30 Years of ReactOS

I would like to see ReactOS succeed for various reasons, mainly philosophical. On the other hand, for practical real-world use cases, it has to compete with several alternative solutions:

1. Just use Windows 11. Yes, it sucks and MS occasionally breaks stuff - but at least hardware and software vendors will develop their code against Win 11 and test it. In other words, you have the highest likelihood that your computer will work as expected with contemporary Windows applications and drivers.

2. Use an older version of Windows. If you want to use old hardware or software, odds are you will get the best experience with whatever version of Windows they were developed/tested against. You have to accept the lack of support for modern software, and you will need to take appropriate security measures such as not connecting it to the internet - but at the same time, it's unlikely that your Windows 98 retro gaming rig is your only computer, so that's probably an acceptable tradeoff.

3. Run WINE on top of Linux (or some other mature open source operating system). This might not be a good solution for the average person, but ticks the box for people who feel strongly pro-open source, or anti-Microsoft. Since Windows compatibility is dictated by Windows' libraries and frameworks and not the kernel, compatibility is likely to be comparable to ReactOS.

I am not saying that this covers every possible use case for ReactOS, but I would posit it covers enough that the majority of people who might contribute or invest into ReactOS will instead pick one of the above options and invest their time and energy elsewhere.

I look at ReactOS largely as an exercise in engineering and there's really nothing wrong it with it being just that. Personally I think projects like Wine/Proton have made far more in-roads in being able to run Windows software on non-Windows systems but I still have to give props to the developers of ReactOS for sticking with it for 30 freaking years.

I’ve been playing around with this for decades and it has been a pretty toy façade until recently. But the last time I found a package manager GUI and installed Python, and to my surprise it worked! Was gobsmacked it took this long but real progress is being made.

Aah, ReactOS, my hope from the era of windows xp. After 30 yrs it's still another 30 yrs from completion, kinda like nuclear fusion reactors

Great project, but let's just make this year the year of the Linux Desktop!

ReactOS is an amazing achievement, for what it is. Building a house is much easier than building exactly the same house without being able to even peek at the original blueprints, or take input from anyone who has.

To that point I hope that more people study ReactOS and get a sense for the Microsoft/IBM philosophy of doing a desktop operating system (which is completely different from the Linux/Unix way). I hope we someday see new operating system projects that use these learnings.

I sometimes daydream about becoming a billionaire and bankrolling this project to completion. Would do the world so much good.

I would think claude code would help make a quick dent in boosting reactos capabilities. Curious what others think.

Feel like such projects would benefit tremendously from agentic coding

Multi Processor Support!!? Cutting edge stuff

At some point AI might get good enough to write whatever is missing from that thing. Seems like they have the ability to wait it out.

anything that gets away from microsoft, and more importantly linus torvalds, is a good thing