So, if you’ve never heard of ReactOS, it’s an alternative to Windows, except it’s open source, and reverse engineered.
The end result is, if it works on Windows, it works on ReactOS natively.
Now, as you might imagine, there are some issues with this. The most glaring one being that they’re currently in the year 2003. That’s the level they’re at with software. It’s not even emulation. It’s running the software natively, and it’s written from scratch.
But my takeaway is that Linux running windows apps natively would improve people’s hesitation to running linux.
Now since ReactOS is FOSS, any improvements made upon it could then be forked over to Linux. And if someone made a ReactOS fork, that isn’t linux, that’s good too (as long as it stays open source). Any advancements made by this new theoretical fork of ReactOS could ALSO be forked into linux.
Right now, development is slow, because it’s a community driven effort without much of a community. If it had a large and engaged community, all legally reverse engeneering the ways of windows? That would allow basically EVERY OS to have FOSS unofficial native windows support.
So I guess my question is, for an OS that’s been in development since 1998, why doesn’t the linux community embrace ReactOS?
I think reactos is just in a weird space of semi uselessness like haiku. It’s not good enough to use daily and doesn’t have as much retro appeal as game emulators so not enough work is done to it.
Also building reactos is terrible, or at least was years ago (it’s a whole os and userland after all, I know it won’t be simple). If the development workflow improves the project could get off the ground.
As far as posix support goes I would love to see reactos get to the point where a posix nt personality could be real again, but really I think humanity has learned enough about operating systems to build a new one from scratch instead of liberating proprietary tech at great cost.