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For those not following this project it is a FOSS reimplementation of the Win32 interface, which supports a great deal of humanity's historical computational effort. The new ReactOS release has reached 0.42 and the filesystems ext, btrfs are apparently RW, though Reiserfs and UFS are readonly mounts, successful systems have been shown running.
A nice gallery of some successfully run high profile applications is here (e.g. SimCity and PhotoshopCS2 !!), although interesting, not why I am reporting this.
There are an *enormous* number of scientific instruments (not just microscopes, but various scanners, PCR decks , robots) which originally came with a Win32 driver disk, and have since gone out of business or stopped support. There might only be a single run instance on a crusty old i386 (yes, I've seen that!!).
This is an ambitious project and of course depends on the effective WINE project. It deserves some specific credit and visibility, for providing a possible threshold in the future that sufficient OLD applications can be run independent of the new Microsoft "One OS to rule them All", that it may be possible to construct hybrid machines running Linux, and sufficient driver support from ReactOS to manage the old device drivers that WINE may find difficult to reverse engineer.
But in general, more OS choice's are a good thing!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ramze on Sunday August 28 2016, @07:06PM
Ah, see the problem is you don't understand the goal. The goal isn't to run Win32 apps without windows. It's to completely replace Windows -- especially for hardware that only has windows proprietary drivers. Lots of organisations have ancient Windows machines chugging along to support not just some app, but some printer, scanner, document imager, medical imager/device. Usually these devices cost tens of thousands of dollars or more and only came with drivers for very old Windows machines. I've seen Clerk of Court offices running Windows 95 back when 2000 was old hat and XP was on SP3. I've seen map and blueprint printers that needed Windows XP (no bloody SP1, SP2, or SP3) in the Windows 7 days. (I've even seen a printer with XP embedded version on it and the printer was inextricably tied to the same hardware as the OS)
Sometimes you can run these environments in a virtual machine or on a linux PC with a wrapper for the driver, but often not.
The point is to install ReactOS anywhere you need Windows, then run any random windows installer with 100% compatibility... and use any random USB cable for your usual windows USB plug'n'play with the Windows drivers.
With your attitude, one could just as easily say it's best to scrap all this Linux on the Desktop crap, invest everything in ReactOS as "everyone" really just wants to run Windows apps in a Windows-like environment anyway for their desktops. Leave Linux for corporate servers, stop re-inventing the wheel when 90% of the planet really just wants free Windows without the spyware/adware. With Wine, Mono, Vulkan, and ReactOS, we could make it happen.
But, seriously... none of that coding is a waste. It's all different approaches and different strokes for different folks. Now... Gnu/Hurd, BeOS/Haiku/PearPC, and a few others might be of questionable use-cases... but ReactOS is a worthy endeavor.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @09:17PM
There is also software that requires kernel level access that an emulation layer like WINE can't provide easily and safely at least. Drivers are not just there for hardware, drivers are a standalone executable type (.sys) in Win32 that can be used for any system level task.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @09:19PM
My employer is looking to use ReactOS to replace some boxes running Windows XP. Sure, replacing the computers is easy, but the multi-million dollar machines they are attached to are a little more difficult. We specifically have multiple old BIOS computers in storage to keep them running. We've tried WINE, but it craps out due to the DRM of the system not being supported because it uses a driver to talk directly to the hardware that Linux + WINE hates. With ReactOS, we can get a lot farther in the process with the hardware, but there is some software problem, but given that is a software problem, there is a chance WINE would have toe same one, even without hating the driver.