14 DAY TRIAL // A new release of the ReactOS open-source Windows-compatible operating system for computers has been released this week with numerous improvements and an updated user experience.
First introduced in the ReactOS 0.4.5 release, the support for styles created for Microsoft's Windows XP operating system received further enhancements in ReactOS 0.4.7 to reduce visual glitches for several apps, as well as to better handle transparency and messaging.
ReactOS 0.4.7 also implements support for Shell extension and allows users to enable the Quick Launch shell extension manually if they want an early taste of this feature. Furthermore, the devs managed to bring the ReactOS painting process closer to the one of the Microsoft Windows OS.
The Recycle Bin and Clipboard features were improved as well, along with the anti-aliasing text, fixes numerous issue regarding Drag and Drop, and file deletion is now correctly managed when dragging files to Recycle Bin, all to offer users a modern and more polished user experience.
New ReactOS Application Manager, better hardware support
ReactOS 0.4.7 introduces a new ReactOS Application Manager that lets users install multiples pieces of software from Rapps, downloads packages in the background so you can continue using the app while installing packages, shows the install percentages, implements force update, and brings back the Installed category.
Hardware support was improved in ReactOS 0.4.7 to allow users to install the ISO image on any USB drive. There's also better VMWare support as the HDAUDBUS driver has been fixed to support HD sound cards, support for using ReactOS on older hardware with SSE2 instructions, and proper checking of end-of-memory-map entries.
On the application side of things, ReactOS 0.4.7 brings better support for some old and addictive games, supports VMWare Horizon and LibreOffice 5, and finally adds support for EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs, ReiserFS, FFS, and NFS partitions, those natively supporting more filesystems than all Windows versions combined.
"Continuing on filesystems, Pierre Schweitzer has implemented the fsutil tool, which arrived in Windows 2003, and is now available through ReactOS as open source," reads the announcement. "Furthermore, the ReactOS fsutil tool also supports FAT file systems whereas its Windows counterpart does not."
Numerous of ReactOS' core components have been updated to their latest versions, and some Memory Manager bugs were addressed in this release, which enhances the overall stability of the operating system. You can download ReactOS 0.4.7 right now from the official website if you want to use this open-source Windows compatible OS.
