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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: 1) by driven on Sunday August 28 2016, @07:11PM
Maybe time to dust off my old Borland products that barf on newer Windows versions. In some ways I miss those days, when prototyping a GUI could be done with minimal fuss. If only it were that easy with JavaScript/CSS. But I digress...
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Sunday August 28 2016, @07:45PM
Yeah, HTML and CSS are annoying (not that JavaScript isn't, just that it isn't what makes GUI building so horrible). Some of the reasons they're so bad are accidents of history, and some of them are more philosophical differences about what HTML and CSS should be trying to do -- they aren't for building applications, they're for rendering hyperlinked documents. And of course, it is easy to make simple cookie-cutter interfaces in them. But they aren't what you'd like to be writing an applications user interface in, and unlike many commenters here I do see the appeal of putting applications inside of web browsers. There are a number of projects that are trying to make a Qt-like interface for rendering things to the DOM, but when last I checked they hadn't gotten too far. It will be interesting to see what the future brings. One of them is being built by PayPal, and the Qt interface is just part of what they're putting together. I saw a talk by Crockford [youtube.com] about it a while back that I found interesting (yes, he's a shill for PayPal now -- sorry Yahoo!).