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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: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 29 2016, @10:20PM
You don't need the driver to be cross-platform, you just have to figure out the driver API and write a translation layer for that. If you're making a Windows clone, then you're already doing that basically.
And no, ReactOS isn't going to "get enough traction" with its tiny little team and little interest. There isn't enough money or interest from people who want to keep clunky old Windows-based manufacturing and scientific equipment running to fund that; if there were, the team wouldn't be complaining about funding and resources like they are. Companies in that position will happily use a free solution if it exists, but if it means shelling out a bunch of money as a contribution, they'll sooner just junk the equipment and buy a new one. You're not going to get a lot of people wanting to work for free on this project, because honestly, who the fuck wants to spend their spare time making a clone of Windows 2000?
If you think it's such a great project, then you can spend your time working on it. I'm just pointing out how with their limited resources, they could have a much more positive effect by creating some smaller building blocks rather than trying to clone an entire OS that no one is really gung-ho about using unless they're forced to.