Tech Over Tea - ReactOS Future Is Brighter Than Ever | ReactOS Devs

Starting point is 00:00:00 Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as always your host, Brodie Robertson. And today, we're not talking about Linux. We are talking about another very interesting open source project, something which has been around just going on 30 years now, ReactOS. So how about you both introduce yourself and we'll go from there? Whoever wants to go first.

Starting point is 00:00:27 It doesn't matter. Pick one. Roll a d'all. Carl, you go. All right. Well, so I'm Carl Bilerruki. I've been involved with the React West project only for, what, two, three years now at this point. So I'm pretty new, but I've, um, I got my start in the project working on, um, some elements of our, uh, I'll explore implementation. And then I slowly did more and more and, um, took on the role, role of the, role of the, release manager with 0.4.15 and just been working on a lot of things for React OS. I really enjoy spending my time with this project. Fair enough. I'm Justin Miller. I started really early in 2021. I think I snuck around a little bit in 2020, but it's been about five years now. I started working off of creating a prototype for a systematic

Starting point is 00:01:32 multi-processing support for basically the kernel level multi-core hardware and eventually evolved into trying to get physical machines to work, focusing my time on taking advantage of modern technologies from later versions of Windows to try and get stuff from physical machines working outside of a virtual machine. So that's a pretty good TLDR of what I've been doing. So it sounds like to me this was like, you were bored during COVID and this was something you started doing. Yeah, I dropped out of college and I was like, huh, because I didn't like, I didn't like how

Starting point is 00:02:08 like that was going. And so I wanted to do something for tech. I was already doing operating system stuff. I made my start on being obsessed with LFS trying to create my own In-It system and replacing parts of G-LibC with my own packages. And eventually it just evolved into, I I want something that's not Unix-based, and so I chose between Haiku or React to Us and end up going with React to us. Okay. Carl, how about yourself? How'd you get yourself involved? Because you've been a bit more recent.

Starting point is 00:02:43 Yeah. So don't laugh too much at me. Growing up, I was a big Microsoft fanboy, actually. Really enjoyed the period of time. It was led by Steve Ballmer. He has some pretty funny quotes, I'm sure. People down in the comment section will love to repeat. And I don't know.

Starting point is 00:03:04 I've used Linux a lot. I just really don't like working with a Unix environment all the time. And so what I wanted really was a Windows-like environment on a wide variety of platforms. Because a big, you know, we can talk about Windows isn't free. I think really a big problem with it is licensing. You're never going to, it doesn't make sense. You want to ship a, I don't know, like a thermostat with a UI on it for 50 bucks. You're not going to pay $30 or more for a Windows license to sell this thing, right?

Starting point is 00:03:46 And so I kind of saw, I don't want to say the writing on the wall for the Windows platform, but I you know Satcha came in I thought he was neglecting the the Windows platform and I knew I didn't really want to use a Linux or Unix like platform on things so I was like well React OS is my option so that's how I started getting into React OS

Starting point is 00:04:14 and yeah Is there any particular reason you don't like working with the Unix platform? Um, it's death by a thousand cuts. Um, you know, I, I don't like dealing with, uh, like different, I don't like dealing with a bunch of dependencies on Unix. I'm not really not a big fan of these really long shell scripts that, you know, part of it can break and then it does, and then the whole script doesn't fail. So then, um, do you end up with unintended behavior? I've just, I don't know, I really like, I at least did, really like using Windows for things. So React OS seemed definitely, to me, felt like it fit that role better. You can make Linux look like Windows, but you can't really make it work like Windows. So React OS works like Windows. That's what drew me to the project.

Starting point is 00:05:18 sometimes too well. I'm sure later on what we can talk about leadership and the project has been a little crazy. So before we get to that, we probably should explain to anyone who's completely out of the loop.

Starting point is 00:05:39 What is Reactoos? Want me to go of a shot? All right. So ReactoS is an open source re-implementation of Windows, a variety of versions at this point. It spent most of its life targeting Windows 2003, which is the server edition of XP, if you didn't know. And it's basically over time

Starting point is 00:06:03 is transitioned between conversions and different goals and now trying to approach a little bit of a later goal. But in general, it's reverse engineering of the entire Windows platform itself. So not identical in functionality, but identical in and out basically. Your favorite apps and drivers in an open source environment you can trust.

Starting point is 00:06:33 So what does that entail like today? Where is the project right now? I would personally say that although it's been mostly resolved, We've spent most of our life being really encapsulated in a VM. And while the last release and this next one, we can talk about that at any point, is going to dramatically prove the situation. Being encapsulated within a virtual machine basically would only allow it for, basically only allow it to use software from the XP era in a VM now.

Starting point is 00:07:15 I will say that is a little better than it used to be. I think when I started even before then, I remember seeing all people talk about Ross and complaining it wouldn't work in a virtual machine for any of the programs. And now the complaint usually is that it's not new enough programs. So that's evolution, but still very much locked down to the XP era of things. And although we are starting to change that to a really reasonable degree of success, that has been it's really where it's at is very locked down in that in casing for now. Yeah, shortly after I joined, there was quite a bit of, there was a lot of project management that shuffled around with the React OS project.

Starting point is 00:08:10 The former release manager ended up stepping down. And I would say definitely React OS. is not something that I would recommend people try daily driving at all at this point. But it's definitely something worth keeping your eye on and seeing where it goes. Because I think React to West has a lot of future potential. It's just not at a state yet where people can use it day and day out. I have seen the odd post of someone saying they do daily drive it. So there are people out there who seem to be crazy enough to do so.

Starting point is 00:09:00 I walked down to Eastern Oregon. Oh, yeah, okay, sorry. This quick was weird for a second. I walked down to Eastern Oregon and I actually found Ross running ATM software. I think it's a command line and I thought that was really scary. I don't know, but I really didn't want to use my debit card there, but you know what? I feel like most people would, for a lot of projects people work with like, wow, that's cool.

Starting point is 00:09:28 The thing that I work on is powering an ATM. But you seem to have, how would I say, a lot of negative perceptions around the project you work on. Yeah, I don't, I don't think I'd work on it this much if I liked it that much, if that makes sense. actually that's fair it's yeah I want to see it get better and I'm very proud of how much it's improved

Starting point is 00:09:54 but like even when I saw that ATM there was like an issue where if you ran something for a certain amount of days it would just bug check the entire system and so bug checks the technical term for blue screen

Starting point is 00:10:08 uh huh sorry but yeah it would kill the entire system after like 13 days or something. That's not the case anymore, thankfully. But at the time when ATM was running that, it was. And I'm like, do they just like reboot it every day?

Starting point is 00:10:25 Like, I don't know what they're doing. It's real weird. You laugh, but we do that at our job with, you know, programs that run on normal windows. We just, we have to restart them regularly. Sorry, man. Let me reboot my ATM. It ran out of memories.

Starting point is 00:10:43 Well, you say that, but I assume they probably reboot it when they fill it with money. I don't, I don't, I don't work around ATMs. I'm sure someone can answer that question. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, there are people crazy enough for it. Clearly, clearly. I thought it was bad when I saw, you know, like OS2 stuff still in deployment.

Starting point is 00:11:07 At least when it's like OS2, you know this, like it was in a good state when it stopped being supported. so even though that's crazy that you still have bad in deployment it sounds like with React OS you're like maybe it's not maybe it's not stable enough to do this just yet maybe just avoid that at least especially at that time oh at that time for sure I yeah I've there was one person

Starting point is 00:11:36 that was daily driving React OS I was as a web server and they got to a year of uptime which beats Windows a left at this point, unfortunately. But so cool, I guess. But, yeah. Feats your parody.

Starting point is 00:11:53 Yeah, there we go. You just need an AI to decide when to kill the OS, and I think we're good. But yeah, I, it's kind of doable now. I personally have been starting to move a lot of the work I do to React OS itself. Varying degrees of success.

Starting point is 00:12:17 The machine I am talking to you on currently has about 30 different drivers that have been removed from Windows 11 and replaced with ReactOS. Specifically because of a bug in their USB stack that Windows 11 kind of made worse. And I was like, I think I can fix it. And I did. So now it's more stable with the Ross components, unfortunately. But stuff is progressing there. It is getting more stable. So if that counts.

Starting point is 00:12:49 Yeah, considering the design choices we know exist in Windows, you know, like the start menu written React, I have no doubt there's some dumb things going on with the driver stack as well. Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately. So you've mentioned that hardware now does work. Is there any specific, like, era of hardware where you kind of stop at?

Starting point is 00:13:21 Is it pretty much anything works? Like, where is that now? So if you download the latest nightly, right now, what you'll end up starting or stopping at is Haswell. Okay. So that's Jennifer. Yep, there's a specific reason for that. There's a specific blocker.

Starting point is 00:13:43 However, we do have a UEFI loader now. That jumps things into the kernel. There's a couple more paths. is coming through to improve that experience. And so we are pushing that edge really far, but it's even less usable than Ross normally. But if you just want, like, you just want to see Ross actually install and work, at this point in time, has well and below all actually reasonably install.

Starting point is 00:14:11 That's Athenae X6. There's a sixth gen down there that also has Ross installed. I have an entire cabinet of a wide range of hardware. But yeah, the nice thing is that XP doesn't actually even boot on Haswell or Vista. So are we better yet? I don't know. But it's definitely improving at a rapid rate. The last two years of immense progress on multiple ends from multiple people to try and make that work.

Starting point is 00:14:47 and it's paying off. It's paying off for sure. These all right here are Windows 7 era machines and stuff. And although they're still using XP drivers, because XP was drivers were supportive for a ridiculous amount of time until like 2015. Yeah, it's an interesting progression. So if somebody was to try out React OS now, you'd suggest they try out the nightly build?

Starting point is 00:15:16 For now. Yeah. I hope to see our next release be the first release we can actually be like, you know what, this is something you can uninstall and try. Point 15 was a good step to that before a USB boot didn't even work at all to install. So by the time point 15 came out, we actually could install off USB and it really did work as long as it wasn't a USB3 controller,

Starting point is 00:15:44 which was one of the blocking efforts there. But it's, yeah, yes, try and for that bill for now. Hopefully that can change here in a couple months. So when was the last tagged release? That was March 2025. Oh, so it's like it's a year of additional changes since then. Yeah. Right, okay.

Starting point is 00:16:17 Yeah, I can definitely see why. what has really changed between those two points? It sounds like quite a few things have improved. Oh, this is really long. I can name off a lot of the kernel stuff being done. Our, in terms of our 64-bit built now actually installs and boots and is mostly usable. We lack the support for 32-bit applications, which for Windows is a huge blocker to installers. But if you're transferring files on there, a lot of software does work.

Starting point is 00:16:56 The experience is not too bad. That's happened in the last year. The same developer that focused on our 64-bit build, expanded features into like AVX, which was not even introduced into Windows 7 until much later in its life. A lot of foundation to try and get Vista Plus applications working, although a lot of them aren't enabled yet by default in the nightlies. They do power a lot of huge benefits we're already seeing.

Starting point is 00:17:27 Better performance. A good example of that is the MESA software render. If you pluck that into Ross, AVX makes the biggest difference. Things like that. There has been improvements to the USB stack. There have been improvements to GPU drivers, which were been getting a lot of time last few.

Starting point is 00:17:48 weeks trying to roll out. I actually just post something on Twitter the other day to show that each vendor of GPU driver is now actually running, which is the first for our history. That's taken effort from a lot of developers. There's been improvements to shell stability, wine sinks to modern version of Hawaiian, Wine 10, which powers a lot of our user mode stuff, despite us being a custom kernel that's, again, not Unix-based. Not all. All of the wine code translates directly to our ecosystem. And so syncing to make modern wine has been incredibly difficult, but rewarding as things like MSVCRT, which powers C runtime for standard applications, has massively improved in compatibility,

Starting point is 00:18:38 async support, which allows for multi-threaded networking, dramatically improved our network stack. That system right there gets about 480 megabytes a second down. Pretty good. But incremental improvements to the foundation that makes our scheduler work for SMP eventually. And when we enable it and it's stable and ready. Incremental improvements to the storage stack, even in the nightly's now, has improved. I'm saying a lot of kernel stuff because that's the things I deal with.

Starting point is 00:19:14 Multi-monitor support. There's been all kinds of work on there. improvements to direct accessibility on actual hardware improvements to the sound stack ability for volume controls wow there's sorry I'm going through a list in my head

Starting point is 00:19:31 we are what was I going to say it's skating me now I'm sorry no no it's so good you've listed out a bunch of things anyway I was going to ask Carl do you have anything you'd like to highlight that's been worked on I don't know

Starting point is 00:19:50 my personal baby project has been, I've been working on a new NTFS driver that I've kind of had to neglect because I got, I took a contract with the project to work on wine sinking tests and updating tests and making sure they pass on, you know, all version, pretty much all versions of Windows from server 2003 all the way up to Windows 11. And so that's kind of been on the back burner. and it's not in, it's not going to be in 0.4.16, but it's something that I want to, you know, I put a lot of work into it. It reads, NTFS drives really well. Writing is incomplete. But that's something that we have to work on figuring out how do we get this into the main tree, source tree. But, yeah. So you listed off a bunch of things like multi-moder's, like that's a thing that I wouldn't even have thought that wasn't even there before. So it sounds like the last year has been like a really big year.

Starting point is 00:21:05 The last couple years of the project have been a comely, wow. Okay, well, English is gone. That's it. Okay. It has been culmination. That's the word you're looking for? Yeah, there we go. Sorry. Yeah, it has led up to a lot of things happening at once. For instance, one of the biggest things that happened during the development of point 15, which was two years ago, was the memory manager being written, rewritten enough for things like this to happen. This wouldn't be possible without that as well.

Starting point is 00:21:48 it's this year has had more visible things for actual end users but the last couple years I've just been absurd creating the foundation needed to do this so one thing I've always wanted to ask

Starting point is 00:22:05 somebody who worked in this project is like what you're building trying to build something that is compatible with Windows it's this ever moving target right do you ever feel like

Starting point is 00:22:20 I don't know, like it's, your effort is being wasted. It feels like, you know, you're just not ever going to progress to a point where it's truly Windows compatible. Or do you not look at it like that and you look at it like version to version? I think you both of us should individually answer that because our perspectives on React to us as a whole are wildly opposite. So, you want to go first, current? I'll give a stab at it. So, you know, I think a lot of the programs and stuff that people really rely on on Windows are like more legacy programs and things like on the user mode side. And on the kernel side, there's been significant changes, but not a lot of, I don't know, Justin can go rip into me if I'm wrong here.

Starting point is 00:23:19 but there's been a lot less like breaking changes with drivers than you may think. There's, you know, a lot of support in Windows, for example, for older driver models and such is kind of more of an artificial limitation rather than an architectural one. And so I really think once we get to kind of like a Windows, Windows 8 level, Gurnal on user mode that it really hasn't. I think the platform is mature enough that it's, that's not something that a lot of people are,

Starting point is 00:24:08 it's not going to be as big of an issue. And also there's been Microsoft, as much as we love to rip into them here, they have been doing a better job at open sourcing some of their work. And so I think we, and we've been able to reap the benefits of that. For example, our fat system storage, or fat file system driver is was a driver as a driver development kit sample. And we were just able to just import it into Reacto. So we had to add some hacks because React to us as broken as shit.

Starting point is 00:24:52 But we were able to reap benefits. We're able to reap benefits from that. So as we move on from Server 2003, I think the workload to get to something that's usable on a daily basis is just going to be less and less. So from your perspective, where the project started was, Windows being in a far more immature state. That was not long after the swap from DOS over to Windows. There was still that, like, back in three? Was three the one where they had both the NT and DOS at the same time?

Starting point is 00:25:34 I don't remember. So there was Windows NT3.51. Yeah. And then Windows 3.1 existed alongside it. Right, right. NT4 and then and then you had 2000 and Emmy and then XP they just yeah yeah my my point there though my point there though is where the project started is very early on in NT being a thing so the project obviously was going to go through a lot more changes than it would now so now that it's been around for

Starting point is 00:26:09 you know 20 30 years a lot of those destructive changes have kind of been done so now a lot of the changes you're seeing are more iterative. There's obviously big changes happening on like the the user front end side, but the back end part, the part that's important for compatibility, a lot of that stuff is mostly stable. Yeah, I think that's an excellent way to put it. Nothing would add to that or... Well, it depends on your perspective. I was gonna ask you what your perspective was. For Wyn-32, I would agree. And I think nothing proves that more than watching wine slow down.

Starting point is 00:26:53 Because in reality, watching as Valve has pushed harder to improve proton, the actual breaking developments to wine as a whole have dramatically slowed in the last 10 years. The amount of raw, complete, re-architecting wine has gone through has halted to almost nothing. The last five years or so of wine changes have been additions in API. the same regard that Windows 10 has been going through. And I think that reflects very well what happened to Win 32 in Windows as a whole, is that things just slowed down a lot. Not like Bashin the Wine Project. Just saying that their focus now has been performance.

Starting point is 00:27:37 Right, right. Yeah. And not what breaking changes. That's definitely something I've seen over the past couple of years for sure. It's great for them, great for us. when you're talking about things like the NT kernel, the NT kernel itself has made changes that are so dramatically different. It's true.

Starting point is 00:27:56 We'll probably never sit there an approach to it. But I don't think we have to. If our goal is just to run these drivers, and it doesn't seem that bad of an offer or an goal. When I started the project, I kind of felt like that where I didn't really care if we caught up or not because I didn't think it would ever happen. but definitely the last two years of progress has changed my mind a little bit

Starting point is 00:28:20 where I'm seeing my delve really deep into the video architecture that powers modern GPUs and I spent a bunch of time researching into it and then the effort it took to go from Vista to Windows 10's architecture to load cards for that RTF card over there took like two months research over what vista. Sorry. Sorry. You're loading for RTCS cards. So part of what we're working on, this is a little bit hidden in our 30-year thing, is we've been working on the modern Windows DPU architecture

Starting point is 00:29:02 called WDM. So that's grabbing versions of drivers from Windows 10 and running it. There's also another, there's also another, a blog post just dedicated to WDM on our site that I've put together myself, and it shows screenshots of running the last Windows 7 drivers for the Pascal cards, or there's also an example of getting display output on, yeah, RTX. Wow. Okay. While those drivers are complicated, we don't know all the extent yet, so it's impossible for us to really measure these things. That's why Ross kind of moves at a snail pace and doesn't try to make any of these claims.

Starting point is 00:29:48 It's because when you start looking at some of the changes, Windows 10, sorry, don't you interrupt you. You need to interrupt you. Oh, what? Oh, sorry. No. Um. Do you think I was going to say something?

Starting point is 00:30:02 No, no. Sorry if my background's loud. Oh, oh. So, that's been a side project that's taken, again, all these 30 years of development to start even considering. and then it jumped forward very quickly. It's getting better. It's slow, but it hasn't been happening that long.

Starting point is 00:30:25 But then there's other parts of NT, like the network stack, which had such dramatic changes into it over Windows, even Windows 10's history, that we don't even begin to comprehend it. The video architecture is probably going to be magnitudes easier than the networking stack from Windows 10 or Vista even, which is an interesting thing. I don't think to point out. Sorry, I sidetracked you from what you were talking about before,

Starting point is 00:30:52 where you were talking about the sort of how you feel about the progression of the project. Oh, yeah, I do not, I don't really think it's going, I don't really think it's hopeless anymore. I admit I'm mostly just doing this for fun and because I like hardware. But the, I used to feel pretty, like there's no way because there's so many different versions of Windows and it's true while the kernel's

Starting point is 00:31:21 very complicated over the years I don't think we have to be Windows 10 to get Windows 10 drivers working and I think that's inspired a lot of hope for me personally and it sounds like from a lot of our other developers too okay so

Starting point is 00:31:37 I honestly expected more like Doom posting I didn't think you'd be that Sorry. We can add them. Yeah, we can add doom posting. 30 years, it still crashes. Did it freeze?

Starting point is 00:31:54 No, it's still going. Let's go. But, yeah. But yeah, it's, it's, there's definitely parts of, there are definitely the ways to look at it that can be very much doom posting, but all this work that's been done for 30 years has led up to what we're doing now. And I think looking at it like that makes things. lot less negative.

Starting point is 00:32:19 This is a bit of a... Yes? I was going to say, a lot of people look at React OS and they're like, wow, it's so broken. There's no hope. When I first saw the project, I was like, wow, there's actually a lot here that works. You know, I mean, it's not usable, but there's... It is broken. Yeah, it is broken, but there's...

Starting point is 00:32:45 There's a lot. There's a lot of things that, I was surprised by how much did work, frankly. Yeah, whenever someone says, oh, this is impossible, oh, it's never going to happen. Like, yeah, maybe some projects don't know the resources to do what they want to do. But at the end of the day, if people are dedicated enough to make something happen, it's going to happen eventually. I look at projects, a lot more recent projects, but projects like the Usahilinix project to get Linux, running on the Apple Silicon. People were saying, oh, you're never going to get it to boot.

Starting point is 00:33:21 Then it booted. Oh, you're never going to get graphics drivers. Then they got graphics drivers. Oh, you're never going to get games. Oh, they have games working now. And every step along the way, there's always, oh, there's some blocker that you're never going to get past. And it happens.

Starting point is 00:33:40 So I trust that people who are dedicated to work on a project, if they want to make it happen, it might take a while. It might take 30 years, but it's going to happen. And I understand why people are kind of negative about things like this, because, you know, 30 years is a long time. You're like, oh, we'll look at all these versions of Windows that come out after this. You're still targeting such an early version. But I don't see that as like a bad thing, right?

Starting point is 00:34:11 If Reacto has had, you know, a thousand paid developers, I feel like it'd be in a very different state than it's in today. Yeah, probably. It's always been manpower for sure. But how many people do, like everyone, but we have like, who, like, how many people are actively working on it right now in a developer role? We have, what, Mark. We have. We have.

Starting point is 00:34:45 Wikipa. Yeah, that's true we do. But just a handful of people, really, like, that are really spending their time. Yeah, the last like 200 PRs have been from about 24 different people. Yeah. Okay, so it's still like a relatively sizable project, but it's not, you know, absolutely massive. Oh, it's on GitHub? Yes? Yeah, okay. Let's see. React OS, let's see. Let's see, contributors when GitHub wants to load the chart.

Starting point is 00:35:24 Thank you. Okay, so there's... Okay, I've got to scroll down here. Because there's a lot of people who were active on the project a long time ago and may not be as active now. Okay, I'm looking through the list, and yeah, there's not that many people in the past year that have been active contributors.

Starting point is 00:35:44 Huh. So it is like, it is still a relatively small project. You said that are like 24 active people. Like, how many people are like sort of the core development, you would say? 13 right now that are active? Like, I think he's asking like how many people are actively, like, in our matter most channels? Like, you have people, maybe that as well, but you have people who are, Obviously, there's going to be people that do more and less work than others, right?

Starting point is 00:36:24 Like, it usually it's sort of, it filters towards the top end for the amount of work being done. But yeah, how many people are active in React OS channels and, yeah, how many people just generally active around the project? In a developer role, I'd want to say we have like less than 10, I think. I could be wrong. Maybe less than 20, I think, for sure. tried not to docks everyone trying to think of their names and it's all public

Starting point is 00:37:04 you can see sure sure sure I actually think it's 16 because some of the people that come and go and stuff in the last couple years like we'll come and drop something massive right right yeah I would say 16 but I'm probably being a bit of a conservative estimate

Starting point is 00:37:23 it's not a super small amount of people, but it's not a large, for sure. Okay, okay. One thing I did what I did want to say is I do sort of, I do sort of appreciate the the joking negativity about the project. Like, obviously, you care about the project, you want it to get better. But I do appreciate that as someone coming from the Linux side, because there is a lot of, like, our project is good.

Starting point is 00:37:55 our project is great on the Linux side. And it's sort of like, people can't, like, joke the, like, oh, this actually, this actually is kind of terrible. We know it's terrible. We're working on it. So I do, I do kind of appreciate that, that honesty about the project. Yeah, well, that's true. And you got to, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:38:19 One thing that, like, growing up, I was, you know, I spent way too much time on the internet, you know, unsupervised. And, you know, I've just been told in all these forms that, oh, you know, Linux is perfect. It's better in every way. You're an idiot if you use Windows. And so I'm like, okay, all right. I'm going to install it on the family computer at this time. And my parents are, you know, using office and they had a lot of proprietary software and things like that.

Starting point is 00:38:47 And they hated it. They hated it. They, like, they still talk about it in my family. they hated that whole time. If I can, let's, if I can impart some wisdom, I'd say, don't, don't call people stupid or an idiot because they don't want to use your project, okay? Like, if it doesn't work for them, it doesn't work for them. And that's okay.

Starting point is 00:39:15 Maybe it will in the future, but it doesn't right now. And don't take it personally. Don't, like, just learn to. My kids have been watching Bluey recently, and there's an episode where they talk about, you're getting really good at losing. So sometimes, sometimes that's what happens. Take it with stride. Not at all relevant, but my favorite thing that I heard once about Bluey is there are kids in America

Starting point is 00:39:51 who only watch it and are developing Australian accents, and that's great. We are taking over everything. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I know a lot of kids that only just watch that. I'm like friends and cousin. So, it's okay. My son learned he's not even two yet. His cousin taught up six, seven.

Starting point is 00:40:18 And he knows, like, less than five words. And that's one of the words. Cool. Getting there early. You broke him. You're at the aquarium You go, Six, seven!

Starting point is 00:40:42 You can't even say Daddy yet. Oh, no. You're kids off to a good start. Setting them up for success. That's one of those things you have to remind them about in like 20 years. Like, hey, your favorite word as a kid was six. Anyway, moving on from that. So when you are working on this project,

Starting point is 00:41:19 like how do you approach reverse engineering kernel aspects, driver aspects? Like, where do you even, what do you even do to know what you need to do? So there is different methodologies. Go ahead. I was just going to say, usually I use Reacto. until I find something broken, which doesn't take very long. And then I debug it.

Starting point is 00:41:47 Pay up a windbag, you know, try and read what's going on in memory, read the code. Oh, this looks like a bug. Maybe I fix it. Try again, try again, try again. Hey, this looks good. Let me open up a PR. That goes for me, Justin. I mean, there's tons of different methodologies.

Starting point is 00:42:15 I know people all develop differently. I can say what I've done for WDDM has been, honestly, once you figure out every input and output my driver needs, just loading it and seeing how it compares with Windows, fuzzing the functions, seeing what comes out. I like doing that because it helps me understand things better. It's not the only reverse engineering method. There's a term for that. I don't know. But that's the one I prefer. Mostly because as you see what breaks when you are dealing with these functions

Starting point is 00:42:53 and fixing it for random crap and incrementally adding them and adding functionality behind them, you find decisions Microsoft made that are there for compatibility reasons. And so you end up uncovering a lot of things, even from later versions of Windows and, etc. I mean, it's just the way I prefer it.

Starting point is 00:43:15 You can ask every single one of us developers and we're all legitimately going to have a different answer. I would imagine you've probably run across things that are documented, but you look at the, you look at what it's actually doing and it's not doing

Starting point is 00:43:39 what it says it's doing. Well, that happens all the time. yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

Starting point is 00:43:52 you know just fantastic perfect and no that's nope they're probably vibe coded too

Starting point is 00:43:58 now but vibe guessing but but you kind of just have to you have to like

Starting point is 00:44:10 work with it right if that's what the code's actually doing it doesn't matter what the documentation

Starting point is 00:44:14 is saying if you want it to be compatible you kind of have to accept that they rode it with a bug. Or driver is making assumptions that they probably shouldn't. Invidia, I have long, long lists of things from

Starting point is 00:44:35 Nvidia that they have done that is completely wrong in their GPU driver, and it checks out why Linux has had so much hard time with it, even Windows is janky, it's heck, just hidden. So there's something going on there, and I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Right, your 99 grievances on NVIDIA's door. I promise there is more than 99.

Starting point is 00:45:02 Oh, all right. Glad we narrowed it down. Top 99, you know with that. Maybe you can have like a rotating list. Just swap it out every day. Maybe one of those like calendars you like rip the paper off for the next day. It's just every problem. So you have to fix one a day.

Starting point is 00:45:27 So if somebody wanted to sort of get involved with a project and help out, where's like a good place to start? Because obviously there are things outside of code. There's the wikis, there's translation, stuff like that. But let's just go with the code side because that's, I assume what both you mainly work on. So I would say, figure out how to clone the repo and run. We have a build environment. It's called the ReactOS build environment. Get that set up and compile ReactOS.

Starting point is 00:46:08 And I'd say that's a great start. And then try changing something, you know. Oh, I want to make this. Yeah. He likes to scream. Um, change, change the start menu text. So says something different, you know, for fun. Right.

Starting point is 00:46:26 Right. Go, you know, oh, I want to make this red, right? And then slowly you'll kind of figure out, okay, well, this, my start was, there was settings not being saved and explorer. And so I was like, okay, well, I can fix this. And so I did and fiar it and I got accepted. And then slowly just built more and more out from there. So you would say start poking around the code base, seeing what changes when you change various things,

Starting point is 00:46:58 and then slowly develop some sort of knowledge of an area that you might want to make a change to. And as you run into a bug, then sort of poke around that and see what is, I guess, what is affecting that area, what is controlling that area? Yeah. So I got my start. first, not even for ReactOS, too. I downloaded Windows phone SDK samples, and I played with those. And I think that's a great way to get started in any project.

Starting point is 00:47:38 Fair enough, fair enough. Maybe coming and interacting with us on Mattermas, also can gain some information. My first couple weeks I spent looking at the project, I just read things that people talked about and tried to grasp how messed up things were and then I, yeah, you see the failures and you learn from them

Starting point is 00:48:07 and then that gives you the basis of knowledge and then you fail more. Ruffly how... Burking's a great skill. What's a great skill, sorry? Lurking. Ah, lurking, yes, yes, yes. Roughly how big is the code base at this point?

Starting point is 00:48:24 Oh, I used to know the answer to this. Okay, I will say that just to a matter of perspective, there's a PR that takes the Kernel 32 module and syncs it with line 10, and that change for a long time was almost 1.1 million changes. And so you times that by all the modules that exists, and it's a lot. I think I once tried making a script to count the lines and it got over like 70 million and I gave up.

Starting point is 00:49:11 The reason why I brought up contributions a lot of people look at a project that is, the same thing with the Linux kernel, right? A lot of people will look at a project that is this big and think, I don't even know where to begin. I don't know what I can look at. I don't know what I can even...

Starting point is 00:49:28 What can I even contribute to a project like this? when you're looking at it from that that perspective of not knowing what does what, it can seem kind of overwhelming trying to work out, even where your place is in this project, even if it's like a little basic change, even knowing where to make that basic change. One thing I really like about React OS is that it's, and the Windows architecture in general,

Starting point is 00:50:01 is that it's very compartmentalized. So you don't have to be an expert in the whole system in order to make a change, in order to fix a part of it somewhere else. That's like if you look into the, how the NT kernel works, and it's, it's definitely,

Starting point is 00:50:27 there's like a chain of different drivers, basically that build on top of each other to get something done. And you can just focus in one area. It's easy to wrap your head around, then trying to wrap your head around the whole kernel and then lose your mind. Right, right. So, yeah, like you just look at the pieces that you think are interesting

Starting point is 00:50:55 and then sort of go from there, basically. I started specifically with that. howl and then that went deeper, deeper. So I know that both of you have kind of been like joking about like, you know, being really negative about the project. But I, I have seen whenever I look up anything about React OS, you're always going to run into these posts like ReactOS sucks. ReactOS is terrible.

Starting point is 00:51:26 Like it's not just joking about it. It's people that genuinely seem to like dislike the. existence of the project. And I don't really I don't really get it. I can kind of get the oh, the developers you know, they're working on something, we're moving

Starting point is 00:51:45 target. We kind of got on to that before, but why do you think there is this sort of dislike of the project in some sense? You don't really get from many of the... You don't really see that in like the BSD space.

Starting point is 00:52:01 You don't see it really much with Linux that. Yeah, you get a bit of it from like Windows gamers for Linux, but it's not really a, the popular discourse about it. I think there's a lot of people that just really like, just really like Linux, Unix. It's been an issue really ever since the 1970s with the Unix community, that there's kind of this, there's like a Unix cult. and they, you can read, I think, I don't know if you ever read the Unix Hater's Handbook. No, I need to, though. It's been on my reading list for a while. It's a really good read, but it's just a, I don't know, they really like Unix. You bring up issues to them, legitimate issues that people have, and they kind of dismiss it.

Starting point is 00:53:06 And I think unfortunately, the Linux community kind of inherited some of that with the Unix community, and it brings some toxicity that I don't like. I don't want to, like, just totally bash. No, no, understandable. But that's one other thing that I really like about React OS is our community. I think we're not. we're not demanding that everybody use React OS for everything. But I'm not great with wording things.

Starting point is 00:53:52 No, no. I think within the ReactOS community, everyone is using it, everyone who's developing it kind of understands the state things are in. So you're not in this position where it's, you know, almost there. Like with Linux, the barriers are more, it's less the backend stuff, it's more sort of interest from companies

Starting point is 00:54:18 bringing software over. So it's most of the way there, which means that a lot of those, I, how do, yeah, no, you know what, I'm struggling with words as well. I think because it's, it's so polished in that way, the, the gaps are, the gaps are, a lot easier to sort of focus on, whereas with the React OS, because it is still targeting such a old version of Windows, and there's obviously

Starting point is 00:54:51 modern stuff being brought in as well, but you can't sort of you can't sort of gaslight yourself into thinking that this is directly competing with Windows 11. Yeah, it's not.

Starting point is 00:55:10 Not yet. Yeah. Soon. I also think that some of it isn't even just the Linux community that I like hates Ross. I've seen I've reached out and seen a lot of people especially the last two years I've reached out to a lot of people that Ross kind of burned I I feel like especially on YouTube you watch a lot of videos about react to us and a lot of them just didn't go the way they wanted it to right right

Starting point is 00:55:38 and then you look at the comments and everyone's just like but you didn't try the nightly or something and Sometimes it feels like parts of Ross also has like a little bit of that, a little bit of that Linux attitude where although we like internally to joke that we and acknowledge our like flaws as an operating system, there are people sometimes reaching out for us that are actively defending it us to the point where I think it bashes each other. I've reached out to a couple people now that have just Ross completely failed and tried to understand. what parts of it failed. Because, again, some of these issues that people run into, too, are things that we don't even, aren't even able to reproduce. And there hasn't been a lot of, there's not a lot of avenues for people to take that frustration and put it into, in front of our eyes.

Starting point is 00:56:36 For instance, you've talked about how you wanted to have a react to us person on here, and the only way you even found out about, like, us communicate with each other was somebody else jumping to another stream to come to you. Yeah, somebody in my chat was like, hey, there's a Reactoist there ever here doing Reactoist stuff. Like, oh, that's cool, yeah. Yeah. I mean, think about it like this. If there wasn't the channel of communication Linux has for things, you would also get frustrated with Linux and just give up. That's fair. That's fair.

Starting point is 00:57:12 I think, yeah, I think a lot of our failures, too, have been our communication with the general public. There's ideas about Ross that make no sense in the public eye, like the country of origin. It just jumps around different, like, ideas sometimes. Like, one week it's Russian. No one needs to German. I didn't know I was either of those things. But, like, I did. I think that bruising of that frustration.

Starting point is 00:57:42 On that note, I did see some, I don't even know what the context was. Someone's like, Putin loves reactivist. Like, I don't. Is there some context here that I'm missing? I wish. I wish he loved reactalus, you know? Maybe we'd have had some funding. Don't say that.

Starting point is 00:58:04 Maybe cut that out. You were looking for YouTube poop stuff? There you go, right there. He was going to keep. He's going to put in the part. He's a Putin lover. So, you know what? That actually does have some context.

Starting point is 00:58:19 There is a photo that goes around of, like, a developer that's not on the team even, like, around anymore. Like, showing it to Putin in, like, 2008 or something. Right. Okay. A long time ago. A long, long time ago. And so what it was, part of that context comes from the React. OS that it like the ReactOS that exists now isn't the React OS that existed back then.

Starting point is 00:58:46 There's a React OS Foundation, which is dead. And those are the people who showed it to Putin and such. And then there's ReactOS, I don't know how to say that we're GMVH. I don't know the German word it is or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the German foundation thing. Yeah, there's that now, which is entirely different and not even the same management. So there is some. context to that, that makes complete sense, but it's not talking about what the project is now

Starting point is 00:59:16 or any of the same people. So we just kind of shrug. There actually is, I went in the had a look. There actually is a blog post on the React OS website from 2012. React OS presented to President Putin. So yeah, there is, so what you're saying is like there's been like a lot of churn of developers over the years. Yep. Because the project originally, like, going to the 30 years of React OS thing, the project originally came out of another project, or it had a different name? What exactly was that?

Starting point is 00:59:55 I'm forgetting exactly what was said there. So free win 95, according to, I wasn't alive. Me neither. Oh, you're 98 as well? But they, so from what Eric Cole told me is that they, they wanted a perfect clone of Windows 95. And they spent all their time arguing about, arguing in the planning stages about what they, what they should do. And there was little to no code actually written. And so Jason Philby, he was in this mailing list.

Starting point is 01:00:42 And he was like, you know what? Everyone that's in here is interested in a project like this. Let's start what would become ReactOS. And so that's how that got started. There's, I want to say on our wiki, there's like a constitution or something for Free Win 95. you can look on ReactOS.org slash wiki and look up FreeWIN95. But that's really all the information I have about it. Right, right.

Starting point is 01:01:13 The constitution. I didn't even know that. That's funny. 3195. Let's see if we can find it. I've worn many hats in ReactOS. You know, now I'm also ReactOS historian now, apparently. Cool.

Starting point is 01:01:32 No, I think that is cool. I like knowing the history of a project. Even if it's not really relevant to what it's doing today. I am always kind of curious how something got started, how it progressed from those early days. And yeah, I just, I'm glad somebody's trying to keep the history around, especially for early or pre-internet projects. A lot of that stuff, it's,

Starting point is 01:02:05 There's sort of bits and pieces here and there. Some projects are better archived than others. Obviously, you know, going back to it, the entire early Linux mailing list is all archived, but for a lot of other projects out there, unless there are people who are still working on the project, who are working on it back then, you know, like Daniel Stenberg, who's still the lead developer of Curl, a lot of the time that early stuff is just entirely forgotten. Yeah, it was really hard to find. I was really lucky that to me because it was looking like he wasn't when I was writing that article.

Starting point is 01:02:47 So I think I really thought it was interesting hearing him talk about how contributions work back then. It's very different now. I mean, sometimes we hold patches in review for way too long, and then they get frustrated and leave and get burned, and then they hate us. And, you know, I'm glad we have different management now. But it's, but back then it was pretty loose. You just, you merge something.

Starting point is 01:03:19 And then if you broke something, you'd get a ton of emails. And then you better fix it. Was there any source control being used back then? Or was everyone just, like, going wild? I don't want to definitively answer that question. because I'm not certain. I know before we used Git, we used SBN. Can't say, I don't want to, I don't want to come down to an answer.

Starting point is 01:03:58 Fair enough, fair enough. Be wrong. No, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, but. But, um, how early do you know SVN was being used? You said that was being used before Git. Um, yeah, again, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not certain at what, uh, fair enough. Fair enough. Weren't me like one of the first projects using SVN to that scale?

Starting point is 01:04:25 I thought that was like a, or was it IRC? I don't know. I've heard there's some chatter around and like old matter most messages were talking about that. It's very possible. Again, I've only been here a couple years. Okay. So I'm kind of.

Starting point is 01:04:40 Maybe an easy one to. I'm trying. No, that's fair. Maybe an easy one to answer is, do you know how far back the Git history goes? Was it like an early adopter of Git? No. No. It was 2018.

Starting point is 01:04:56 Wait, sorry, what? 2018. Okay. It might be a little earlier. But yeah, it's not old. It's been, it was in SVN for like almost 20 years. Wow. We still have parts of our site that assume that we still use SVN.

Starting point is 01:05:15 Yeah, there's parts of it'll just break if you go there. Yeah. So that needs to get fixed, but, you know, who wants, I don't know, there's so many things broken. I'm trying. Yeah, there's a branch that says SVN backup, don't touch or something. And I'm like, oh, that's all within me, I bet. Nope, oh, that's 2017. With that being more recent history then, why was the swap to get actually done finally?

Starting point is 01:05:48 because you're on SVM for that long anyway. You might stay there. I don't actually know the answer to that because there was an explicit reason. But it was written somewhere and I don't remember what it said. I probably might be able to find it. But there was a limitation we ran into

Starting point is 01:06:09 that GitHub need to be used. And so they created an entire script to try and preserve history. So if you actually look at our commits, you can find commits dating back to like the earliest times you were documenting things. And there were commit messages before they were even commits. So that transition also took a lot of time as I understand it. And because we wanted to retain as much history as we could.

Starting point is 01:06:40 If you start looking at like the oldest parts of Ross, you can find the commit message from like 19 years ago. And parts of our hal and stuff. and it's wild actually reading that. It is really interesting to hear. Oh, go on. Say, Git is the worst source control that exists, except for all others, I think. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:05 It's pretty about how it goes to the most things. Yeah. Git is an interesting project, because a lot of people obviously credit Linus Torvald with it, but he dropped the project after, like, month to another project maintainer. He was only there basically to get it started and then wanted nothing to do with it. Yeah, it's, all he struck me as odd. Like the guy who's been running it for the past 20 years now, no one ever talks about. I'm sad. Yeah, yeah. Um, I had something,

Starting point is 01:07:44 I forgot what I was going to say. Um, oh, right. It is kind of interesting to see. It is kind of interesting to a project like this that has such sort of management churn, you don't really have that that like long-term project continuity. It sounds like there's been a bunch of different groups over the years who've

Starting point is 01:08:04 wanted to run the project and develop the project. How long would you say like would, like how long would you say like the current crop of people have been working on? Because you've been here since like

Starting point is 01:08:23 2020, Justin. Like, maybe you have a bit more insight there. I think it's been ran by mostly the same people for almost 10 years now, with a couple people dropping in and out. Sure, yeah, yeah. Like, the release manager changing was a surprise, but if you look at our date between releases, it doesn't take a lot of thought to figure out why that might have happened.

Starting point is 01:08:53 And there's clear there's some contention there. And was it like five years? It's more than that. If you, I mean, our current, like, head of the project's been here for quite a while, but he's been quite pretty busy. And so we've been, I guess, changing direction anyway. Our, well, maybe the people themselves haven't changed, our intentions and directions for how we develop the project have dramatically shifted even more.

Starting point is 01:09:29 So we are taking a harder stance on clinging to wine more directly for our user mode components. We'll create our own kernel. We should be running wine on top of it as much as we can. But part of that's also the transition that Wine's gone through, where they've removed a lot of the Unix stuff out of their code, to where the Wine server that's actually doing any of the Unix call dispatching is really, really small. And the rest of it's just Windows compatible calls now. If you put DLLs from Wine on Windows now, it works on a lot of modules at this point. And then Proton, you put DXVK in there, and it outperforms Windows 11.

Starting point is 01:10:12 But, yeah. So that's those. shifts have happened because people learn and adapt. Again, our management has learned and adapted. Where it's a little more uniform now, I'd say we have the core team of developers, and that's, I mean, it's not a super large group at this point, but we're constantly looking for more people to, like, lend into the fold, so that porch carries pretty often. I think that's, I think it works.

Starting point is 01:10:46 For us, I guess. I think we're a more inviting project now than we were 10 years ago, too. I mean, we're both after that, so that's kind of relative. But who knows? Probably. I guess you're right. But who know? There's some pretty funny.

Starting point is 01:11:07 If you look at old PRs have been closed, or even some of them that have been merged. It's just, oh, people ripping into. other people, yeah, we have our own we had our own toxicity problem trying to clean that up, you know, it's been, I think we've made a lot of progress but it's, uh, you brought up wine before.

Starting point is 01:11:38 I, this is, you know how you said like a lot of people sort of misunderstand what ReactOS is and sort of they, they like don't really understand the problem. project. I wonder, one comment I saw was like, oh, React OS would do a lot better a job if they just ran the Linux kernel with Wine. So it sounds like you're already using Wine in the project. Yeah. So React to US as a whole at this point is a kernel with its own drivers that matches and tries to be compatible with Windows. And then there's some components that we don't adapt from Wine. but the higher up you go in the architecture, the more wine it becomes. When in 32K isn't really wine, the thing that's actually doing the rendering isn't really wine,

Starting point is 01:12:29 but then you look at a DLL like Colonel 32 and about 70% of it's just wine code. It starts to get more wine as you go down because wine themselves have always tried to keep how much Unix is in their requirements in their code base to a minimal. and so if you actually look at the amount of code that's react to a specific and wine, it's the ratio is pretty insane. It's like 40 to 50 or something. It's pretty absurd. But, yeah. And you said this usage of wine is somewhat of a recent-ish thing.

Starting point is 01:13:14 So, no. We got stuck in, a specific version of wine for almost 10 years. Because we wanted to be compatible with Windows 2003. Wine started introducing stuff from Vista and Windows 7, Windows 8, follow the block. Then we kind of abandoned that idea recently in recent times and have been moving everything to be Vista and et cetera,

Starting point is 01:13:41 little by little. So while the nightlies do still target Windows 2003, it's kind of an artificial limitation in a lot of regards. Even now, if you enable all the exports, you can run tons of different Windows 7 apps. It's just soft disabled currently because if you just basically if you enable all of it at once, apps start depending on functions that exist that don't exist and it becomes a crassy mess. I see. So there's a foundation, yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:08 Yeah. So if you don't enable the extra stuff, it runs in like a compatibility mode, expecting the older stuff. but if you let it try to run normally, it will expect everything it's supposed to see. Yeah, I mean, there's screenshots that have come out and stuff now, and while we haven't posted on blog posts or Twitter very much about these things, there's videos you can find of like ReactOS running Fallout 4, React to us running VR chat and stuff,

Starting point is 01:14:39 and these things have come out because so much of our components now are getting synced. There's two aspects to us targeting something. You made one of the video. Yeah. I was trying, yeah, sorry. But, yeah, there's plenty of people trying to do this. I was not trying to do that. Man, there's so many things in there.

Starting point is 01:15:10 No. I'm like, oh God, don't. I don't need people seeing that. I'm like, why is this? Why isn't this in the nightlies? But there's a reason why it isn't. We're making that decision and progress slowly. There's the kernel structures, which have to match a certain version of Windows.

Starting point is 01:15:31 For instance, if the process structure doesn't match, apps will just freak out pretty much. And then there's just the exports and how many APIs we have. The kernel structures are trying to move to Vista, which is going to be that big jump that lets us do all kinds of things. But then wine's just moving straight to Wine 10, and then we're just going to sync regularly from there. And so we'll have all of that Windows 10 stuff just kind of soft disabled until we're ready for it. Right, right. I've got the video playing here. It's definitely running.

Starting point is 01:16:11 I've got the Fallout 4 video. It's certainly running. It's not running great, but it's running, and that's better than nothing. Yeah, in a virtual machine. if only we had GPU support. But. The machine's still going. I mean, I, yeah.

Starting point is 01:16:33 We're trying to slowly, like, talk more about our progress and stuff on this avenue. But the problem is, this has all been, those 30 years mattered. Yeah, yeah. Like, that foundation windows required is there, and it's getting better. But there, the more we start being like, well, look, Look, we got this running now. It's not one person that got that running. It's a massive amount of effort that went into building this foundation to power these things. Reversing the NT kernel is hard. Reversing the NT kernel in NT user space and Windows user space is even harder. And thankfully, with Hawaiian, we don't really have to do both yet.

Starting point is 01:17:16 So one thing that was brought up earlier was this idea of sort of, sort of, I guess communicating better about what the project is and what the project is doing. What do you feel like could be improved on that front to make sure people are more aware of what's actually, you know, being worked and what's actually improving? Stuff like this. We've been so silent and hesitant to actually talk to people through much of our history for varying different reasons. There's that I, there's no point to be doing that. We should be going and spreading our word a little bit better and making more of these blog posts. And our Twitter has been really active talking about applications and stuff that run almost every other day.

Starting point is 01:18:09 But that's not quite enough. We need more channels of communication with the project in general. And that's what we've been trying to build and doing more frequent releases. So people have something they can actually look at to see what could this be. Carl, do you even have anything to add there? Hmm? Do you... You bug-checked.

Starting point is 01:18:39 Do you do, do, do, do. I was asking, do you have anything to add regarding, like, sort of communicating about the project and sort of getting the message out there about what's being done? I agree wholly with what Justin said. one thing I this one thing when I first joined react OS I joined under the pseudonym anon-anon because I was I don't know I was like oh I'll just lurk I don't know if I want to get involved and I you know I looked at more in the project like wow I could help this project a lot and so I started showing my face a little more and I started using my real name and things and

Starting point is 01:19:29 I think that's really important for building trust is having some sort of public image, having some public face, having people you can hold accountable. I told this is not at all to say, like, you know, if you want to hide behind an anonymous identity that that's an issue, I don't think that's at all an issue. You need to react to us fee too. but uh but when you when you start managing a project uh as large as reactOS i i really think that it helps to um be present be a face um be willing to uh yeah not not hide behind something

Starting point is 01:20:25 yeah people who've watched this uh this show a number of times probably have heard me make this this this, I'll say this before, but this is part of the reason why I do like doing the podcast, because it's a way to sort of put a face to a project. It shows that there are actually people working on this, because even if you use your real name, if you're looking at a blog post, if you're looking at a commit, it's hard to really, it's easy to sort of forget that an actual person worked on this.

Starting point is 01:21:03 and this isn't something that just sort of spawned out of the ether. It's, well, look, maybe that's not going to be too much longer. We'll see where vibe coding goes. But for most things, they don't just spawn out of the ether. And it's nice to really be able to sit down and understand how the developer behind something really sort of came to the decisions they did with a project. Yeah, that's all I had to say. Does anyone get to...

Starting point is 01:21:46 There's nothing? Is anything... No, I agree. That's... That was a statement, not really a question. No. It's like, yeah, let's go. Yeah, I do.

Starting point is 01:22:01 Sorry, I've had Discord problems lately, so whenever there's silence, I assume that something's broken. Yeah, yeah, Discord's making choices. I also have Discord problems. Yeah. I have a lot of other problems. I don't know this.

Starting point is 01:22:20 I see Discord. So, um, um, yeah. Yeah. Carl, you were,

Starting point is 01:22:32 you were hired to work on, uh, the React OS test suite. So that makes me think that there are, presumably other people that, have been hired to work on ReactWare. It's like, what is, what is project funding like? Like, how, like, what is, how many people are they paid to work on stuff?

Starting point is 01:22:54 And how, is it just like all the short term stuff to work on individual things? And yeah, if you have any insight on that, I'd love to hear it. So, I'll be as transparent as I can be here. Sure, I understand. This is all public information. the organization brings in from donations about 40,000 euros a year, which is more than enough to keep the lights on, but it's not quite enough to really be paying people full time for years and years. Yeah, yeah. So what we've done to spend, this sounds kind of mean, spend this money, but is to offer contracts to people.

Starting point is 01:23:37 in the case of my test suite contract that was for me really beneficial i just graduated a university and i was it it worked out really well for me um help i keep my family afloat um and you can look back in the history of our project there's been lots of um lots of contracts that we've uh paid out. I mean, I think mine is the most recently paid a contract out to Hermes. I don't, he's French. I don't even want to pretend I can pronounce his name, but he worked on a graphical installer. So kind of more similar to when you're installing Windows Vista and newer, there's like a,

Starting point is 01:24:32 there's like a virtual image that you, you know, put on, you apply to the disc. that installs the operating system instead of manually coupling files over like we do now with ReactOS. He finished his contract out. He's still working on it on his own free time. But that contract gave him or allowed him to work on that as much as he did. I mean, I've only done contracts like once every two years for one person, maybe. and that's the most frequently I've seen it personally.

Starting point is 01:25:10 The amount of contracts I've seen past their react to us I've been here has been three. And there was a giant gap before that first one before Carl got here. So the last between like eight years has been like three. Otherwise there's been

Starting point is 01:25:28 GSOC which is something we did for a couple years. The Google Summer of Code, yeah. The Google Summer of Code. But otherwise, for actual contracts, like, paid out by Ross themselves, it's... It's only been, like, three since I've been in an adult. So... The fact of the project can do any, though, like, that's a sign of a good direction, because most...

Starting point is 01:25:55 Most projects are not able to do anything in that regard. Absolutely. So, this is a problem that obviously comes up in the entire, in the entire, like, Foss world. But what do you, what do you think could be done to sort of improve project funding? Is it just, do you think just getting the message out there? Like, like, what, do you have any insights on what could be worked on in that regard? Because obviously, just having people know about the project and using it, it's certainly a, it's certainly a good start. I do she'll react to us at the end of our blog posts.

Starting point is 01:26:38 You know, you can help, you can help us by making a contribution. I'm sure you've seen that. But yeah, I really think just getting the message out there is really important. You can't collect donations from people that don't know that you exist. Yeah. I mean, on top of that, like having visible progress over time, would probably make things easier. We've spent so much time in the dark

Starting point is 01:27:06 trying to build our foundation that now that we're able to do more things that are like viewable for the end user, I'm sure it'll be easier for people to actually justify that. Because what's the point if you don't see progress for 30 years? And that's an argument that, yeah, it's kind of fair. You know? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:27:30 It's not visible of the end user. Hmm. Okay. Okay. It's, this is a tough problem that exists with all of these projects. It's obviously you're going to have people that are just passionate about a project and want to work on it. But, you know, you have got bills to pay, right? You've got a, you've got, like, it's just, unless you win the lottery and can just chill with that.

Starting point is 01:27:56 Like, you can't just ignore life. As nice as that would be, you're not 13. and you can't just like do nothing and work on what you enjoy and like, yeah. As sad as that is, it's just a reality that exists with any sort of volunteer-run project that people are going to, people are going to come and go as well, right? You're going to have, especially, a lot of projects tend to have a lot of people who are either like quite old

Starting point is 01:28:29 who've managed to like set themselves up but also a lot of really young people where they're like high school maybe university and then maybe they stick around a bit after that and then sort of vanish because you know they got a job somewhere and just maybe they had a kid

Starting point is 01:28:46 they just don't have the time to work on it like they did before and you know some people have other interests as well it's not just this project and they just can't justify spending the time on it anymore. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:29:06 Yeah. I was going to say something. I was going to say something really good, and then I forgot it. I'll let you know if I, yeah. Well, you have a kid running around. Like, what's that been like for you? What? Sorry, repeat that?

Starting point is 01:29:24 Like, having a kid running. Yeah, I assume you have a, I assume you have a, I assume you have a, full-time job as well. Yep. I have a full-time IT position at a medium-sized company. I've got a two son, two under two. Oh, okay. Yep. And my wife stays at home to help take care of the RV right now that we're living in. That's how we've been able to afford it. But soon house. And, you know, I think children are a great blessing. I really, I love my children. Their work.

Starting point is 01:30:19 I don't, you know, working from home on ReactOS versus so in my IT job, I got to go in the office most of the time, unfortunately. being able to work from home while working on ReactOS has made a lot more of my time available to the project so I think you know um I'd make this without without just becoming a rant of what people say about children you know there's there's economical ways to do things people talk about oh it's so expensive and chill chill it's not cheap but there's you know there's things you can do to really not make having children that expensive there's um there's ways you can use your time where you can spend time with your children and do something else um i think a lot of people are just um you hear the word children and they just freak out like

Starting point is 01:31:30 oh no how do you um you can't you can't do this and work on to react OS. I like to think that I can. I think, you know, I've been doing pretty well so far, I think. Okay, okay. So we've sort of brought it up a couple of times now. The 30 years of React OS, this is sort of like built the foundation. Where is the project going, though?

Starting point is 01:32:07 That's the thing. Do you want to figure the first Carl or me? Um, I'll have, I'll, Justin, I'll let you go first. Okay. So, show and tell? Well, I thought about it, but. I don't want to step on your toes, that's why. Very good.

Starting point is 01:32:29 There's been tons of development from all sorts of the different developers on our team. Completely different wildly directions. Multi-monitor. Graphics cards. Modern graphics cards. Sound. sounds another one I haven't even touched on ReactOS hasn't had sound in decades except for very old AC audio chips that is changing and that is changing right now that there's an HD

Starting point is 01:32:56 audio bus that is in development that will allow sound drivers from every range of Windows every single one and Windows 11 Windows 10 cool as long as the N2S kernel functions are there which it'll take us a long time to get to like all the Windows 10 ones, but for most drivers, even up to Windows 8, there's also the generic code act. Sound is going to be a solved problem. That is massive for us. There's ASLR, randomizing memory addresses and the memory layout. This was a massive change.

Starting point is 01:33:34 Windows went through for security and performance and accessibility. It allows React to us to use above 4 giga. It allows React to us to use 128 gigabytes of RAM and spew it out. This has been an active development for a while. AVX, kernel features that didn't even take maturity until the end of Windows 10, or features like the GUI installer, which are continuing now, or dealing with all these extra APIs. There's an entire subsystem of our kernel that's missing, and for the power power

Starting point is 01:34:14 management and instead of targeting Windows 2003, the developer was like, screw it, I'm doing Windows 8. And he's making the entire Windows 8 power manager for Ross. That has been incredible. That's running a bill with it still. Improvements to ACPI, to USB support. There's been UEFI to allow us to boot on modern machines, enumerate hardware on modern machines. USB 3 has made enormous amounts of progress. It's off. Once this release comes, next release comes out, that is one of the next priorities,

Starting point is 01:34:49 getting that out, which will allow us to not have to be on Hasbell machines anymore. KMDF has been huge for us, which is one of the architectures that Microsoft open sourced at the MIT license. KMDF is what powers all drivers that are not

Starting point is 01:35:07 networking, GPU, or sound. your touch devices, your I2C, your GPIo drivers, all of these. We have a Windows 10-style KMDF stack right now in the nightlies, and loading drivers for those isn't far off. And when we do that, that is a massive, massive boost over even Windows 7. There are people that have actually taken our stack for us and brought it back to Windows 7, You know the people talking about like modernizing Windows 7 last couple weeks. That is using stuff from us that have been just for Ross because parts of there are already expanded past Windows 7 in that regard.

Starting point is 01:35:54 Better hardware support, much better stability. There's been incredible work still that has happened to the memory manager to allow these things. And that is what's being unleashed for us now. A 64-bit build, likely in the next year even, is going to run many, many more applications, even the nightlies compared to what XP ever could. That's my rant. Because you were talking about where Reactoist is going. I thought back on that thing that I had a really good idea about, and I think it applies here too,

Starting point is 01:36:35 is that you can't really force people to work on something without paying them. And so we have a lot of people excited for new features and they're working on those. Really what I think is, and that's why I got paid to work on the test because that's really boring and nobody wants to do it. So that's that was the reasoning behind that. Um, the end goal, I think, for React OS is to become a drop-in replacement for Windows. So, you know, if you were using, um, you know, if you were using Windows with all your proprietary drivers and software, um, you could, you could run all of those things on React OS instead. Uh-huh. The road to get there is really long.

Starting point is 01:37:33 Justin's highlighted all the fun things that are being worked on that either have PRs or in private branches or something. But, yeah, that's more the project manager-ish answer. Yeah, I mean, without those wine sinks, we're not going to get anywhere. Again, that foundation you've made with the kernel, the foundation we're making with updating wines. so we don't have to worry about that anymore. It's freeing us to deal with these things. I hadn't even thought of the fact that the people were trying to run older versions of Windows

Starting point is 01:38:18 would be using parts of ReactoS. I get, like, I know, I got my opinion, people were trying to go and run Windows 7 as the daily driver or XV as the daily driver. But how does it feel knowing that some of your work is actually going to help out these people. Have you ever heard of the Apple TV Windows project in recent history? People taking the original Apple TV and running Windows on it?

Starting point is 01:38:50 Ah, no. So essentially, the original Apple TV is a UEFI machine that was basically just a MacBook in a shell with stripped out operating system features. One of the components in that is the bootloader we wrote for UEFI was modified and ported by Distro Hopper to try and do this kind of court. There's a project called Second System, who we've discussed a lot and talked to a lot about him taking what I'm doing for WDM and allowing you to use RTF cards on Windows 7. or something or this stuff if you really want to do that. But I mean, our end goals here is to provide these utilities and what people do if the codes

Starting point is 01:39:48 is fine with us. If people want to enhance their Windows 7, fine. The way we see it is that if there's a problem with it, it's going to come back to us anyway and we can continue to improve it. And so I think it's been nice. It also is starting to disprove how unstable all of Reactoists is. of Reactuist is a little bit. As much as we're joking, if people are out there doing this, there's probably a reason. And it's not like if my system's crashed during this call, and I'm using like 20 different drivers from Ross, including the audio driver.

Starting point is 01:40:21 Like this inputs just Ross, actually, but for Ross components. But so it just proves that a little bit, which I think is nice to see. Yep. Someone wants to take my code and use it. it and something else, you know, it's open source. That's what it's there for. Go use it. I don't, it doesn't, I don't lose sleep at night thinking, oh no, my code might be used in something I don't agree with, but, you know.

Starting point is 01:40:53 No, I think, I don't, not pro time. I wasn't really coming in from like a negative side. It was more of like, a interest side, right? Where it's like, hey, that's actually, like, it's neat. People are actually using this for something they're actually, running. Like, that's, that's sort of where I was trying to approach it from. I love seeing that. Every time I see XP on UEFI, I just, I cringe a little, because what the heck, but it's, it's cool, I guess. Why are you doing that? I don't know. But it's unlocked many

Starting point is 01:41:28 avenues for us. Well, it sounds like there's a lot of, um, by interest. Mm, mm, mm, future interest. Uh, it sounds like, it sounds like, like there's a lot of like really cool stuff going on with the project. Um, I think we've covered basically everything I wanted to cover. If there's anything that you want to get to that maybe we haven't touched on yet, um, we can certainly do that. Actually, sorry, wait, I, I completely felt one thing. Um, Justin, when did you start, like, streaming doing React OS work? Like, streaming doing React to Us work. And when, why, why do you, like, why do you like, why do you, like, why did you like start doing like videos about it?

Starting point is 01:42:14 I did not understand what I was looking at. And I thought that if I said something so confidently wrong, I could annoy enough people for them to come correct me. Uh-huh. And I was right. So I did that so people could come tell me I'm an idiot. Really? That's the reason I wanted to learn because for,

Starting point is 01:42:39 for once I wasn't like the smartest one in the subject and I thought that learning just I wanted to learn from as many people as I could. That's the only reason I did that not because I had a passion for streaming particularly but because if I showcase this one, it gets the word out and two, it allows people to really come in and challenge what I'm doing and my logical thinking for things which is let me become a far better programmer than I was. Not the answer I was expecting, but yeah, that's a, that's a great reason, actually. And it is the idiot that worked on this. It was me. Me!

Starting point is 01:43:28 I am. Actually, in this time of this call, I got a ping. It's like, why does you do it like this in like a DM from like one of the other developers? I'm like, that's fitting. What is that called when you, uh, when you just say something wrong and you hope someone corrects Murphy's Law? No. Wait, wait. Damn it!

Starting point is 01:44:00 Fell for it again award. All right, billions must smile. I'm mad now. Both you've been a lot of fun to have on here. You both have very clearly, passionate about the project and like it's it's nice to see people that can sort of joke about their own work as well and I do appreciate that but yeah this is this is a lot of fun so if there's anything else you wanted to touch on we can do that now otherwise we can I guess start wrapping up

Starting point is 01:44:46 I will say that while these things have taken a long time the next couple years are going to show an immense amount of progress. WDM, for instance, I can sit there and I can claim, oh, I did all this work on it and stuff, but without that 30 years of foundation, it wouldn't have even mattered. There will be a point in the next couple years

Starting point is 01:45:13 where the nightlies will have the ability to use Vista or seven video drivers, and maybe even later, depending on how well that goes. And at that point, people might be like, well, they made so much progress, in such a short middle of time, and I'm just going to say now that is not true. It's been the same amount of progress.

Starting point is 01:45:32 It is just all mattered. Right. None of this would have mattered without that 30 years. Right. A lot of the changes that you're seeing now are more visible. There are changes that, you know, the lower level backend stuff, it's kind of hard to really show what it's doing. But when you say, oh, sound is working, multi-monitors, modern GPU drivers.

Starting point is 01:45:54 Like, this is stuff that's easy to point at that people can understand. understand what it's doing. Even our next release, our goal is to have all XP drivers working as many as we can. That is the first for us. And that's probably going to bring in a lot of people saying, like, oh, they've, they like got their act together. And I'm like, well, no, we didn't. And there's some departments that I'm sure we did.

Starting point is 01:46:17 I'm sure our decisions for things have been better. And we're going a better direction in terms of like going more with this to plus stuff. That is true. but it has all mattered. It legitimately all did. Yeah, that's all I want to say. Yeah, no, it's a good, yeah, good message to end on. Carl, was anything you want to say?

Starting point is 01:46:41 Yeah, I think Justin did a great job. Well said, I could maybe tighten up the phrasing a little better, but, but yeah, just unless I'm in an interview with you and then which case I can't because I'll get nervous. It's been a pleasure this interview. If you want to help contribute to the project, you can make a donation at Reactos.org. You can open up a pull request or you can help us with our bug tracker. and on Jira.reactOS.org. All of the links about the project can just be found on the website.

Starting point is 01:47:37 Yep. Obligatory shill. It might even all work. You sell mug. It might even won't work. Yeah, you said there is something that breaks. Do you know what page it is that does break? It's um

Starting point is 01:47:56 If you go to a development test man I think Development test man And then you just try searching For anything Like or try uh Oh yeah

Starting point is 01:48:09 Okay yeah Like website like project It didn't die Yeah that's good Yeah Yeah. That's cool. Windows 3.1

Starting point is 01:48:34 startup sound. Dada. Is there really other link to mention just you want to mention your channel? I'll leave it in the description

Starting point is 01:48:46 if you don't want to, even if you tell me not to. No, you're good. You can do that. I appreciate it. Yeah. People want to see the future.

Starting point is 01:48:55 Where can people find that? I don't actually even know my own YouTube channels thing. I'm going to be honest with you. I don't know. I am not a creator, I just like ReactOS, man. The underscore Darkfire underscore. I think the URL's at the underscore Darkfire Zero.

Starting point is 01:49:20 Sounds like an Xbox Live gamer tag. That. Oh, and it's... It was PlayStation. And the channel tag is the underscore Darkfire Zero. Right. I can see you're not a creator.

Starting point is 01:49:38 What is consistent branding? Sorry, is the Twitch different? The description literally says ReactOS time. You didn't even realize that. And I just love watching ReactOS at the movie theater when they said it's ReactOS in time. Oh, my God. I will say at least your Twitch,

Starting point is 01:50:07 Yeah, your Twitch and YouTube seem to have the same reigns. That's something. That's something. My Twitch hasn't been opened in a decade. Okay, well, maybe the Twitch doesn't matter then. Three years. That's a very short decade. I know.

Starting point is 01:50:25 Is that it? Carl's there anything that you want to direct people to? Or do you just do react to our stuff? If you want to link my YouTube channel, I do plan on posting more content on YouTube in the future about React OS. I haven't yet. You can see some of my fancy branding I did on it. Should be, I forget how channel URLs work.

Starting point is 01:50:57 There should be C by Larruki and all I have. I don't know how to spell that. Oh, it's. Yeah, and I'll see. I'll just type it in chat. be your discord name. Yeah, there we go. Last video, 17 years.

Starting point is 01:51:14 All there is, is there's a video ripped from an Intel webcam, like 13 years ago. 17. If you plug it into React OS, it'll crash React OS. Oh, okay, good. Good to know. Yeah, I know. I tried. Intel play.

Starting point is 01:51:37 One video 17 years ago, 260,000 views. That's awesome as I hit it for a few years, too. I'm like, oh, yeah, I had such cringy YouTube videos on there back then. Like, I made once. Like, how to fix your computer when you get the black screen virus, and it was restart Explorer. EXE. I want my startup

Starting point is 01:52:06 to look like this and it's the worst MSPaint animation you can imagine with the 20th century Fox in the background. Yeah, I didn't, man. I made them

Starting point is 01:52:21 I made them what is it? Private? Not private. Unlisted? Unlisted. Yeah, yeah. Some Easter eggs

Starting point is 01:52:33 Yeah, I have had other channels in the past And yeah I'm saving my note The channel I remember for a special occasion I'll show that eventually If I don't need to see that Um Yeah, so nothing else

Starting point is 01:52:56 Either you want to mention That's pretty much it Okay, I'll leave all of those links in the description below So yeah, check those out So like subscribe Yeah, do that Forget to hit the bell The like button

Starting point is 01:53:14 That doesn't work half the time anymore Yeah, five stars Oh wait no, sorry, right, yeah Maybe when you uploaded that video It was still five stars Uh YouTube has like a hype thing on mobile now where you can like give imaginary internet points

Starting point is 01:53:30 and that I think boosting the algorithm I don't know how it works No one knows how it works Make sure to 6-7 Brody Robinson below Make sure to 6-7 him for Mega Sigma points Yep

Starting point is 01:53:45 For sure Anyway I'm gonna regret saying that Yeah well it's not the first time This Just going in the YouTube pool. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Anyway, my main channel is Brody Robertson.

Starting point is 01:53:57 I do Linux videos there, 6 is Jays a week. Sometimes I stream as well. I have the gaming channel that is Brody on Games. Right now, I... Actually, I don't know what to be playing, because I'll probably be finished with the games by the time this comes out. So, if I'm not, it'll be Silk Song and DMC Never Way Cry.

Starting point is 01:54:15 If I am, I don't know what it is. Check it out. You see what it's there. The bad DMC game, because it's actually kind of fun. Anyway, Um, yes, yeah. Uh,

Starting point is 01:54:26 if you're watching the video version of this, you can find the audio version on basically every podcast platform, uh, tech over tea. There is an RSS feed. Wherever you find podcast, you'll find it. And the video is on YouTube tech over tea.

Starting point is 01:54:39 How do you want to sign us off? I'll give you the final word. Thanks for having us. It was fun. Don't blow you up your operating system like we did. Nothing new one to say, Carl. That's it.

Starting point is 01:54:53 Oh, well. Farewell. Something in good night. I'm just gonna stop recording.

Tech Over Tea - ReactOS Future Is Brighter Than Ever | ReactOS Devs

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