The ReactOS project has announced the release of ReactOS 0.4.8, latest tri-monthly release of windows binary compatible, open source operating system. This release brings various user experience improvements, kernel stability fixes, and better NT6+ software support, especially for games.
Multiple icon selections on the desktop were impossible prior to 0.4.8 release. Now, it has been fixed and also the renaming and deletion of files and folders work reliably.
Other user experience related improvements includes shell autocompletion support, ability to unmount network drives directly from explorer, and the eject and disconnect item is implemented on the context menu.
"From the visual point of view, several glitches related to the redrawing of static text elements, scrollbars, button captions, fonts and text background colors were fixed in this version. As a bonus, now ReactOS also detects more themes and is much faster when rendering big amounts of text" - mentions the release announcement.
For more information on ReactOS 0.4.8, read release announcement published on project's website.
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The power of open source
Beginning from 0.4.7 release, ReactOS team has migrated most of the development activities to Github. This has significantly helped the project to get contributions from the enthusiastic community out there. Within this short span, ReactOS project was forked 248 times. The project has received 209 pull requests and 1094 commits in this period, which is summed up in ReactOS 0.4.8.Refining the user experience
One of the prime concern of ReactOS is improving the user experience. Towards this goal, ReactOS 0.4.8 brings some crucial improvements on Taskbar configurations to fix *always on top*, auto-hide, and toggle lock features. Also, now balloon notifications are behaving properly and support notification queue. The notifications from killed or terminated applications will be automatically removed from the queue.Multiple icon selections on the desktop were impossible prior to 0.4.8 release. Now, it has been fixed and also the renaming and deletion of files and folders work reliably.
Other user experience related improvements includes shell autocompletion support, ability to unmount network drives directly from explorer, and the eject and disconnect item is implemented on the context menu.
"From the visual point of view, several glitches related to the redrawing of static text elements, scrollbars, button captions, fonts and text background colors were fixed in this version. As a bonus, now ReactOS also detects more themes and is much faster when rendering big amounts of text" - mentions the release announcement.
Improved NT6+ Software support
As a part of leaving NT5 behind, ReactOS is expanding its target to NT6+ platforms which include Vista, Windows 7, 8 and 10. The required logic for this is getting implemented in NTDLL and LDR. Kernel32 is now capable to support NT6+ applications and the shim compatibility layer is also getting improved. Although these changes are in the experimental state, ReactOS 0.4.8 can provide support for recent applications with NT6+ dependency.For more information on ReactOS 0.4.8, read release announcement published on project's website.