ReactOS: Can It Replace Windows In 2021?!

Hey guys, I don't know if you've realized from watching my channel over the years that I'm actually not the biggest fan of Microsoft Windows. It's shocking, I know, but I've actually made videos over the last few years singing praises. of different versions of Windows and you know, with all my heart, I will give credit to Microsoft when I give credit to you, for example, Windows 95. I thought it had a lot of innovation from Microsoft and we saw things there that are still present in today's desktop user interfaces, things like The Start Menu, for example, which you know, not only is still on Windows even though they tried to remove it in Windows 8, but almost every Linux distribution you download has some kind of start menu there and Windows 2000, I thought.

It was a very elegant and optimized version of Windows, you know, for a Microsoft operating system, so there are certain versions of Windows that have impressed me over the years, but I think it goes back to my days as a real user. loyal and loyal. I used friends through the '90s and up until 2001, so it wasn't until Windows XP came out that I finally packed up my friend 1200 and went over to the dark side because before that I remember looking at Windows 95 and thinking that Microsoft was I finally caught up. with the things my media could do, it's true, using four times the RAM and four times the storage capacity, but before that, I mean, you know, I thought Windows 3.1 was a complete joke compared to Amiga OS, but in the time since then, I mean.

I was that teenager who had the Intel wallpaper on my friend's desktop. I shared this gif behind me with several friends on the web, I'm sure, but I've admitted the fact that I need to use Windows for work purposes. and that's the case for a lot of us and I think generally if you're a Windows user you use it by default because there are programs that you have to use. I have never met anyone who uses Windows because they are fans of it or they like to use it and look around my house. I mean, I have a Windows machine, which is the one behind me running Windows 10, but I have several work apps on there that only work with separate

windows

.

As of that, I have six current Macs in the house, I edit all my videos on this Mac mini m1 next to me which works great and I also have about four or five Linux machines in various rooms of the house so I'm really I'm not a big Windows user these days and maybe you are the same and thinking how can I stop using Windows in

2021

. Well, obviously we have things like Linux with Wine there where you can run it with varying degrees of success. different Windows-only apps, but there's also a drop in the open source Windows

replace

ment OS that's actually been in development since the mid-90s called

reactos

, so I haven't taken a test drive for a while, so i thought in this video download the latest version of react os and find out how well it works as a

windows

replace

ment in

2021

now just before we start I wanted to take a moment to give a huge thank you to the sponsor of this video, the amazing total av antivirus now total av is an award-winning product trusted by millions of people around the world that protects your computer, whether it's a PC or Mac, or even your smartphone, from bad guys and, as well as being safe from malware , spyware and viruses, it also encrypts your data and has a VPN included that will protect you from phishing sites and data theft when you are in places like coffee shops and airports with wifi, and that risk is actually very real because I remember being in a hotel in London with some friends. and they were all connected to the hotel wifi and one of the guys in our group was horrified that we could see all his files, his documents, his photos shared on the hotel wifi and anyone had access to them and he was not the only one which I informed the hotel but you know they didn't understand or were simply not interested in protecting their network, instead they used the Total AV VPN which will funnel the traffic through their secure servers and make sure all your Devices are fully protected regardless of the network you are connected to, so you can be protected today.

In fact, I managed to give you the most amazing discount that will save you a whopping 70 off a full year AV subscription, which means you'll get it. for only 29 pounds and that includes the vpn service, so claim that offer right now by going to the link that you will find in the description of this video and of course help the channel by supporting our sponsors and thank you very much to total av for sponsoring this video, okay, so before we get stuck into downloading and installing React OS, I thought I would give you a little information about the project, as I mentioned, it started in 1996, originally under the name Free Win 95 and as that suggests It was originally intended to be a direct replacement for Windows 95 and over the years they changed the name to React OS and expanded the project's goals to duplicate the functionality of Windows NT, which of course forms the basis of everything.

Modern versions of Windows, you know, Windows 10 is actually version 10.0 and even though React OS has been in development for 25 years, progress has been pretty slow to say the least, and all these years later, In 2021, it is still only in alpha state. Admittedly, it is quite slow, it is not completely unique in the world of operating systems. I mean, I could take this opportunity to mention that Gnu listened again, but I already hated that enough in the last video, so I'll quickly move on to the current version of react. OS is 0.4.3 and was released in April 2020, but on their website there are also nightly builds that are more up-to-date and include some newer features, obviously, that could be compromising stability, but based on the advice I've received.

From the forums, nightly builds are worth trying, so I'll use the latest nightly build for this video and install it on virtualbox to try it out. Now I have a PC ready to test Reactos on physical hardware, but after burning. a CD image I couldn't even get the system to boot and apparently that's not unusual, you know the alpha software and everything, so after we have downloaded the iso file we can start working installing

reactos

and here we are inside the virtual box . manager and I have created a virtual machine that should have the ideal configuration to install React OS.

I've read them on online forums and I can put them in the video description if you're interested, but as you can see here, we have we have 32 megabytes of video memory, the vbox vga graphics driver, 2d video and 3d acceleration enabled, we have the ac 97 audio driver, the netfast 3 net computer for networking and now all we have to do is attach the virtual box cd image and We should be able to boot from there and hopefully get it installed and running within virtualbox and from immediately we get this warning here which I'm going to ignore and as you can see now, we've booted right into the Reactos installer and the first thing.

What you will notice is that it is very reminiscent of the Windows installers of the era it is trying to emulate. Obviously, Windows 98 and Windows 2000 look like this, that sort of blue and silver dostyle screen, so we'll go to um United. kingdom and we go in to install and then we get a warning that react OS is in alpha stage which means it is not feature complete and is under heavy development. It is recommended to use it for evaluation and testing purposes only and not as your daily operating system. Go now, let's take a look here, that looks good, except we have the unpartitioned disk space here, so if I press enter, it should create a um and then we can select a file system here as well, now we have the butter. fs there as well, which I've used on Linux before, obviously we're trying to copy Windows, so to speak, so I think probably the chunky filesystem that's obviously on Windows will probably be a better option.

I could be wrong, but we'll go ahead with that and do a quick format and then it'll ask you what directory you want to install the React OS files in so you know normally on Windows you put it in forward slash, obviously here it's going to be React OS forward slash and then the installer is. doing its thing and it seems pretty quick to install the bootloader yeah we'll do that and there we go now we're at the stage where we're ready to reboot and run it from the looks of it so what I'll do is here We also need to delete the CD image before rebooting, so I'll pause it and then we can delete it, there we go and that was very quick, I mean, I don't know when the last time you installed Windows was. 98 was, but I did it in a recent video and it took about 45 minutes, so yeah, this is a lot better than that, so we're going to try to make it the stock version of React OS and you'll get that really cool logo there and, as you can see. the copyright date at the bottom was 2021 and yeah this looks a lot like Windows 2000 you know, nice gradients at the top which is definitely a plus for me I mean I think Windows 2000 is probably my favorite UI on any version of Windows it looks very clean and very elegant, I think we are doing a little more configuration here because of the way it looks and they recognize the open source projects we use to create React OS and other elements of Wine over there. which I mentioned a little bit before, several other projects here as well, we skip that and then we need to choose a product option so that we can have a react server or workstation so that on the server the system is recognized as a server.

Private folders are separate from my documents what is workstation I guess it just means if you want to share the network from the looks of it so we'll try that and the server here we can customize our locale yeah everything looks good and then the keyboard, yeah, it's already in English, as you can see, it's cutting off the bottom of the screen a little bit here in virtualbox, but I could scale it, which makes it all fat, so yeah, I think we're going to get into this for now, hopefully we can. Fix that in the graphics drivers later um yes the keyboard has been detected ok um reboot now for the language isn't it strange so we'll put our name here yes this is almost exactly like installing Windows 2000 um even down to the strange name they give you machine, an administrator password, I don't think we need it, so my time zone is correct if it's very early in the morning here and now we can choose a topic to react os now, it's currently in a classic from the looks of it and In fact , it's great that it changes in the installer so you don't have to wait until it boots and we have my myzoo luna.

I think we'll go with a classic one, you know, which is a little bit more like Windows 2000, as I mentioned before. um yes typical setup it will be part of a domain yes we will add it to my network shares why not in which reactos group couldn't find a Wine gecko package which is needed to embed html for it to work properly? Okay, install it. Okay, now our first. problem here it seems like maybe I haven't set up the internet connection correctly or there are no drivers installed maybe so we can skip that for now ok we will do another reboot.

I'm impressed by the responsiveness and how quickly we're going through the installer here, like I said, compared to those older versions of Windows, you know this is flying and here we go, we found a new device driver for the device from the system, yes that's very vague, ok, couldn't find auto-swap driver, ok, this one for audio device is ok, couldn't find auto-install, this could be because we don't have a working network connection, but as we can see here, you know we're on the Reactos desktop and yeah, wow, this looks a lot like Windows. 2000, doesn't it even reach the start menu in the corner?

Check that out and we'll take a look at some of the store's programs and settings very soon. They've done a very good job on this though, but I'm wondering if I read that you can install the Virtualbox guest editions so you know the graphics drivers and audio working and as you can see here, Reactos reports as Windows NT version 5.2 , which I think was Windows XP. Well, then NT 5.2. It's actually Windows Server 2003, so it's actually a little newer than Windows XP, so I hope we can install the virtualbox guest additions for Server 2003 and it should work. You know, if Reactos does what it says and can run Windows programs, so.

I've installed the CD image there, going to my computer and there we can see it there, so you already have it installed, from the looks of it, we'll reboot it and hopefully now we have the graphics and audio drivers working and we can put it in full screen and there we go and the virtual screen is currently set to 8 color modebits. I wonder if they work now, no, but we should be able to put it in full screen mode now and there we go, it's not all stretched out. We actually have a decent screen resolution here, so let's go the same way you do it from Windows, changing the resolution and display properties and yeah, this looks identical, so I think we're going to configure the settings.

Yes, actually we can put So far I have a 16 9 monitor, so maybe it will work, let's try to put it in true color too, maybe 24 bit, let's try it. Well, I've been experimenting with different screen resolutions for a couple of minutes now and unfortunately, it seems like the only way to get the depth of true color 32-bit graphics is to run them at 960 by 498 resolution, which is obviously a pretty low screen in 2021, but if I change it to anything else, the default is still 256 colors and everything looks very washed out on the screen, but actually for making a 960x498 video it's probably ideal. actually, because you can see everything I'm doing on the screen without having to keep zooming in on different areas, so we'll stick with this for the rest of this video and hopefully it won't cause too many problems, but while we're in the display properties, which again look very similar to those old school Windows versions.

I thought we would take a look at what else we can change from here, as you can see there are some of those themes that we saw in the installer that we can actually access directly from here without having to reinstall reactions, so let's see how they look now , this one is called lotus, so if we apply it, as you can see, everything changes to this really dark theme here, um, the beginning. menu, you know you have that kind of black react logo in the corner and we have one called luna, which I actually thought luna might be similar to Windows XP, you know, with rounded corners and all you know is the Fisher theme Price as we used to call it, which is called Luna, but it's actually a little bit more like a dark mode sort of thing and we also have Mizu there in my zoo.

Yeah, I quite like that one, it actually looks quite modern, that kind of floor plan. look, what you get in modern versions of Windows and there's actually one called modern, which again is another type of dark theme. I'm not a fan of using dark modes. In general, I prefer light themes on my operating systems. You know, keep me. Wake up, uh, but on this one I think we're going to go back to the classic theme, you know you prefer the look of Windows 2000, and we've got some different color schemes here, some of which really look like they're taken directly from older versions of Windows, yeah , like that pumpkin, I don't remember that wheat eggplant that was definitely on Windows, I think I used that one for a while in Windows 98, uh, react classic, which is, you know, a 95 98 theme.

From the looks of it, red , white and blue, cool, we'll stick with the standard, now that sort of Windows 2000 gradient look. I've always preferred those screensavers. Now we have a couple installed, the old screen protector with 3D technology. working great looking great and yes the lock screen you could have backgrounds on yeah it looks like we don't have any installed by default but obviously you know you can add your own there let's look at the lock screen manager devices. there you see see everything is installed here our network adapter should be installed and working from what it looks like so this might be a good time to see if we can connect so I think there is a web browser included with the React OS there.

Let's go to the Wine version of Internet Explorer, um, which I don't have high hopes for, but I think there are other web browsers that we can run here and from the looks of it, it's trying to load the west reactor home page and, uh , don't have. Very happy, let's try something that we know works with Google and from the looks of it, it's connecting to Google and accessing something here because the URL has changed, but nothing is showing in the browser. Let's try a really simple website, Oldnet. com which is a basic html 1.0 website that again doesn't work.

I'm wondering if this is related to the error message I saw on installation about html rendering. You know the gecko edition couldn't be installed because from the looks of it. From this we don't get an HD or any html rendered in the web browser. We'll do a quick check to see if we have network connectivity, so if we go into the command prompt we should be able to ping Google. and there you have it, it's been returned so yeah we're connected to the network and the internet so it's working maybe we can install a different web browser and get it working now here if we're going to add and remove programs that are very different than Windows because as you can see, here we also have a package manager where we can install third-party applications within the React OS, so that's something I didn't have in previous versions of Windows.

You already know the package manager. The Windows App Store wasn't introduced until I think it was Windows 7 or maybe Windows 8. So we'll explore that and install some third party programs and maybe get a new web browser that renders HTML in a moment, but I thought about Take a look at what else is installed here. I mean, if we go into Windows Explorer, as you can see, this is all very similar to Windows. We have drive C there, which is my virtual CD-ROM drive. then the file structure is identical to Windows, we have my documents folders there and all the program files are installed here, the reactos folder, let's try some of those ready-made programs that we have in the store, you know, Notepad and Paint clones.

Van, the paint looks extremely similar to Windows, there is practically no difference, the same with Notepad, the calculator, which again, as expected, looks like the Windows 2000 version of the Word Pad calculator Windows, yeah, I forgot, they used to be like that, um, it's still on Windows. Now I know Notepad is there, but Wordpad was a little more feature-rich and I remember this not being able to load Windows credit, load Microsoft Office files here and the same with Word. I remember that it had many more functions than a Notepad, for example. all the different toolbars, you know, here we have the different fonts and everything, yeah, I forgot about Wordpad and there are a lot of fonts installed by default again, all the ones that you would have had in previous versions of Windows, from the looks of it. of administrative tools again, just like Windows, we have some games here, I mean, yeah, come on, they had to install solitaire, isn't that how many hours were wasted in offices around the world playing solitaire in the past ?

I think I also saw a version of Minesweeper there, yeah, it came from me again, another version that you get with uh, with wine from the looks of it and Spider Solid, there's a different version of solitaire. I must admit I was never a solitaire player so I don't really know how to fix it so yeah there's not much to do you know since you get a standard Windows 2000 installation all we need to get set up and get started is installed, but we'll try to install a Some of these third-party apps now 7-zip is something I always install on Windows right away, so we'll get that word Abby, which is an open-source, snappy word processor.

I've used it before, I think it is. like an open source version or a clone of microsoft word or adobe air, yes, I think we need that one, the ac97 audio driver, but I think from the looks of it, the audio seems to be working anyway, so I do it we'll skip, uh, flash. still we don't need that um, well, instant messaging, yeah, some of these really date back to this software, don't they? I mean, I can't remember the last time I talked to someone I named, probably around 2002 and we have a CD ripper. There's also boldness and it's actually a pretty nice, full-featured open source audio editor, so we'll try it with a cleaner there as well.

Now imagine these are all older versions of these programs because obviously this is only working up to Windows Server 2003 Support, so I imagine the current versions require you to know Windows 10 and it won't work here. I love that game on Windows 95. We'll try it. Anything else we want or we also have LibreOffice in there. Obviously a full-featured office suite will be useful to have some of the Microsoft Net frameworks as well, but I think the main thing we need is a web browser, from what it looks like, the latest version of Firefox that we have. We have version 48 here, which is going back a little bit now, what we have is version 80.

So I think for now let's try to install those and see if they work before we get anything else, so click install here and it will. ask me where I want to install them, yes in program files, just like we would in Windows, so I must say I was really impressed with the installation process from the package manager, everything downloaded automatically, no errors, installed everything smoothly incremental and It seems that all the programs I selected installed correctly and as you can see, there are already many of them on the desktop, so we will try Audacity, the audio editor I mentioned, which I have used before and which seems to be working.

It's fine here, obviously a little tight due to the limited screen resolution. I don't have a microphone or anything connected, so yeah, I imagine that's not going to work, but it sounds like you know the UI is working fine. and we can use the program, I figure, so let's try something that we can actually demo here in LibreOffice. Now, this is actually a pretty big office suite, so the fact that they have this installation working fine here, but I imagine it's I have a lot of dependencies, the Windows version will be a good test, so yeah, as you can See, we can make a document, a spreadsheet, a presentation or a graph.

Let's try just the standard writing document, okay, we got it. A strange blue bar appears there. I'm not sure what that is. I'm not normally a LibreOffice user. Yes, it seems to be working fine here. It's definitely usable and I've mentioned it in videos before. I use Microsoft Office 365. I work and I use, you know, Google Drive and I use Friends Office, but really, for the kind of things I do in a word processor, I mean I haven't used a new feature in Microsoft Word since about 1997 so I could definitely get by with using this for my everyday word processing you don't need any problems with this um the graphics have gotten a little corrupted there and I made it a little too big maybe so so we definitely have some glitches there and it appears now, yes. um it crashed so I also installed Firefox here and it went away um which I hope we can now access websites using so it's obviously an older version of Firefox but it should still work with a lot of sites.

I imagine you haven't seen that user. interface in Firefox for a couple of years, when is this Firefox? Yeah, there's no year here, but I have a feeling it was at least a decade ago. An update is available. Unfortunately, after installing the Firefox update, no. I don't run it now, I get this error message saying a dynamic dll could not be found, so I think we'll try to uninstall it and then not do the update. I mean, I checked that this version of Firefox is from 2016. You know, it's not terribly outdated, I imagine there are a lot of websites and forums and that kind of thing would work fine if I used it, it was version 48 I had, maybe we can reinstall it, since you don't actually see it installed on the system, the uninstall icon is grayed out, so maybe we can install it on top, okay, let's try booting again and that's it, we're back to the version we installed in the first place, so let's try a website that I know works.

Let's try the old net.com as I mentioned and now we have web browsing in React OS as you can see. This is a very simplistic website that is designed to work on older machines, much older than this one, which actually works with 1990s computers, but as you can see here, it is really responsive, the rendering looks fine to me, let's try it, this time we won't do the google.com update and again, you know, it looks good here, let's try the OS website reacts very well, very responsive, so we're really going to put it to the test now by trying YouTube, which I don't have high hopes for, but you never know, yeah, that tells me I need to update my web browser because it's no longer supported, unfortunately my Wikipedia, I imagine, should work fine, yeah.

So I want to say that it is possible to do basic web browsing here. Let's try Twitter, as you can see my Twitter account is also displaying fine here again.Definitely at a usable speed. I've been updating my hue bulbs a little earlier. So. I would say that you know in terms of web browsing, if you don't do anything too demanding, it seems like react has you covered using this older version of Firefox, so that's something we can cross off the list of things we need. to do and I even managed to launch Google Drive within Firefox.

Now I admit that it is completely dragging and there are some rendering issues probably due to the low resolution of the screen, but it looks like it can be used here, we can create a new document. and we get the message that here we go, we have our first blue screen of death, right in the middle of trying to do something in Google Drive again, you know, like I said, it's alpha software, so these things are to be expected. So we'll do a quick reboot of the machine and a quick reboot later and go back to React OS, so we got Google Drive working there, you know, slowly, before the blue screen of death appears, so I think that we can mark.

Outside of web browsing, I mean Firefox, although it's a few years old, it should do pretty much everything I need besides video streaming, so I'm pretty impressed with how well it actually worked and what else we installed here. Also, we had a couple of games installed, including hover, which I don't think ran the installer, it just used winzip to put the files somewhere on the hard drive here, but I'm not exactly sure where, so let's take a look and there is. I have detected that you are not running on 256, it will still run. Yeah, we're running in true color mode so it should be fine and f2 to start the game where Noah, I know how to play on hover and again, it's running very, very well.

Here it's actually better than when I ran this inside a Windows 98 virtual machine in a video recently, so yeah, these early 3D Windows games seem to run pretty well inside Reactos, so I downloaded and installed a bunch of different application manager programs with varying degrees of success now, apart from the odd graphical issue here and there, I must say that most of them worked very well and these are programs that I used to use daily in the Windows XP era, some of which I still use it quite regularly nowadays and most of the time, if it weren't for the React OS logo in the start menu in the corner of the screen, you might forget you were running Reacts and imagine you were Using Windows 2000, is the experience really that similar until you run into something that completely crashes the system, which I have to say happens a lot more when using React OS than in previous versions of Windows, in my experience, but again , this is alpha quality software, so there is no problem?

Wow, that's been reacting as just a little demo to show you where you are right now and to answer the title of this video, can it replace Windows in 2021? Well, obviously not, and really, to be honest, I probably couldn't. Even replacing Windows in 2001 in its current state, but instead, usually when I watch videos about React OS, this would be the part of the conclusion where the presenter ridicules the project and trashes it. I will not do it. However, because I really think they are to be commended for the progress they've made on this, even though you know it's been in development since 1996, people don't realize what a gigantic effort it is to replace something like Windows and when.

If you look at Microsoft, they have 1.3 million programmers working on Windows 10, 800,000 designers, and 2 billion people testing it, and I know from reading the forums and comments from the Reactos team that they are literally a handful of programmers, many of They're doing it in their spare time for no money, so when you compare Microsoft's resources to react to the fact that they've even gotten to the point where they're becoming comparable to Windows 2000, I think that's a huge achievement, so certainly I'm not going to criticize them for the progress they have made in recent decades. Now I also think that by the time they get to the stage, this is the big question.

The point is that it could be a replacement for Windows 10, but the question is whether or not it is really necessary today, and you know, I see Windows becoming less and less relevant as time passes, even ignoring the fact that most of us nowadays do our general daily computing if like using a smartphone and then when we get to the office to do real work, I mean there are many different solutions now , and even for the general user, I mean, if you watch my channel, you're probably the same as I've been with my family. You know tech support for as long as I can remember and I got to a point where I was getting fed up like my cousins ​​and aunt were calling me asking me to decrap their Windows laptop.

You know, having to connect it with VNC and uninstall all these toolbars. and the shit they dumped there, it got to the point where I was like, do you know what you're doing with your machine? and almost everyone said: surf the web, do some shopping on Amazon, go to Facebook, maybe write. their document or email using Google Docs and my advice to them now is that they know by Chromebook. I think you know there's no real reason for people to use Windows outside of a corporate environment and even that I mean there are efforts out there like you guys know.

You may know that I'm involved in the friend os project which actually takes the entire desktop file system and applications paradigm and puts it inside a web browser. You know HTML5 and JavaScript are so powerful now that you know you don't really need a desktop. on your hard drive or your ssd and if you want that traditional operating system environment, you already know Linux, which has come leaps and bounds over the last few decades and I think when the time comes that companies like Adobe, if it ever gets to the level where they're porting things like Photoshop and the Adobe suite to Linux, I mean I can't really see why anyone would choose to use Windows if the apps they need exist on something like Linux, so my real question isn't whether reactor West any Maybe it will get to the stage of replacing Windows 10.

The question is whether it is really necessary or not, so, yes, maybe there are some controversial thoughts there. Don't know. I'd love to know what you think too. Have you tried reacting? a Windows fan, do you use it because you enjoy it? Leave a comment. Thank you so much for watching this video, just a quick heads up also that I do a weekly retro gaming and tech podcast called The Retro Hour and you can get it in your favorite podcast client, ask your smart speaker to play the retro hour podcast or Check out our website, retrohour.com, new episodes coming out every Friday and we've had some amazing guests recently so definitely check it out and while you're here on YouTube.

Here are a couple other videos that I think you might like. Thanks for watching them. See you at the next one.