SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @05:41AM
The most important bit about ReactOS is that it runs real Windows drivers. Having the hardware support that Windows does is massively important.
Really, this is an issue that only ReactOS is in a good position to solve -- not just with current hardware with awful not-Windows drivers, but older custom hardware with no drivers for any other system.
The other thing is that it pretty much works like Windows -- administration and the lot are just like on a Windows machine. The target audience for ReactOS isn't Linux users, but Windows users who have issues with the way Windows is progressing.
There's also architectural differences that cause major issues with WINE (one that's affected me a bunch over the years is how awful DirectDraw performance is in Wine -- although, Windows 8's DirectDraw performance is also really bad, I think WINE is actually doing better than Windows with it at the moment, even if Win7 and down can soundly beat the pants off of it).
Still, if you really want to run Windows programs right now without Windows, WINE is still your best bet.