reactos VS Servo

https://reactos.org/ implement some of the windows API

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.

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

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.

> 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/

> Is there any easy to use/hack HTML layouting engine where I could experiment with custom CSS attributes and bridge that gap? Would anything from Servo be suitable?

Servo could be used for this. You'd want to add support for parsing the CSS properties themselves to the style crate in https://github.com/servo/stylo and then the layout implementation to the layout2020 crate in https://github.com/servo/servo. You do effectively get a whole browser though.

I'm currently working on building a lighter weight / hackable layout engine based on a combination of https://github.com/servo/stylo (for css parsing and selector resolution), https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (for box-level layout) and https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (for flow/inline layout). I expect to have something decent in around 6 months

Neither of these setups currently have any support for pagination though.

Great to see some competition still alive in browser engine development. See also Servo (previously part of Mozilla) https://servo.org/ - that and Ladybird are still very underdeveloped compared to every day browsers.

It's a huge shame that there are no nightly builds of ladybird to try out but I assume that's because they just don't want the bug reports (if everything doesn't work it's pointless getting random bugs filed).

I haven't messed with it yet but from looking into it, this should absolutely work.

https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Building-on-ARM-desktop-...

don't know, there was a downtime in 2021 and 22 but since 2023, contributions look back to where it was before .. https://github.com/servo/servo/graphs/contributors

The world has moved on though to opinionated tools, and Rust isn't even the furthest in that direction (That would be Go). The equivalent of those two lines in Cargo.toml would be this example of a basic configuration from the jacoco-maven-plugin: https://www.jacoco.org/jacoco/trunk/doc/examples/build/pom.x... - That's 40 lines in the section to do the "defaults".

Yes, you could add a load of config for files to include/exclude from coverage and so on, but the idea that that's a norm is way more common in Java projects than other languages. Like here's some example Cargo.toml files from complicated Rust projects:

Servo: https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/main/Cargo.toml

rust-gdext: https://github.com/godot-rust/gdext/blob/master/godot-core/C...

ripgrep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/Cargo.toml

socketio: https://github.com/1c3t3a/rust-socketio/blob/main/socketio/C...

1. Servo

It won't don't worry. There already are forks, for the worst case scenario. And Servo is on its way. Not yet ready, but it will be. Originally, from Mozilla kitchen.

To pain broad strokes, the layout phase (~= take the HTML, take the CSS, determine the position and size of boxes) is largely sequential in production browser engine today. Selector matching (~= what CSS applies to what element) is parallel in Firefox today, via the Stylo Rust crate originally developed in the research browser engine Servo. Servo can do parallel layout in some capacity (but doesn't implement everything), https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Servo-Layout-Engines-Rep... is an interesting and recent document on the matter.

Parallel layout is generally considered to be a complex engineering problem by domain experts.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en... is a really cool article that is related, that is a few years old but what it says is largely correct today.

[Article author/submitter here]

I can only tell you that it is not what this is about, inasmuch as I was at the talk and there was not a single mention of Firefox Reality or Wolvic in the talk.

Wolvic might use Servo – but I think if it did they would mention it, right?

The talk didn't and the word "Wolvic" does not occur anywhere on https://servo.org

So I am guessing not, no.

Igalia has -- or rather is because it's a co-op -- about 100 developers. They are not all working on the same thing.