ReactOS: Can It Replace Windows In 2021?!

hey friends now i don't know if you've realized from watching my channel over the years that i'm not actually the biggest fan of microsoft windows shocking i know but i have actually done videos in the last couple of years singing the praises of different versions of windows and you know hand on heart i will give microsoft credit when credits to you for example windows 95 i thought had a lot of innovation from microsoft and we saw things in there that are still present in desktop user interfaces today things like the start menu for example that you know is not only still in windows despite them trying to kill it off in windows 8 but also pretty much every linux distro that you download has got some form of start menu in there as well and windows 2000 i thought was a very elegant and streamlined version of windows you know for a microsoft operating system so there are certain versions of windows i've been impressed with over the years but i think it kind of goes back to my days as a real hardcore loyal amiga user i used amigas all throughout the 90s and up until actually 2001 so it wasn't until windows xp came along that i finally packed up my amiga 1200 and moved over to the dark side because before that i remember seeing windows 95 and thinking that microsoft were finally catching up with the things that my media could do admittedly 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 that had the the intel outside desktop wallpaper on my amiga i shared this gif behind me with uh various friends on the early web i'm sure but i've admitted the fact that i do need to use windows for work purposes and that is the case for many of us and i think generally if you're a windows user you kind of use it by default because there are programs on there that you have to use i've never really met anyone that uses windows because they're a fan of it or they enjoy using it and looking around my house i mean i've got one windows machine which is the one behind me running windows 10 but i've got various work applications on there that only work with windows apart from that i've got six current macs around the house i edit all my videos on this m1 mac mini next to me which works great and i have about four or five linux machines as well in various rooms of the house so really i'm not much of a windows user these days and maybe you're the same and you're thinking how can i get away from using windows in 2021 well obviously we have things like linux with wine in there where you can run with various degrees of success different windows only applications but also there is a drop in open source windows replacement operating system that's actually been in development since the mid 90s called reactos so i haven't really given a test drive for a while so i thought in this video we download the latest version of react os and find out how well it works as a windows replacement in 2021 now just before we get into it i wanted to take a quick moment to give a big thank you to this video sponsor 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 be it a pc or a mac or even your smartphone from the bad guys and as well as being safe from malware spyware and viruses it also encrypts your data and has a vpn included which will protect you from phishing sites and your data being stolen when you're on places like coffee shop and airport wi-fi and that risk is actually very real because i remember being in a hotel in london with a few friends and that were all connected to the hotel wi-fi and one of the guys in our group being horrified that we could actually see all of his files his documents his pictures shared on the hotel's wi-fi and anybody had access to them and he wasn't the only one i did make the 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originally aiming to be a drop in replacement for windows 95 and over the years the name was changed to react os and they expanded the aims of the project to instead duplicate the functionality of windows nt which of course forms the basis of all modern versions of windows you know windows 10 is actually nt version 10.0 and despite react os having been in development for 25 years progress on it has been pretty slow to say the least and all these years later in 2021 it is still only in alpha state now admittedly that is rather slow it's not completely unique in the world of operating systems i mean i could use this opportunity to mention gnu heard again but i got enough hate about that in the last video so i will quickly move on now the current version of react os is 0.4.3 and that was released in april of 2020 but on their website there are also nightly builds that are more up-to-date and include some newer features obviously that might be compromising stability but based on the advice i've received from the forums it is worth trying the nightly builds so i'm going to be using the latest nightly build for this video and installing it in virtualbox to test it out now i did have a pc ready to try reactos on physical hardware but after burning a cd image i couldn't even get the system to boot and apparently that is not uncommon you know alpha software and everything so after we've downloaded the iso file we can get to work installing reactos all right and here we are inside the virtualbox manager and i've created a virtual machine that should have the ideal settings to install react os i've read these on forums online and i can put them in the video description if you're interested but as you can see here we've got 32 megabytes of video memory um the vbox vga graphics controller 2d video and 3d acceleration enabled um we've got the ac 97 audio controller the pc netfast 3 net for networking and now all we need to do is attach the virtual box cd image and we should be able to boot from that and hopefully get it installed and working inside virtualbox and straight away we get this uh warning here which i'll ignore and as you can see now we've booted straight into the reactos installer and the first thing that you will notice about it is it is very reminiscent of the windows installers from the era that it's attempting to emulate um obviously windows 98 and windows 2000 look like this that kind of a blue and silver dostyle screen so we'll go to um united kingdom and enter to install and then we do get a warning that react os is in alpha stage meaning it's not feature complete and is under heavy development it is recommended to use it only for evaluation and testing purposes and not as your daily usage os so there you go now let's have a look here um that looks fine except that then we have the unpartitioned disk space here so if i press enter that should create one um and then we can select a file system here as well now we do have the um butter fs there as well which i have used in linux before obviously we are trying to copy windows as it were so i think probably the fat file system which obviously is in windows will probably be a better choice i could be wrong but we'll go with that and we'll do a quick format and then it asks which directory you want to install the react os files in so you know normally on windows you put it in slash windows obviously in here it will be slash react os and then the installer is doing its thing and it seems pretty quick install the bootloader yeah we'll do that and there we go we're at the stage now where we are ready to reboot and run it by the looks of it so what i'll do is here we also need to remove the um the cd image before we reboot so i'll pause it and then we can go to just remove that there we go and that was really fast i mean i don't know when the last time you installed windows 98 was but i did that in a recent video and it took around 45 minutes so um yeah this is way improved over that so we'll try it's the standard version of react os and you get that really cool logo there and as you can see the copyright date at the bottom was 2021 and yeah this is very much like windows 2000 with those you know nice gradients at the top there which is you know definitely a bonus for me i mean i think windows 2000 is probably my favorite user interface on any version of windows it looks really clean and really elegant i think um so here we are doing a bit more set up by the looks of it um and they acknowledge the open source projects that we use to create react os and other elements of wine in there that i mentioned a bit earlier um various other projects here as well sort of skip that and then we need to choose a product option so we can have reactos server or workstation so on server the system will be recognized as a server private folders are independent from my documents what's workstation i guess it just means whether you want to do network shares by the looks of it so we'll give it a try and server here we can um customize our locale settings yeah that all looks fine and then the keyboard yeah it's already on english as you can see it's cutting off the bottom of the screen here a little bit in virtualbox but um i could scale it which makes it all fat so yeah i think we'll just go into uh into this for now hopefully we can solve that in the graphics drivers later um yeah keyboard's been detected fine um reboot now for language no weird then we'll put our name in here yeah this is almost exactly like installing windows 2000 um even down to the weird name that they give you a machine uh an administrator password i don't think we need that then my time zone is correct if it's very early in the morning here and now we can pick a theme for react os now it's currently on uh a classic by the looks of it and that's cool actually that it changes in the installer so you don't have to wait till it boots and we have my myzoo luna i think we'll go with a classic one you know that looks a bit more like windows 2000 like i mentioned before um yep typical settings it will be part of a domain yeah we'll add it to my network shares why not in what group reactos could not find a wine gecko package which is needed for embedding html to work correctly okay install it okay now our first problem here it looks like maybe i haven't configured the internet connection properly or there are no drivers installed maybe so we can skip that for now okay that's gonna do another reboot i am impressed at how responsive and how quickly we're going through the installer here as i said compared to those old versions of windows you know this is flying and here we go um we found a new device driver for system device yeah that's very vague um okay trading automatically driver couldn't be found okay uh this one for the audio device okay install automatically couldn't be found right this could be because we haven't got a network connection working um but as we can see here you know we are on the the reactos desktop and yeah wow this looks very much like windows 2000 doesn't it um even down to the start menu there in the corner here look at that [Music] and we'll have a look through some of the in-store programs and settings very soon they have done a very good job at this though but i wonder if i did read that you can install the virtualbox guest editions to get you know graphics drivers and audio working um and as you can see here reactos is reporting as windows nt version 5.2 which i think what was that windows xp alright so nt 5.2 is actually windows server 2003 so actually a little bit newer than windows xp so um hopefully we can install the guest additions from virtualbox for server 2003 and it should work you know if reactos does what it says it does and can run windows programs so i've installed the cd image there going to my computer and there you go we can see it there so you got that installed by the looks of it we'll give it a reboot and hopefully we've now got graphics and audio drivers working and we can make it full screen and there we go and the virtual screen is currently set to 8-bit color mode wonder if these work now no but we should be able to put it into um full screen mode now and there we go it's not all stretched out we've actually got a decent display resolution here so let's go into um the same way you do it from windows changing the screen resolution and properties and yeah this looks identical so i think we're going to um settings yeah we can actually put that up to now i've got a 16 9 monitor so maybe that would work let's try putting it in um true color as well maybe 24 bit let's try that okay so i've been experimenting with different screen resolutions for a couple of minutes and unfortunately it seems the only way that i can get the true color 32-bit graphics depth is by running it in 960 by 498 resolution which obviously is a pretty low screen resolution in 2021 but if i change it to anything else it keeps defaulting back to 256 colours and everything looks really washed out on screen but actually for the purposes of doing a video 960x498 it's probably ideal actually because you can see everything i'm doing on the screen without me having to keep you know zooming into different areas so we'll stick with it for the rest of this vid and hopefully it won't cause too many problems but while we're in the display properties which again looks very very similar to those old school versions of windows i thought we'd have a little look at what else we can change from here as you can see there are some of those themes that we saw on the installer that actually we can just jump right into from here without having to reinstall reactos so let's see what those look like now this one is called lotus so if we apply that as you can see everything changes to this really dark theme here um the start menu you know you've got that kind of black reactos logo in the corner there and we have one called luna which actually i thought luna might be similar to windows xp you know with rounded corners and everything you know the the fisher-price theme as we used to call it which is called luna but actually it looks a bit more like a kind of dark mode and we also have mizu in there as well on my zoo yeah i do quite like that one actually that looks quite modern that kind of flat look that you get in modern versions of windows and there is actually one called modern um which again another dark kind of theme i'm not a fan of really using dark modes really i generally prefer light themes in my operating systems you know to keep me awake uh but on this one i think we'll go back to the classic theme you know much prefer that windows 2000 kind of look um and we have here's some different color schemes in here as well some of which actually look like they've been lifted straight from the old versions of windows yeah like that pumpkin i don't remember that one wheat eggplant that was definitely in windows i think i did use that one for a while in windows 98 uh reactos classic which is you know a 95 98 theme by the looks of it um red white and blue cool we'll stick with the uh the standard one now that kind of windows 2000 gradient look i've always preferred that um screen savers now we have a couple installed the good old 3d tech screensaver running very smoothly that looks very nice and um yeah the the lock screen one that you could have backgrounds yeah it looks like we haven't got any installed by default but obviously you know you can add your own in there let's look at the device manager there you go see everything is installed here our network adapter should be installed and working by the looks of this so this might be a good time actually to see if we can get online so i do think there is a web browser bundled with react os there we go the wine version of internet explorer um which i haven't got high hopes for but i think there are other web browsers that we can run in here and by the looks of it is trying to load the reactor west homepage and uh not having much joy let's try something we know works google and by the looks of it it is connecting to google and pulling through something here because the url has changed but we're not getting anything displayed in the browser let's try a really simple website the oldnet.com which is you know a basic html 1.0 website which again is not pulling through i wonder if this is related to that error message i saw on install about html rendering you know the the gecko edition that it couldn't install um because by the looks of it we're not getting an hd any html rendered in the web browser um we'll do a quick check to see if we have got network connectivity so if we go into the command prompt we should be able to do a ping to google and there you go it's been returned so yeah we are connected to the network and the internet so that is working maybe we can install a different web browser and get that working now in here if we go to add and remove programs that is very different to windows because as you can see we do have a package manager here as well where we can actually install third-party applications inside react os so that is something that you didn't have in the old versions of windows you know the 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 get some third-party programs installed and maybe get a new web browser that will render html in just a bit but i thought we'd have 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've got the c drive there d which is my virtual cd-rom drive and then the file structure identical to windows we have my documents folders there and program files are all installed here the reactos folder let's try a few of those um out-of-the-box in-store programs we have you know clones of notepad and paint they go paint looks extremely similar to windows virtually no difference there same with notepad the calculator which again as you'd expect looks like the windows 2000 version of the windows calculator word pad yeah i forgot they used to be like um is that still in windows now i know notepad's in there but wordpad was a bit more fully featured and i remember couldn't this load windows credit load microsoft office files in here as well stuff that same with word i remember being a lot more fully featured than um notepad for example all the different um you know toolbars here that we've gotten the different fonts and everything yeah forgot about wordpad and there are quite a lot of fonts installed by default again all the ones you would have got on there earlier versions of windows by the looks of it administrative tools again same as windows we've got a few games in here i mean yeah come on they had to install solitaire didn't they the amount of hours that were wasted in offices all across the world playing solitaire back in the day i think i saw a version of minesweeper there as well yeah wine mine again another version that you get with uh with wine by the looks of it and spider solid there a different version of solitaire i must admit i was never a solitaire player so i don't really know my way around it so yeah not really a lot to it you know as you get with a stock windows 2000 install everything that we kind of need to get us set up and going is installed um but we'll try installing a few of these third-party applications now now 7-zip is something that i always install in windows straight away so we'll get that abby word which um a snappy and open source word processor i've have used that before i think it is like an open source version or clone of um microsoft word um adobe air yeah i think we need that one uh the ac97 audio driver but i think by the looks of it the audio appears to be working anyway so we'll skip that one uh flash yet we don't need that um hey well instant messenger yeah some of these actually do date this software don't they i mean i can't remember the last time i spoke to anyone i named probably around 2002 and we have a cd ripper there as well audacity and it's actually quite a nice fully featured open source audio editor so we'll give that one a try um c cleaner there as well now imagine these are all older versions of these programs because um this is obviously only working up to windows server 2003 compatibility so the current versions i imagine that require you know windows 10 and not gonna work in here um hover love that game on windows 95 we'll give that a try um anything else we want or got libreoffice there as well that is obviously a fully featured office suite which will be handy to have a few of the microsoft net frameworks in there as well but i think the main thing that we need is a web browser so by the looks of it the latest version of firefox that we've got in here is version 48 which um is going back a bit now what we on that like version 80. so i think for now let's try installing those and see if they work before we get anything else so click on install here and it will ask me where i want to install them yeah in program files same as we would on windows all right so i've got to say i was really impressed with the install process from the package manager everything automatically downloaded no errors it incrementally installed everything and it looks like the programs i selected have all installed successfully and as you can see there are a bunch of them on the desktop already and so we'll try audacity the audio editor that i mentioned which i have used before um and that appears to be working just fine in here obviously a little bit cramped due to the limited screen resolution um i haven't got a microphone or anything attached so um yeah i imagine that's not going to work but it does look like you know the the user interface is working fine and we can use the program i imagine so let's try something that we can actually um demo on here libreoffice now this is actually quite a big office suite so the fact that they've got this installing them working fine in here and but i imagine it's got quite a lot of dependencies um the windows version of it it's going to be a good test of it so yeah as you can see we can make a document a spreadsheet a presentation or a graphic let's try just the standard writer document okay we have that weird blue bar appearing there i'm not sure what that is i'm not a libreoffice user normally [Music] yeah that appears to be working just fine in here um definitely usable and i've mentioned in videos before i do use um microsoft office 365 through work and i use you know google drive and i use friend office but really for the kind of things i do in a word processor i mean i haven't really used a new feature in microsoft word since about 1997 so i could definitely get by with using this for my daily word processing needs no problem at all with this um the graphics have kind of corrupted a bit there and i've made that a bit too big maybe yeah so definitely we've got some glitching there and it appears now yeah um it crashed um so i also installed firefox here as well go away um which hopefully we can now access websites using so it is obviously an older version of firefox but it should still work with a lot of sites i imagine you have not seen that user interface on firefox for a couple of years when is this from about firefox yeah there's no year on here but i've got a feeling it was at least a decade ago there is an update available okay and unfortunately after installing the firefox update it won't run now i get this error message here saying that a uh dynamic dll couldn't be found um so i think we'll try uninstalling that and then not doing the update i mean i've checked this version of firefox is from 2016 so you know it's not hideously outdated i imagine a lot of websites and forums and that kind of thing would work fine using it that was version 48 that i had maybe we can just reinstall over it as it doesn't actually see it being installed on the system the uninstall icon is greyed out so maybe we can just install over the top of it okay let's try launching again and there we go we're back to the version that 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 now this is a very simplistic um website that's designed to work on older machines um a lot older than this actually works with you know 1990s computers but as you can see here really responsive the rendering looks fine to me let's try we will not do the update this time google.com and again you know looking fine here let's try the react os website renders very nicely very responsive so we're going to really tax it now by trying youtube which i haven't got high hopes for but you never know yeah that's telling me that i need to update my web browser as it isn't supported anymore unfortunately my wikipedia i imagine should work fine yeah so i mean it is possible to do basic web browsing in here let's try twitter as you can see my twitter feed is displaying fine in here as well again definitely at a usable speed i was updating my hue light bulbs a bit earlier um so i'd say you know in terms of web browsing if you don't do anything too demanding it looks like react os has got that covered using this um older version of firefox so um that's something we can tick off the list of uh things that we need to do and i've even managed to get google drive launching inside firefox here now admittedly it is absolutely crawling and there are some rendering issues probably because of the low screen resolution but it looks like it is usable in here we can create a new document and we do get the message that uh there we go we've got our first blue screen of death um 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 we are back into react os so we did get google drive working in there you know slowly uh before we got the blue screen of death so i think we can tick off web browsing i mean firefox even though it's a few years old should do pretty much everything i need apart from video streaming so i'm quite impressed with how well that ran actually and what else did we install in here as well we did have a couple of games i installed um including hover which i don't think ran the installer it just used winzip to place the files somewhere on the hard disk here but i'm not exactly sure where so let's have a look around and there it is we've detected you're not running in 256 it will still run yeah we're running in true color mode so that should be fine and f2 to start the game where noah i know how to play hover and again that is running really really smoothly in here actually nicer than when i uh run this inside a windows 98 virtual machine in a video recently so yeah these early 3d windows games appear to run quite nicely inside reactos so i downloaded and installed a bunch of different programs from the applications manager with varying degrees of success now apart from the odd graphical glitch here and there i've got to say most of them ran really well and these are programs that i used to use daily back in the windows xp era some of which i still use quite regularly today and a lot of the time if it wasn't for the react os logo on the start menu in the corner of the screen i could actually forget that i was running reactos and imagine i was using windows 2000 instead the experience really is that similar until you run into something that completely locks the system up which i've got to say happens a lot more when using react os than it did on the older versions of windows in my experience but again this is alpha quality software so there you go that's been react os just a little demo to kind of show you where it's at the moment and uh to answer the title to this video can it replace windows in 2021 um well obviously not um and really to be honest it probably couldn't even replace windows in 2001 in its current state but instead of you know usually when i watch videos about react os this would be the bit in the conclusion where the presenter ridicules the project and kind of rips it apart i'm not going to do that though because i actually think they are to be commended for the the progress that they've actually put into this even though you know it's been in development since 1996 people don't realize what a gargantuan effort it is to replace something like windows and when you look at microsoft and they've got 1.3 million programmers working on windows 10 800 000 designers and 2 billion people testing it out and i know from reading the forums and comments from the reactos team they are literally a handful of programmers many of them doing in their spare time for no money so when you compare microsoft's resources to react os the fact that they've even got to the stage where it is kind of getting comparable to windows 2000 i think is a massive massive achievement so i'm certainly not going to crap on them for the progress that they've made over the last couple of decades now i do think as well that by the time they get to the stage this is the big question i've got not whether react os can get to the point that it could be a windows 10 replacement but it's whether or not it's really needed today and you know i see windows becoming less and less relevant as time goes on even ignoring the fact that most of us today do our general daily computing if you like using a smartphone and then when we get into the office to do actual work i mean there are so many different solutions now and even for the general user i mean if you watch my channel you're probably the same i've been my family's you know tech support for as long as i can remember and it got to the stage where i was getting fed up like my cousins and my auntie's ringing me asking me to decrapify their windows laptop you know having to vnc into it and uninstall all these toolbars and crap that they've downloaded onto there it got to the stage where i was like you know what do you do with your machine and pretty much all of them were like surf the web do a bit of shopping on amazon go on facebook maybe write your document or email using google docs and my advice to them now is you 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 know you may know that i'm involved in the friend os project which actually takes the whole desktop file system and applications paradigm and puts it inside a web browser you know html5 and javascript is so powerful now that you know you don't really need a desktop on your hard disk or your ssd and if you do want that traditional operating system environment you know linux now that's come on strides in the last couple of decades and i think when it gets to the stage when companies like adobe if it ever gets to the level where they're porting stuff like photoshop and the adobe suite over to linux i mean i can't really see why anyone would choose to use windows if the applications you need exist on something like linux so my real question isn't whether reactor west will ever get to the stage of replacing windows 10 it's whether it really needs to or not so um yeah maybe some controversial thoughts in there i don't know i'd love to know your thoughts as well have you tried react os are you 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 as well that i do a weekly retro gaming and technology podcast called the retro hour and you can get that from your favorite podcast client ask your smart speaker to play the retro hour podcast or head to our website the retrohour.com new episodes out every friday and we've had some amazing guests recently so definitely give it a listen and while you're here on youtube here is another couple of videos i think you might enjoy thanks for watching i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Dan Wood

Views: 278,769

Rating: 4.7505827 out of 5

Keywords: reactos, reactos replace windows, reactos open source windows, windows alternatives, open source windows, react os, reactos apps, reactos compatibility, reactos gaming, linux WINE, installing reactos, reactos tutorial, trying out a windows knock-off, windows, microsoft windows, open source, windows xp, windows server 2003, reactos impression, reactos daily driver

Id: XLP-B3-OftU

Length: 36min 32sec (2192 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Kormoraan]

spoiler alert: no, but it is still worth going on.

[u/kruemmelbande]

I can run it on my laptop... But... No Drivers for the gpu, WiFi or even the usb ports..