ReactOs and steam charts/other OS statistic sites

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ROCKNROLLKID
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ReactOs and steam charts/other OS statistic sites

Post by ROCKNROLLKID »

Hello.

I am just curious, when Steam charts collects data on ReactOS users, would it show up as Windows XP or would it show up as ReactOS? Same thing for other statistic sites, like stat counter, market share, OS statistics, etc.
erkinalp
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Re: ReactOs and steam charts/other OS statistic sites

Post by erkinalp »

-uses Ubuntu+GNOME 3 GNU/Linux
-likes Free (as in freedom) and Open Source Detergents
-favors open source of Windows 10 under GPL2
JHKr0md1yk
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Re: ReactOs and steam charts/other OS statistic sites

Post by JHKr0md1yk »

ROCKNROLLKID wrote:Hello.

I am just curious, when Steam charts collects data on ReactOS users, would it show up as Windows XP or would it show up as ReactOS? Same thing for other statistic sites, like stat counter, market share, OS statistics, etc.
Since you referred to "sites" I'll presume you meant web sites and thus a browser being involved. One can easily report running on ReactOS by editing the UserAgent String with an addon like "User Agent Switcher" for Firefox. Perhaps a good default UA string indicating ROS as the OS could be something along the lines of "Mozilla/5.0 (ReactOS 0.4.4; SVN r77777, NT 5.2; x86; Win32; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0 ". See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc ... nt/Firefox for the UA strings used by FF on the various Windows environments (x86 Win32, x86_64 Win64, x86_64 WOW64).
PurpleGurl
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Re: ReactOs and steam charts/other OS statistic sites

Post by PurpleGurl »

ROCKNROLLKID wrote:Hello.

I am just curious, when Steam charts collects data on ReactOS users, would it show up as Windows XP or would it show up as ReactOS? Same thing for other statistic sites, like stat counter, market share, OS statistics, etc.
Likely as XP or 2003. Whatever the OS is reporting is what I'd assume.

As for the other discussion, I think there are ways software can already do this. For instance, looking for copyright strings. Like if I wanted to know what DOS version was used, I would open command.com or io.sys and find out what the strings are and where they are. Sure, there were DOS calls for doing that (I wasn't using assembly when I wrote such code in QuickBasic, so not knowing the calls, I would analyze the files). My approach had the advantage of determining the manufacturer too. In those days, due to the original licensing terms, there were two lines of DOS with the same version numbers, MS-DOS (Microsoft) and PC-DOS (IBM). While both lines tended to have the same features, there were likely subtle differences.

It would be nice to have an API that returns that this is ROS, but how could programs know to suspect that and know the API is there? That could mean returning something different with the results in a standard API, which could perceivably break compatibility. It is one of those questions where if you know enough to ask, then you already know the answer.
dark
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Re: ReactOs and steam charts/other OS statistic sites

Post by dark »

It reports as Windows server 2003. You can also set it to report as "workstation", but most applications such as paint.net don't care and refuse to install on all server versions.
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