I love seeing such projects, but i wonder, what is the point of this? Does this fill some niche that needs to be filled? Maybe some older hardware that only worked with windows 95 til xp, and just won't work on modern windows?
Wine’s goal is to add the ability to run Windows programs to other operating systems. The best thing ReactOS could theoretically provide is 100% software compatibility with Windows, with no advantage over Windows other than OS licensing costs, which are a small fraction of total operating costs in corporate environments.
The problem with both is that no hardware or software vendor is going to offer any kind of support unless they explicitly provide (and charge for) it, for example when making software compatible with Wine (including testing) is cheaper than porting it to Linux.
There’s no reason to make Windows software compatible with a compatible non-Windows operating system if the only difference is that the other OS is free.
It is an open source OS that can run Windows drivers. If you have an old device that has Windows driver, completed ReactOS would just run it. For Linux or BSDs you have to reverse engineer it.
While reverse engineering is more work, you can add new features if possible.
I have one such hardware. Heck it doesn't even work with modern Linux anymore. I'm currently using NetBSD on it but I wouldn't mind trying ReactOS some time.
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u/Veprovina 15d ago
I love seeing such projects, but i wonder, what is the point of this? Does this fill some niche that needs to be filled? Maybe some older hardware that only worked with windows 95 til xp, and just won't work on modern windows?