So, if you’ve never heard of ReactOS, it’s an alternative to Windows, except it’s open source, and reverse engineered.
The end result is, if it works on Windows, it works on ReactOS natively.
Now, as you might imagine, there are some issues with this. The most glaring one being that they’re currently in the year 2003. That’s the level they’re at with software. It’s not even emulation. It’s running the software natively, and it’s written from scratch.
But my takeaway is that Linux running windows apps natively would improve people’s hesitation to running linux.
Now since ReactOS is FOSS, any improvements made upon it could then be forked over to Linux. And if someone made a ReactOS fork, that isn’t linux, that’s good too (as long as it stays open source). Any advancements made by this new theoretical fork of ReactOS could ALSO be forked into linux.
Right now, development is slow, because it’s a community driven effort without much of a community. If it had a large and engaged community, all legally reverse engeneering the ways of windows? That would allow basically EVERY OS to have FOSS unofficial native windows support.
So I guess my question is, for an OS that’s been in development since 1998, why doesn’t the linux community embrace ReactOS?
You ever heard of Wine? The majority of work to make Windows apps work on Linux is not with ReactOS. Last time I tried ReactOS it was more like a nostalgic OS for people to remember the good ole days of minesweeper. It wasn’t a serious project to actually become compatible with modern Windows. Even if it was, I wouldn’t trust the authors to do so. Wine however has made serious progress and there are multiple Windows apps that now run on Linux as a result. The Linux community should not embrace Windows. Microsoft needs to embrace the Linux community & make their source code open enough and documentation good enough to run Windows software on Linux natively. Otherwise you’re doing free work for a company that will be acting hostile towards you, and it just isn’t worth it. You’d be better off at that point at convincing software makers to make their apps compatible with Linux or using a hypervisor.
reactos is a serious project tho. in fact they were collaborating with and at about the same progress as wine until an incident in 2006; not sure what the status of such collaboration is now
