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https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-0415-released/
We are pleased to announce the release of ReactOS 0.4.15! This release offers Plug and Play fixes, audio fixes, memory management fixes, registry healing, improvements to accessories and system tools including Notepad, Paint, RAPPS, the Input Method Editor, and shell improvements.
We chose to release this version of ReactOS in honor of Eric Kohl's first commit to the ReactOS code base, which dates back to 1999.
[...]
0.4.15 was branched 6 months ago. Since then, many new and exciting features have been worked on in the master branch. UEFI support, symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), a new graphical installer, a new NTFS filesystem driver, power management, and newer application support are just a few features being worked on. We are excited to share this journey with you as ReactOS improves and matures.
Previously on SoylentNews:
Watch: Mac OS X 10.4 Running in Windows Alternative ReactOS via PearPC Emulator - 20180510
Alternatives to Win32...Win32 of course! ReactOS still making progress.... - 20160828
Release of ReactOS 0.4 Brings Open Source Windows Closer to Reality - 20160217
Ask Soylent: Can We Turn ReactOS into a Viable Alternative to Windows 10? - 20151021
NTFS Now Supported in ReactOS LiveCD - 20141106
(Score: 4, Insightful) by turgid on Friday March 28 2025, @09:47AM (2 children)
With things like WINE, do you need a whole Windows OS re-implementation? I got off the Windows treadmill in 1997. I went cold turkey. I've pottered about with WINE occasionally if someone tells me to run a Windows program to do something specific and it has often worked well enough. When things like LibreOffice came along, that reduced the need for WINE even further.
Microsoft is pushing Linux hard these days. Everything's WSL and Azure. Why would they continue to invest in Windows development long term?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Friday March 28 2025, @10:39AM
Some software will not work on Wine because it needs deeper hooks into the system and/or kernel. Likewise any software that has a hardware component or its own driver will not work on Wine.
Still ReactOS and Wine work very closely and collaborate, the userland of ReactOS is basically Wine, so any improvements between the two projects are shared.
From my perspective, I have software that runs better (or at all) on Windows in a VM than Wine (e.g. some Audio software), as well as old games, some that work on Wine and some that don't. So while I do have Wine installed and used occasionally, the XP VM is used more often.
Beyond that, a previous place I worked at still uses WinXP/2000 (and even Win 98!) heavily, because the robots they purchased decades ago only work with those OSes. You can't run on Wine because the software has custom drivers and HW to connect to the robots. Keeping those ancient OSes secure and reliable requires a lot of manpower and cost, so replacing it with something that is compatible, yet is still getting bugfixes and security updates (plus perhaps with some modern features like inbuilt firewalls) would be a good use case for ReactOS (if it ever reaches that point, which they seem to be trying to).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Friday March 28 2025, @03:53PM
Some things involve hardware drivers that aren't available outside of a Windows or OSX environment. From what I can tell, ReactOS can handle some regular windows drivers, albeit mostly older ones from XP/2003, which can make it a potential option for people that have older hardware that doesn't have drivers that work with newer versions of Windows.
I haven't loaded ReactOS in a while, I've pretty much always got a copy of Windows sitting around, but I think ti's probably about time that I did, just because of the horrible direction that MS is taking with 11 and the lack of any particular guarantees that copilot won't get more insistent about trying to trick people into allowing it to snoop.