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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: 3, Informative) by SomeGuy on Sunday August 28 2016, @06:03PM
One of the goals of ReactOS is not just to provide application compatiblity but also *hardware* compatibly. There is quite a bit of Windows-only hardware out there where the only way to operate it (or operate it fully) is through a proprietary closed source binary driver. Now, if you can stomp your feet enough to get all of these vendors to release source code, then by all means please do.
There is also the seperate issue that some people just don't want a Unix based OS. There are many archaisms in Linux/Unix, and while Windows has its own archaisms, many people would, to put it bluntly, prefer not to run an OS that feels like it should be running on a DEC PDP-11.
Tthe people with the above needs/wants deserve to have a choice, and therefor it is not a "waste".
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Sunday August 28 2016, @10:25PM
You could do a hardware driver compatability layer on Linux. In fact, that would be a great idea to get more people to use Linux, would be for windows drivers to work on it.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Sunday August 28 2016, @11:31PM
You obviously have zero idea what that would involve. Perhaps YOU should try getting past the Linux politics and implementing it if you think it is so simple.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @09:31AM
FWIW NDISwrapper exists.