Thorium Core Cloud Desktop
kickstarter.comThorium Core is a commercial distribution of ReactOS, the Open Source Windows compatible operating system, targeted for cloud computing. This is silly. It's an XP-era clone. The only people that are hanging on to XP are people that are trapped in an echo chamber of folks that don't want to upgrade, or are encumbered by some legacy LOB application. There's no way that a shop looking for funding via kickstarter can match the feature development of Microsoft. If you want to disrupt Microsoft, it's sure as shit not going to come from a clone of their 11 year old OS which is 4 versions back now. I don't think the point is to disrupt Microsoft. There are people who think XP was a fine OS, and are building a new OS that takes its good parts, and likely adds other good parts that did not exist in the original. ReactOS isn't even mature yet. I don't see this project taking off in the foreseeable future (though I do think they will hit their funding goal) Your trust issues are showing. i guess everything depends on what you expect from the system. For me xp was the last windows that had both reasonable features and resource usage. The only reason I'm going to use windows is because I need that one specific application for 15 min. If they provide me a terminal with something that's windows-compatible enough for me, I'll happily pay for it (saves me 2h of installing the system and hunting for drivers / downloading updates). I was totally hoping someone was using kickstarter to launch home nuclear power generation using thorium. That I would have funded immediately... OK, sure, a Thorium reactor project would be worth funding, surely. But a /home/ thorium reactor? That's not exactly an HOA friendly endeavour, is it? Fine, fine, kill my dream of powering my neighborhood and giving FPL the boot. However, if you lived in the woods, why not... ? How unfortunate that it'll be a c:/Documents and Settings/ throrium reactor. I didn't pay too much attention but it isn't clear to me whether they're planning to go their own ways or develop in such a manner that they can cooperate with & contribute back to ReactOS. I'd like to see ReactOS grow. Exactly, the ReactOS project itself needs more funding, not sure if this helps. At least it appears that the 2 people at the kickstarter project are part of the ReactOS team (http://www.reactos.org/wiki/People_of_ReactOS ) but the page at the kickstarter project appears to be written in a hurry. Wording like "Thorium core is an attempt to build" doesn't exactly garner a lot of trust in getting the work done. I am not seeing the use case. Access to ReactOS from the cloud? Sorry, but that's very vague, they are going to copy remote desktop as well? It would help if ReactOS itself was stable already. It's a great piece of engineering. Amazing what they have done so far, but -at least during my limited testing- when playing with it in a virtual machine it never survived a stable session longer as a few hours.
Bringing that to the cloud just means another layer of complexity and thus possible failure. It is also not clear to me if the kickstarter project is actually connected to the ReactOS project and what the other contributors think about it. I would at least have expected a page at the ReactOS project about this if it was part of the rest. So far I have not seen a page on the ReactOS site about this and that would help for building trust in the kickstarter project. I don't see how this is connected to "cloud computing" in ANY way. People just throw in the "cloud" word anywhere, don't they? It's a remote Windows desktop, running on a remote server and provided as SaaS. While I agree that cloud is overused in general, it seems appropriate in this case. It never really meant anything, it was just a marketing term that went too far, encompassing so many different technologies and services that it could be applied to pretty much anything. It never meant anything new, but it does mean something (mutualising resources and having access from anywhere and the like). 'Private cloud' may not have access from everywhere and may refer to mutualised resources across teams and individuals but not necessarily unknown third parties. I'm pretty sure that for any given definition I could give you a counterexample or two that's had the label slapped on it :) (Unless it's "has a network connection") I get that a lot of companies still rely on Windows, but aren't we slowly edging away from really needing it? Especially when more and more software is being written in platform-agnostic languages like Java? I feel like a company willing to migrate to something like ReactOS could just as easily migrate over to some *nix variant. The only Windows-only thing that I can think of being essential would be Office (that might be the big one though). > I get that a lot of companies still rely on Windows, but aren't we slowly edging away from really needing it? But it's not Windows. It's a new OS that borrows a lot from an older version of Windows as far as design goes, and hopefully brings something new to the table. And I don't really see how "needing it" or not matters. People use an OS they like, or an OS that has the features they enjoy, or an OS that is compatible with the software they use, or whatever. > Especially when more and more software is being written in platform-agnostic languages like Java? Really? Software has always been written in a variety of platform-agnostic languages. C and C++, to name a couple. But I see a recent trend of ignoring and dismissing portability beyond a select few favorite platforms. MS Office runs on Linux since I can remember. There are several problems I see with this. Firstly, from their literature I am guessing they want to be grabbing on to people who want to continue using XP style services after Microsoft cuts support for XP next year, however I feel they will most definitely miss the boat with this one, 4 months is not a big migration window let-alone for development of the product. Secondly, their core offering is support. A lot can be said about Microsoft's customer service, however I will never fault the support contracts they offer to businesses. I honestly cannot see how they intend to match that. I've never seen MS a support contract add anything valuable for anybody. It may be diffrent at the US, but at Brazil they are worse than worthless. I second that. I think this is the worst Kickstarter project I've ever seen I was expecting some new type of physical server powered by Thorium :(. ReactOS is still in alpha stages and I can't see a difference between the ReactOS I first saw in 2006 and the current one, it still is extremely limited when it comes to running advanced windows applications. Also Windows cloud computers aren't that expensive, a Windows cloud on EC2 costs only a few cents more than a Linux one plus you can also use Azure. It seems pointless to me. Save yourself some trouble, just mail your Kickstarter contribution directly to Microsoft's lawyers. :( I was hoping for some sort of Thorium reactor on kickstarter...sigh maybe next christmas. why do we need a windows clone? Because Linux is stil crap, Windows 8 became crap, and NSA backdors were found! Windows only? How deep in bed with the NSA are these guys? How does wanting to make a Windows-like OS have anything at all to do with the NSA? ReactOS is against NSA! ReactOS is opensource!