a friend of mine was browsing the internet for some alternative os'es that imitate windows....he found this one, ReactOS. it is an operating system somewhat like lindows/linspire...it will run all your windows programs and i believe linspire programs. it comes with some basic software built in (but not much, considering its only 10mb)....

some screenies













so...as you can see with the screenshots, it apparently runs some basic programs (that i definatley have problems installing under linux) like winrar, windows games, word 2003...and linpsire applications like open office dot org (im not actually sure if thats the windows version of oodo but...yeah...it also has tux paint...so idk). but for only a ten mb download....this looks like a powerfull operating system that i will definatly be messing around with for a while

and of course...if youd like to download and try this new os here are some links

Live Cd Iso Image Preloaded with Qemu

ReactOs is quite old, for example in linux you can use windows ntfs version (writable), and the wrapper use Wine and ReactOS parts.

This is most interesting.. A GUI operating system inside of a 10 mb download.. oh yes.. very very interesting...

The ideal OS in my book would be one that is able to run both Linux, windows and Mac based programs. Now, that would surely be something to look out for.

The reason WIndows and to a cirtain extent Mac does so very well is the ease and simplicity of use. My own grandmother took to using a computer a few years ago and finds the more basic computing tasks pretty simple to accomplish. However - when it comes to installing a program or conducting any other tasks like making out settings... all the magnificance of computing comes to a full stop. In the office too, I've found that most of my co-workers manage to utilize all the basic tasks - web browsing and any of the MS Office products, but anything that requires learning something new is where the line is drawn. Even installation of programs that require the user to just click the next button after reading through the screen seems daunting.

I do believe that it may be some time, maybe an entire generation, before users are more willing to experiment with computers and different OS's. I mean there's already a huge following for opensource but it's hardly enough. Simplicity of use is the key to mass appeal.

and for me, more advanced user, I don't like windows do to I don't know what it does and it makes lots of things I really do not want and you can't stop it. :S but now windows seems getting better, but still.

If you want that get Linspire, it runs most windows and mac software.

most interesting . It would be great for my laptop, but it only has an old, external , parallel cd-player

Good idea, its like flash linux

Linspire was Ok but it had too many bugs and I could never find any good games to run on it except for the one that the makers wanted you to PAY for. And not only that but Linspire kept on doing stupid crap that just made me want to beat up my PC with a bat

Hmmm.... quite an old post, surprising I missed it. If it really can run and install all Windows and Linux programs, it must be one mean OS. I think I'll give it a try sometime.

I tried Reactos when it was still just a bootable kernel. It is akin to the NT kernel and runs the same sort of programs. More recently I found that they had developed a gui. Unfortunately I could never get Open Office to work on it. Abiword ran fine as did some early win32 apps designed for Windows 95, but programs that required the windows installer didn't work.