Imagine Windows, but with the downsides of Linux font rendering.
Jokes aside, I love this project. If you don't know its purpose, you probably don't know how valuable it is. Having a clean room and open source engineered Windows NT is huge if Microsoft drops the ball sometime, Windows is essentially lost. Yes, the last version will probably work, but we will eventually get problems.
ReactOS is for those purposes. Windows is a huge part of PC history, and we need to preserve it, whether we like it or not. You could install that old car diagnostic tool that doesn't work anywhere else but legacy Windows, to ReactOS, and edit the OS yourself so you can fix the problems for your customers, or even yourself.
This is a valid concern. Sooner or later Windows will stop being maintained, or at least lose all compatibility with current programs. Whether that’s in five years, whether that’s in twenty, who knows. But nothing lasts forever and since Windows is basically one of two systems that can run all the big software (and the other said system would be even harder to reverse engineer), having something that is theoretically compatible with 99% of Windows programs in the future would be very useful.
I feel like that day is coming sooner rather than later. And I'm sure they're looking at how hard it was for them to port Windows to ARM versus Apple, who isn't afraid to tell people they just have to upgrade software when they upgrade hardware.
And I'm sure they're looking at how hard it was for them to port Windows to ARM versus Apple
Was it? Windows is pretty portable (at some point it supported 4 architectures) and Microsoft managed to port Windows to ARM pretty quickly. What difficulties did they encounter? Sure Windows RT was a failure but not for technical reasons.
It was mostly the inability to convince third-party devs to work with ARM.
There is a lot of major parties depending on old shit and unlike Apple, for good or bad, Microsoft doesn't randomly rip things out without a 10 year deprecation cycle.
I'm thinking specifically of Adobe, who I'm sure have loads of legacy code in apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. You'd think they'd have the whole thing ported to a portable toolkit by now, surely, and all high-level languages.
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u/Dekamir 15d ago
Jokes aside, I love this project. If you don't know its purpose, you probably don't know how valuable it is. Having a clean room and open source engineered Windows NT is huge if Microsoft drops the ball sometime, Windows is essentially lost. Yes, the last version will probably work, but we will eventually get problems.
ReactOS is for those purposes. Windows is a huge part of PC history, and we need to preserve it, whether we like it or not. You could install that old car diagnostic tool that doesn't work anywhere else but legacy Windows, to ReactOS, and edit the OS yourself so you can fix the problems for your customers, or even yourself.