Trying out a Windows knock-off

what you doing i'm looking at react os react to this i thought i never heard of it it's uh open source reverse engineering of windows how have i never heard of this and how have you never heard of our sponsors for today's video freshbooks freshbooks is the easy to use accounting solution for small business owners and freelancers try it out for 30 days for free at freshbooks.com tech tips we'll have that linked below this is fun wow fonts look like total garbage i forgot what fonts were like before what's it called clear view clear yeah clear clear type sound right this is horrible react os is a free and open source operating system for amd 64 personal computers intended to be binary compatible with computer programs and device drivers made for windows server 2003 and later versions of windows so you can even run drivers that were designed for windows and they reverse engineered this thing and somehow it still exists without microsoft bombing it into oblivion yeah it actually started back in i think it's 1996 as a project called free win and i think the first release of rac2s proper was 1998 and they've been going ever since then it has nothing to do with like the data league or anything like that it's it's just straight up reverse engineered so you mean to tell me they've been at this 24 years and this is still version 0.4.12 alpha yes okay well i guess let's see how far they've gotten i mean right off the bat it looks really weird to me it's kind of like a combination of windows 2000 and like uh like a more modern windows 70 looking like blue gradient thing going on with the with like the menu bar at the top in fact how do i even oh weird like firefox looks really different i swear you can run firefox on anything oh wow it's glitchy already uh re react os how do you minimize something is that it's not right minimize hey i know how to use windows 98 sc suckers i'm going to put my recycle bin over here because that's what the cool kids do i mean that's what windows xp did can we uh can we line up the icons it doesn't work i see that wonderful holy crap you put halo on it okay i'm sure this is a guided experience what do you want me to do should i just poke at it first or do you want me to you know why don't we shut this one down and go through the installation process okay this has a very windows xp vibe to it yeah remember when windows setup looks like that i know right so press enter to install yup okay enter to continue yeah it's just telling you that it's an alpha oh it sure is format as butterfest yeah it actually supports butter fs is that okay can i can i use butterfest yeah you can use butter reference okay cool thank you why not so it's linux based then no no oh right wait what this blows my mind so this is a completely scratch-built kernel where they're trying to reverse engineer the windows kernel yeah but then you can run butter fs because if you have the source code you can just pour it in whatever the crap you want basically yeah in fact they don't fully support ndfs right because ntfs would be like very very deep you can run it off a ram disk like you can just boot so you can it'll just take your os off of your storage medium throw it all onto the ram disk and then start it up i actually don't know i've never tried that that would be so cool and totally dumb it's totally different it's small enough it could potentially work they even borrowed things from windows that are stupid like the like the stupid random string of characters after the computer why why is that there well so if you set up two react os system because that's what you're going to do at exactly the same time yeah with exactly the same name okay so there's some devices that are missing drivers install automatically oh couldn't found okay what my computer property managed hardware device management that's how i used to do it cool these other devices here can we just go get drivers for them yeah actually uh since we have a network connection we can just use the app store the app store the application manager well yeah it's like a software distribution virtualbox uses the ac97 driver there okay so i can i just grab that and then what um top left get it okay so now we need to go find the driver do you want to know how we do this can i try and figure it out sure let's figure it out install a driver from a specific location include this path uh my documents wraps downloads inf next wait that didn't work why didn't that work all right you can show me how to do it okay uh well that doesn't seem to work very often because it doesn't like to actually copy the files that it needs so what we're going to do is we're just going to copy these then we're going to go to the c drive under the react os folder not the windows folder right and we're just going to paste it in here and that's how we do it it's not like that for everything okay some things that have installers that put things in the right place will work but this was just a straight inf and unfortunately that doesn't work very well here okay so let's go back to the one that you already had kind of set up then okay ntos kernel.exe yeah so remember how you said oh is it okay for us to use butterfs yeah sometimes this happens with butterfast oh but worse things happen with fat32 trust me oh so butterfs is the better option yes okay so we're reimporting the disc because we had that one blue screen and now it won't boot yes this seems really finicky is it better on bare metal oh no no no it's still an accomplishment to boot it on bare metal well the thing is is that when it's working it is really cool it's just that we happened to run into some issues it's exploring time then right sure have a look around see what looks familiar and what doesn't okay my network places looks familiar yeah i've got a couple of uh shared drivers oh backslash oh that's because canadian multilingual oh okay so we need to change our keyboard uh settings control panel keyboard hardware properties that's incorrect even on windows just let me figure it out okay what you have to reboot to change the language yeah don't don't reboot what no oh it just prompt it just asks you if you want to like hey it's chill you just want to reboot for no reason maybe click in the white space and hit f5 or right-click and refresh or something maybe it wants something samba instead maybe it wants hostname maybe it wants something not password protected is this supposed to work um i didn't get it to work okay that's fine okay so we can look at some of the pre-included applications right yeah so like accessories administrative tools i did install a couple of these so okay solitaire it's got solitaire wow i'm not actually any good at solitaire i believe there is actually a method to the madness but i don't know what it is restart until you have three aces showing yeah yeah if you were able to speed run solitaire that'd be 17 seconds oh that's fine i got that spade i got that spade hey we making progress boys watch me freaking win this i'm actually doing pretty well here i wonder if it has the same win animation well that's actually why i'm doing this no i'd say this is not just because i don't respect the time of the people here trying to do their work so i need to get six seven eight and i can reveal some more cards okay uh am i back in this dang it i thought i was back in it and i wasn't oh wow everything just like stacks up along the bottom it's been a while since i've seen that okay games wine mine [Music] look i know how to play this game smh s-u-h what s-u-h-nothin oh crap i'm stuck okay there's a way to figure this out this one and this one okay all right what else we got programs winrar runs yep that's sweet vlc no way a character map okay hey this word no it doesn't scroll so it has a sideways scrolling bar but it doesn't do anything all right what what did you expect what indeed so we tried to put our secondary steam drive onto our clean one that does boot and now it doesn't okay so we have this other one what's reactive west blank that's the one you installed so it's a blank blank slate okay all right well we've abandoned the cooking show strategy where the cake is actually pre-baked and we're now on the os that i installed at the beginning of the video yeah um right i need to install the guest additions which you can do it's straight up the windows guest editions so i'm just gonna go ahead and do that what anthony's also doing is mounting one of our network shares as a drive in the vm using oracle virtualbox so we're going to finally address that halo folder that was on the desktop of the ones that he had pre-prepared assuming come on i just want to do the halo thing i should have just done it right away because i was like oh i'll save that for last this was working this was all working we all saw it was working seconds ago all of this was can i get into regular mode no it's gone [Music] now i did nothing to it i restarted it that's it i'm getting frustrated now and i'm the apologist for this thing hey which one is this this is the new one that i just reimported so it is set i know what's going on for the sake of everyone's sanity i have it scaled why does that help people's sanity so they can actually see what's on the screen instead of all like having everything super small it helps the editing team sanity anyway oh their sanity not the viewers sanity well i mean it could be theirs too you know if the viewers cared about the editing yeah oh wow yeah the mouse is a little on the broken side yeah that might be fixable uh how uh just like a full screen setting yeah it's like a thing well it's like that now yeah okay now it's up in the top left corner but hey it's playable oh wait no i can't i i can't turn past that point um okay must go only forward to be clear the mouse thing is only because this is a vm okay well it runs it's not the newest game or anything but it ran which is i guess impressive that's a directx game running on not windows everything else about the experience is absolutely horrible and i'll be floored if these guys ever get out of alpha because linux has made so much progress on gaming and is infinitely better than this in every other possible way to the point where it's infinitely better in now every way but hey cool um i'm glad i tried it i can't believe i've never heard of it and i can't believe you guys have never heard of our sponsor that's the same segway you used last time is it really yeah our sponsor squarespace you think you don't need a website well you do no matter what you need a website for whether it's to put up pictures of your cat for the world to enjoy or to you know promote your operating system that probably nobody legitimately actually uses squarespace lets you do it they've got tons of great features so if you want to open a business online selling products they've got you covered there if you want to promote your expo our site for ltx expo was built using squarespace and quickly mind you and if you have any trouble using squarespace you can reach out to their 24 7 support team via live chat and email the whole thing is that squarespace makes it simple to get your message online and you don't have to take my word for it they've got a free 14-day trial just go to squarespace.com ltt and if you use our link you can get 10 off we're going to have that down below so thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this video maybe check out our most recent linux update linux gaming update proton one or um that won't be out yet but we can look at the 10 reasons why linux is just better oh yeah we could do that too you should do it 10 reasons reactos is just better shortest video ever i mean no offense like it's super cool that you got even this far but i mean academically it's pretty good and they have been updating the wine staff as well so that's part of the reason why wine has gotten so good it's just kind of crazy just like you wouldn't actually use it that's all no

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,795,148

Keywords: software, operating system, os, windows, windows xp, windows server 2003, open source, alternative, alpha, reactos, react os, first impression, reaction, tour, compatibility, testing, virtual machine, not linux, not windows

Id: U6d7E1uKSmg

Length: 14min 13sec (853 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/blackletum]

Yeah, doesn't surprise me in the least that Linus completely misses the mark of ReactOS. He's coming at it as if it should be a fully robust, ready-to-run operating system (I mean, he compares it to gaming on Linux, and Linux in general, near the end) when that is simply not a fair comparison.

Also I know they like their clickbait - but could they at least put the ReactOS name in the title? Come on, guys. (They do, at least, have a link to the website in the description - something they haven't always remembered to do historically)

also NGL - wish this was less of a "Linus reacts to ReactOS" video and more of a "Anthony discusses ReactOS, it's history, purpose, etc" since he's a bit less uh, let's call it squirrely, than Linus or the other presenters within LMG. When Anthony is showing something off you can tell he's done his homework and is presenting it to you in a professional manner, whereas Linus just comes in with his hyperactive personality and shits all over everything he's interacting with (for instance, the video where they talk about low-cost computers, and he doesn't even run the machine in dual channel mode)

this turned into a rant, but hey lol

edit: small note I want to put here, I won't change my wording here but I think it should be noted that Linus came into this as if it was a "finished product" when it's still in alpha, regardless of how long it's taken to even get to where it is today. I think it's unfair to judge a product based on an alpha build (even if that build has taken literal decades to get there, but that's a different point)

[u/bumblebritches57]

Why not just symlink %SysRoot%/Windows to %SysRoot%/ReactOS?

[u/DeemounUS]

I felt that Linus was a bit aggressive towards React OS. This OS is not a Windows replacement for sure, but it has potential. And it feels right in terms of shipped stuff. It's like Windows without bloatware, spyware and trackers.

All I want my Windows machine to be is to have: 1) Win 2000 look. I don't need any modern themes 2) Have no Cortana and Win Store 3) Without unnecessary software.

This one seems just right for that purpose