The ReactOS development team announced today the general availability of the ReactOS 0.4.12 open-source computer operating system compatible with Microsoft Windows binaries.

ReactOS 0.4.12 is here more than six months after version 0.4.11 to introduce window snapping, a feature that lets users snap windows to be aligned to sides, along with the necessary keyboard shortcuts, more robust and correct font rendering for buttons in various apps, two new themes, namely Lunar and Mizu, and support for Intel e1000 NIC.

"ReactOS now possesses a driver that supports this NIC out of the box instead of requiring end-users to manually find and install a driver, a finicky process if one does not have a working network connection in the first place. Furthermore, the new driver should also be compatible with e1000 NICs in real hardware," said Colin Finck.

More kernel improvements, Wine 4.0 support

Under the hood of ReactOS 0.4.12, there are several kernel improvements to make the file system drivers and device power management more reliable, improve the CDFS driver, and fix support for PXE booting. The write-protection functionality has also been rewritten and beefed up with execution protection for better overall security of the operating system.

It also brings various improvements to user-mode components, including support for more Windows apps, proper support MIDI instruments, improvements to the sound mixer dialog, fixes to the calculator, updates to the on-screen keyboard, and updated components like Wine-Staging 4.0, Btrfs 1.1, Uniata 0.47, ACPICA v20190405, libpng 1.6.35, mbedtls 2.7.10, mpg123 1.25.10, libxml2 2.9.9, libxslt 1.1.33, and libtiff 4.0.10.

You can download ReactOS 0.4.12 right now from the official website if you want a free and open-source alternative to the Microsoft Windows operating system. ReactOS is fully compatible with many Windows apps and games, which you can install and use on a truly free OS that doesn't uses proprietary code. Don't forget to report bugs if you encounter them to make future ReactOS releases even better and more reliable.

Font improvements

New themes