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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, 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.