alt Hacker NewsI 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.
Replies
f311a • today at 4:16 PM
> Wine/Proton have made far more in-roads in being able to run Windows
Yeah, they can even run modern games, which ReactOS can't. It can't even run on modern hardware properly.
It's a nice project, though. Good progress for a hobby project, and it's still going after 30 years!
Yes. The unique point of ReactOS is driver compatibility. Wine is pretty great for Win32 API, Proton completes it with excellent D3D support through DXVK, and with these projects a lot of Windows userspace can run fine on Linux. Wine doesn't do anything for driver compatibility, which is where ReactOS was supposed to fill in, running any driver written for Windows 2000 or XP.
But by now, as I also wrote in the other thread on this, ReactOS should be seen as something more like GNU Hurd. An exercise in kernel development and reverse engineering, a project that clearly requires a high level of technical skill, but long past the window of opportunity for actual adoption. If Hurd had been usable by say 1995, when Linux just got started on portability, it would have had a chance. If ReactOS had been usable ten years ago, it would also have had a chance at adoption, but now it's firmly in the "purely for engineering" space.