Moo IX

[buzzy]

So in yesterday's [probably friends-locked] entry, I did a lot of Windows 8 dissing (oh, the Desktop Window Manager is now using 907 MB of RAM), and while today's entry will include talk about some OS bugs and problems, but this time, they're totally understandable; the operating system is alpha quality. Anyway, I popped ReactOS (0.4 SVN 20130203-r58282) into a VirtualBox VM. They had a prepackaged version on a VirtualBox hard drive image, but that version was older and I couldn't get the sound to work. I used one of the Subversion releases that they happen to compile (warning: that link takes forever to load) into ISOs compressed with 7-Zip. It took two tries to get it to install (I have no idea what made it install the second time; I just did the same things I did for the first time), but eventually it got on there. Here's a list of problems I ran into: (I can't report these to them because their issue tracker is invite only.) Actually, some of these aren't problems because I couldn't be 100% negative. :P

• 
  I totally have a hard drive big enough for a 32 EiB page file
  Their implementation of dxdiag.exe (the DirectX diagnostic) has some interesting issues. If you switch away from the first tab, then switch back, all the text disappears. Also, it says I have used 17592186043225 MB of my page file and have 17592186043904 MB free. (See picture) (Both numbers are about 16 EiB. To put that into perspective, that's enough space to record the entire lives of over 3000 people using one camera each recording 720p MPEG4 video at an average bitrate of 21.6 Mbps, assuming an average life expectancy of 67.2). The emulated environment has 512 MiB of RAM, 48 MiB of VRAM, and a 20.0 GiB hard drive.
• The only version of Firefox that works halfway decently is 3.6.28. At least that I've tried. I tried several of the versions that came out when they started their six-week development cycle and none of them worked for more than a minute. When they would work, graphics would appear in the wrong places and huge black splotches would appear everywhere.
• Double-clicking the corner of the window with the icon (top left) does not close the window.
• Recently opened programs go into a Recent Documents folder, but I haven't been able to open any programs with the shortcuts that are created in there. I end up getting several errors in a row: "ERROR: FILE_NOT_FOUND - The system cannot find the file specified.", then "There is no Windows program configured to open this type of file.", and finally "ERROR: INVALID_WINDOW_HANDLE - Invalid window handle".
• Most of the toolbar buttons in the implementation of Windows Explorer work. Hitting F5 doesn't refresh.
• 
  It says it's searching, but it's not doing anything
  The Add Hardware Wizard has a pointless step where it just shows a magnifying glass. At first, I thought that was where it scanned for new hardware, but it does nothing. (*insert glasses doing nothing reference*) When you get to the genuine scan for hardware, that does nothing as well. You can at least cancel.
• No support for USB flash drives or SMB/CIFS, so the only way to get files from the host to the machine is to put them in an ISO. I found I can cheat (sorta) and use Firefox to download files from my development server.
• It doesn't appear that holding the Shift key while moving files to the trash allows you to bypass the Trash entirely like it does on Windows.
• Right-clicking and opening a program/file in the Start menu doesn't close the Start menu, so it's in the way until you click the Start button to close the menu.
• I occasionally lose the ability to type. I haven't had that problem with the mouse.
• In the color picker, if you accidentally enter a value that doesn't make sense (I noticed this after accidentally hitting the same number twice in the red field causing), it will adjust it so that the value is correct again, but the saturation slider on the right side looks strange until you change another value.
• No desktop wallpapers using PNG or JPEG. Only BMP and DIB.
• It's pretty small for an operating system. The OS and the one program I have installed (Firefox) take up about 300 MiB. The page file alone is more than twice that.
• There's a lot of memory being used and I'm not entirely sure what is using it.
• The fonts are pretty hideous. Either that, or something is wrong with the font rendering. The letters in some of the fonts are so wide and bold, it looks strange and is kinda hard to read.
• I like the Add/Remove Programs area, a.k.a. the ReactOS Applications Manager. It provides the ability to download and install packages of open source programs easily in addition to the regular ability to uninstall. Unfortunately, it takes seven minutes to load taking up 100% of the CPU.
• 
  Rigby ponders this frozen desktop as a red and black bar encroach from above.
  Occasionally it would freeze with this large red and black bar at the top. (See picture) I don't know what triggers it because it happens randomly. Sometimes if I leave it alone for an hour, I return to find it like that.
• There's a Print Spooler service that uses a little more than 1 MiB of RAM, but there's no printer support, so there's nothing it could be doing. It might be a stub for programs that insist on printer support.
• The Folder Options window (usually in Windows Explorer, you can access it by going to the Tools, Folder Options menu) is in the Control Panel. Going to the Tools, Folder Options menu in the ReactOS Explorer gives a different options screen that only lets you adjust whether each folder opens in the same window or different ones and whether it uses a multiple document interface or a single document interface. Changing those settings doesn't seem to affect the behavior of the program though.
• When adjusting service startup types in the Services Manager, it didn't save the first time, but it seemed to work the second time. I managed to get the XP style of themes to work by setting the Themes service to automatically start.
• Sometimes, the icons that get displayed in the upper left corner of the window or in the taskbar are wrong or blank.
• Sometimes, the network icon does not appear in the system tray even if it is configured to do so. (It's not hidden...it's just not there.) The only way to get it to appear is to go into the status of the network connection (Start, Settings, Settings Menu, Network Connection, Network Connection), then click Properties, and mess with the check boxes until it appears.
• In the Text Services and Input Languages, it always has three input languages all with the same name and keyboard layout. Deleting one causes the keyboard layout to change to random characters on the remaining two. Based on how it behaves when you close and open the window, there is only one input language and keyboard layout, but it shows up as three. If you delete one of those three, it deletes the only one there. Then when the thing realizes there's no keyboard layout, you can't type.
• The My Computer, My Documents, My Network Places, and Trash (Recycle Bin) icons do not open what you expect when you double-click their icons on the desktop. All you get is a blank window. Right-clicking the icons and clicking Open will open them normally.
• There's a browser for those weird things like \Device\Harddisk0\Partition1 or multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) built-in. It has issues (right-clicking on things either causes the selected item to reset to the first item or shows an error), but it's interesting to see all that internal stuff.
• You can make the auto arrange on the desktop icons work in ways other than top down and left to right. This is handy if you don't want your icons blocking your wallpaper, since you can just set the arrangement to a version that doesn't block the image.

As rough-around-the-edges as it is currently, there is a lot of promise. It's too bad that when they sought to raise €30000 to pay some developers to devote time to the project last year, they got less than half of that. I'd give them some money if I had money to give and if it meant they'd get closer to beta quality.