reactos VS WSL

Compare reactos vs WSL and see what are their differences.

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reactos WSL
150 406
14,009 16,635
1.3% 1.4%
9.9 8.3
7 days ago 6 days ago
C PowerShell
GNU General Public License v3.0 only MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

reactos

Posts with mentions or reviews of reactos. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-19.
  • Questioning "The Value of Open Source Software"
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Feb 2024
    https://reactos.org/ implement some of the windows API
  • Saving Linux
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jan 2024
  • Windows 10 end of life could prompt torrent of e-waste
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Dec 2023
    You can use Rufus: https://rufus.ie/en/

    To modify the ISO to turn off hardware check and TPM support for Windows 11 to install it on an unsupported PC.

    https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#user-content-Help_...

    Besides Linux and BSD Unix there is: https://reactos.org/ https://aros.sourceforge.io/ https://www.haiku-os.org/ and https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/

    I know some third-world nations still use DOS and the BORLAND DOS compilers because people donate old computers to their nations.

    With the right OS, old computers are still usable. Please don't throw them away, e-cycle them so they get used by poor nations that cannot afford new PCs.

  • A balance between lightweight and user friendly
    1 project | /r/linux4noobs | 11 Dec 2023
  • Microsoft Will Eventually Start Charging You for Windows 10 Security Updates
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Dec 2023
  • BREAKING NEWS: Registry healing and validation checks work by George Bisoc has just been merged into main tree!
    1 project | /r/reactos | 22 Nov 2023
  • ReactOS Newsletter 103 – Late 2023 News
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Nov 2023
    ReactOS is sometimes very disappointing. Take the issue with toolbar icons, for example. Toolbar icons in at least Office 97, Office 2000 and Visual Basic 6 were affected, as was some game [0]. Microsoft Office is a complex Win32 application, making it a good guinea pig for testing compatibility. And yet, this was fixed a few months ago, and the Office bug was reported in 2016 [1]. The bug with no text wrapping for tray balloons is also an embarrassing thing to have lingering for years (I assume it was like this since the balloons were first implemented in ReactOS).

    Does the world really need a buggy Windows Server 2003 reimplementation? I think the efforts of the development team could be better spent elsewhere.

    [0]: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/5227

    [1]: https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-12377

  • Microsoft Edge is starting to annoy me big time
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Sep 2023
    Anyone tried ReactOS recently? Supposed to be a clean-room FOSS Windows NT compatible OS.

    https://reactos.org/

    It's still on my TODO. Mostly cause my parents want XP back.

  • Windows 9x and Word 9x at 800x600 resolution. Spacious. Comfy
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jul 2023
    > It's whitespace. There's wayyyy too much god damn whitespace in modern UIs, and it's awful.

    I wanted to see how LibreOffice would compare on my netbook, and frankly it's better than the new Word, but still "worse" than the old version: https://i.imgur.com/cWGYh3M.png

    That said, at least LibreOffice lets you have your custom themes and actually offers a variety of different interface layouts, which I think is a nice touch: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Videos/User_interface

    > Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX, and you'll never change my mind. It's been downhill ever since, getting worse and worse with each generation.

    To be honest, I'm inclined to agree with this. That's also why I rather enjoyed the Redmond theme even in *nix distros. There's just something so very usable about the old Windows look and more modern attempts, such as SerenityOS https://serenityos.org/ and even ReactOS https://reactos.org/

  • Looking for an os for a very old laptop
    1 project | /r/lowendgaming | 4 Jul 2023

WSL

Posts with mentions or reviews of WSL. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-28.
  • GoboLinux
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Feb 2024
    It absolutely 100% can be true.

    As an example: Windows Services for Linux 2 used a special init daemon to interact with the host OS.

    That meant no systemd. That meant that the `systemctl` program wasn't there.

    This baffled legions, armies, of wannabe sysadmins.

    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55579342/why-systemd-is-...

    https://superuser.com/questions/1785697/systemd-in-wsl-on-wi...

    https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/9477

    https://askubuntu.com/questions/1132230/unable-to-run-any-sy...

    People on the whole have no idea how this stuff works, and they just copy magic incantations from StackOverflow to get stuff to happen. If that doesn't work, then this OS is broken. The end.

    For these guys, WSL was broken.

    Result:

    MS hired Lennart Poettering.

    https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/07/lennart_poettering_re...

    He "fixed" it. Systemd now works in WSL2. All those guides for noobs now work. Everyone is happy.

    In a world where tools like Flatpak and Snap are proliferating and it's driving deep divisions between Linux distros, if you think the average person struggling with Linux is going to use `ldd` to work out where the dependencies for something live, I'm afraid you are a deep guru who lives on a different plane of existence.

    We now have widely-used packaging systems which simply embed an apps entire dependency tree into a package to avoid people having to work out the difference between `apt` and `rpm`. Thousands of terabytes of disk are being burned to make this stuff go away.

    Yes, this is too hard. Way too hard.

  • Why Linux utilities tend to run poorly on Windows
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jan 2024
    Better source: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...
  • Weird graphical glitch/problem in Ubuntu WSLg (OpenGL)
    1 project | /r/bashonubuntuonwindows | 10 Dec 2023
  • RamRamRamEveryoneSleepingOnDocker
    3 projects | /r/ProgrammerHumor | 7 Dec 2023
    One of the bugs where on the Docker side. As I have said, there have been several since release with a lot of impact period overlap. The latest and greatest is not resolved.
  • Laravel dev in Windows - Laragon vs Docker?
    1 project | /r/laravel | 7 Dec 2023
    It's the issue of abysmal I/O performance in communication between the mounted WSL2 virtual hard disk and Windows mounts inside the WSL2 distro.
  • WSL freeze seems fixed in 2.0.12
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Dec 2023
  • What's the right way to open files in the system's default program from Ubuntu 22.04 in WSL 2 please?
    1 project | /r/bashonubuntuonwindows | 6 Dec 2023
    I found this github page and I was able to reproduce this from the answer
  • Ask HN: Best Docker open source alternative?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Dec 2023
    * Docker engine and not Docker Desktop in a VM. WSL2 works well after some configuration: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6655#issuecomment-11...
  • Broadcom to Cut Almost 1,300 VMware Jobs in California After Takeover
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Nov 2023
    Seems to more of a Defender issue than a WSL one, see https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8995

    After adding exclusions for the fsnotifier-wsl process and and both variants of the WSL distro path my disk performance was improved.

    Adding the idea64.exe process also helped since I was trying to run IntelliJ against projects inside WSL.

  • Bricked WSL 2 after 2.0.9 / Windows 10
    1 project | /r/bashonubuntuonwindows | 21 Nov 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing reactos and WSL you can also consider the following projects:

NsCDE - Modern and functional CDE desktop based on FVWM

wslg - Enabling the Windows Subsystem for Linux to include support for Wayland and X server related scenarios

Proton - Compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components

genie - A quick way into a systemd "bottle" for WSL

serenity - The Serenity Operating System 🐞

Scoop - A command-line installer for Windows.

quickemu - Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux desktop virtual machines.

Single-GPU-Passthrough

docker-minecraft-server - Docker image that provides a Minecraft Server that will automatically download selected version at startup

setup-msys2 - GitHub Action to setup MSYS2

ravynos - A BSD-based OS project that aims to provide source and binary compatibility with macOS® and a similar user experience.

mkcert - A simple zero-config tool to make locally trusted development certificates with any names you'd like.