There is a clear, widespread trend toward replacing major commercial software programs with AI clones—a phenomenon that, in a way, reminds me of the auld lang syne when "cracked" versions of commercial software were available everywhere ;) This could also help projects like ReactOS make progress by incorporating the best features from this fork, given that the clones are open source.
I’ve tried a few of these AI clones—specifically those from ArtCraft. They’re sometimes interesting, though they obviously make my computer’s fans spin up (some others, from different sources, are practically unusable for this very reason)... The only one I’ve adopted so far is PDFCraft; it’s already better than anything else we’ve had on Linux, despite a few odd quirks—the kind you often run into with AI.
That *craft thing is only estimated to have 25-35% of the features of photoshop, and like most open source things, will never remotely be a true alternative to professional software for anyone that's actually a paid professional in the field. Already has problems like working large files and saving to photoshop format that AI coding will probably never overcome.
100%, i installed it too and used it a bit... I don't think it is bad, it is snappy performance wise. However, filters, features, all have some slight issue. I have the subscription for photoshop and HATE IT, the new features and AI garbage added bogs it down... I used to not mind the update costs when new versions came out and were snappier. If i did not have a license for Photoshop that I use for work I would use the craft thing and Krita.
Maybe less. I didn't mean the contrary. It looks more like Photoshop Elements, and I think this is what it's meant to. It has only one thing the Gimp developers should copy (but the part of Gimp it would belong to is probably written in C while Photocraft is in Rust): the locale correction brush to directly remove dust and scratches;) I always missed this feature in Gimp, and the Krita developers tried to make one, but the result isn’t particularly convincing.
saving to photoshop format that AI coding will probably never overcome.
They could use their format instead, and AI can at least learn something from the Gimp sources: their file-psp executables can already handle psp files in most cases, and at least sufficiently for me as I'm not an everyday Photoshop user.
I agree that there aren't many truly operational AI-coded applications just yet, but I am convinced that we shouldn't demonize vibe coding. It's a challenge that could breathe new life into FOSS and keep it from becoming stagnant.
As for commercial software, it will certainly be able to hold its own without my help.
A quick reminder: LiberNT is made by one single dev, and reviews EVERY line of code the AI writes. If needed, he can also correct what AI generated, or simply code some parts by himself. And also most LiberNT bugs comes from the ReactOS base being pushed to its limits.
This is indeed a good way to leverage AI. I'm keeping an eye on LIberNT's developments, and if a truly viable Windows 11 clone without all of Microsoft's bloatware ever emerges, it will undoubtedly be my OS.
I tried WordCraft myself: I just clicked the Appimage, saw that it didn't even recognize the styles in my documents, so I rejected it immediately. It's nowhere near as good as OnlyOffice, and for my purposes, LibreOffice remains my favorite.
Most of these applications are useless, I agree. LightCraft only looks like Lightroom; it doesn't support raw files from most of my cameras, has no correction profile for my lens, and its editing capabilities are uninteresting. The only one that's been useful to me is PDFCraft as a PDF viewer/editor because there aren't many good options available on Linux.
I just think that all these Vibe Code programs could, through competition, give a new boost to FOSS.
It's been posted here before. It's a lot of AI slop, which people have mixed feelings on. If it's going to progress comically fast, and if competent people can debug it. It is a fork of ReactOS and if they want to slop up their fork, let them. I'm not above playing around with it.
There's a whole conversation about copyrighting or licensing slopped code, but lets not have that discussion today.
The guy who made it is know in the ROS community and knows what he's doing even if it's AI assisted, so yeah it's not like AI is writing all the code without anyone experienced checking stuff
I'll just copy the comment I wrote under one video about libernt and paste it here
the project is honestly quite trash, and it haves so much problems
the dev is one person with dozen of ai agents
the project is obviously vibecoded and "clean-roomed" (but its not, the ai probably was trained on leaked code)
the project is not maintains BIOS boot but for some reason uses NTLDR as default loader (???)
for some reason its way less stable than ReactOS and boots from hard drive in 1 out of 10 cases
the project maintains 103298102 architectures but can't run any properly (reactos still have issues with WoW64 even after 12 years lol)
reactos suck even at nt6 compat (and nt5.2 is like half-implemented still), i won't even mention nt10, so clearly even for one person with ai agents its years and years of work and after like 2 years or something no one will maintain it
It’s the same as building a large three-story villa on a dilapidated foundation that was laid back when Theodore Roosevelt was president
The ReactOS team is still deathly afraid of potentially infringing on copyright. AI code is still in somewhat of a grey area, so the ReactOS team haven't been embracing it like most other projects. While I can understand the concern, the truth is, they're probably just gonna be left behind and forgotten about by forks (like this one) who aren't afraid of copyright concerns and are going full steam ahead with AI code.
They won’t touch ai because there’s a chance the it was trained on Microsoft copyrighted code at some point, and if it was there’s a chance it could spit out that copyrighted code at any time. That chance isn’t worth getting their life destroyed by Microsoft lawyers.
Plus this has already happened once. As I’ve mentioned before some ex ReactOS developer who landed a job at Microslop suddenly accused ReactOS of using Windows source code taken from materials that was released to universities for teaching purposes. Suddenly droves of lawyers and auditors came out of nowhere and demanded to audit their code. If I’m not mistaken they were also dragged to court several times over how some parts of the code “looked suspiciously similar” though it was proven then and there that the code cannot be implemented other ways. They have to stop development and freeze contributions for a year for the audit. Even after the audit the code had to remain frozen for another two or three years, and it took them 5 more years after that to recover their activity level.
Nothing about this is accurate. Starting with the fact the guy that left for Microsoft and the guy that accused them of stealing code are 2 different guys.
Even if my memory is failing me, it stalled the project for a decade (I have been actively watching ReactOS for years now, and even donated to their Indiegogo when they needed funds for development, no doubt after those bloodsucking lawyers and auditors had drained them considerably). If this were to happen again it would be devastating. The auditors thing was accurate as I remember it and unless I misunderstood, according to Wikipedia they did have to go to court at least once to answer for why certain code looks like it was lifted out of samples Microslop provided to universities.
There's a bunch of leaked source code for different Windows versions, I think it's pretty safe to say all the major models have been trained on it, considering how little they seem to care about what they take.
I wish I could get it to work in VirtualBox. After much experimentation, I finally got to the "choose language" screen with the ISO, but as soon as I tried to use the mouse pointer, I got the BSOD.
Why on earth would they call it that..? "LiberNT" Is that supposed to be a play on the word liberate? If not then I got no clue. Its just a bad name otherwise. (In my own personal opinion of course)
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u/User_Typical 2d ago
did you try installing any recent 3rd party software?