters, some built on top of Visual Studio (Beckhoff TwinCAT.)
I have donated to ReactOS in the past in the hopes of one day freeing myself from this hell.
You can forward USB devices into a VM. About 15 years ago I was using a Windows VM on Linux to program PIC18F??? devices with the custom (JTAG based?) programmer provided by Microchip. The upside is that you can preserve and share this windows environment for other coworkers, and have separate VMs for different projects (perhaps one you can update, and one you can't ...)
Why not spend some money on an uncensored LLM to reverse engineer or create an open clean room reimplementation?
Because that requires breaking the almost assured stipulation in a software license agreement that says "You will not try to RE this software", which is fine to ignore for home gamers, but not something you generally want to mess around with in a business setting where the risks are much higher.
Reverse engineering is protected under certain conditions, even if the EULA prohibits it
The thing about this type of thinking is that it often requires risking millions of dollars and a major distraction from your primary goal in order to find out if it's true or not.
As would be running critical software certified for Windows on ReactOS as envisioned by GP. So, either we talk about an enterprise setting, in which GP already fucked up, or a more personal setting, in which both whaat GP and I said are reasonable
That is how you get a hardware provider to stop selling you stuff
The reason industrial PLCs cost so much is because of their reliability. They need to be working flawlessly 50 years in the future. Trying to vibe code your way into a PLC compiler feels like it could blow up in your face after a little while.
That is also ignoring the safety PLCs with safety instructions that are certified for use with ISO 13849. Can you imagine getting inspected because your safety subsystem cause injury and you explain how you don't use the officially licensed software to program it.
For personal project, that could be fun however.
You completely stripped what I said from its context. GP explicitely said they donate to ReactOS in the hopes of one day being able to run that industrial software on it instead of on Windows. In this context, running the software on ReactOS instead of official Windows would already fail your hypothetical inspections. This is why I suggested trying the LLM route.
That is only recently become an option you could try, and we don't know long term how well it will work. Remember laws may change (and there are some legal issues around LLMs that are not clear at all)
Looks like a lot of improvements on long-standing hard-to-find issues. Kudos to the team and thank you for providing an alternative OS that keeps getting better
One of my favorite projects, maybe someday it can be a true daily driver, I wonder if that's the goal for 1.0 is to claim that they've gotten it stable enough to run as though it were Windows 7 or something to that effect.
Love it! Haiku, ReactOS and sure Linux. But if necessary, the real art of computing can be kept up!
Now all we need is an alternative clean-room implementation of Mac OS.
You should take a look at ravynOS!
https://ravynos.com/
See also: https://www.darlinghq.org/
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Quite the dedication have these people!
This reminds me of the feeling of when Linux got graphical installers instead of long text based ones asking you many, many questions.
It's not only that it was text based, but that it failed in all sorts of ways.
I had a particularly bad afternoon in early 2000s when I tried to install Linux on various machines (4 or 5, each one with different hardware) and failed with all of them. Of course, I wasn't as savvy as I am now, but it's been years since I've seen an issue with a Linux install; although I might have to download and compile a driver for one thing or another, the install itself doesn't fail.
Bar bad floppies I don't remember ever having an installer issue.
Unrecognized/unsupported hardware is another thing but I always could finish the install and at least reach the console login prompt.
I've never used bleeding edge equipment though, euther second hand or brand new but proven tech.
Mine was in the 90s and concerned X11 failing or crashing due to the video card typically. Redhat 5.2ish or Suse.
This seems like the sort of project that ai would excel at. /goal excel runs flawlessly.
It's also the kind of project where LLM license-washing is going to be the most dangerous for the project itself. Projects like Wine and ReactOS have to be extremely careful about what kind of code to accept, because taking code from one of the countless Windows source leaks is just a recipe for legal disaster.
Well, Excel has AI now, so maybe it can help.
Excel writes Excel, which writes Excel...
Now we have an infinite loop
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TIL that the GUI of ReactOS isn't based on React. All these years spent baffled that who would like to build an OS with JS, thanks to me only reading the headlines lol
ReactOS is way older than React. In fact, the first times when I heard about React I thought ReactOS was becoming mainstream, but no...
If you an OS based in JS, maybe the closer we had was NodeOS [1]
Well ReactOS did have a 15 year lead on the name over React...1998 vs 2013, going by first public release of each.