ReactOS has been in alpha for so long that it lost all reasons to exist, made obsolete years ago by Wine and Proton running Windows apps incredibly well on Linux.
Also it's a project supported by the russian government so maybe that's for the best.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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One goal of ReactOS is to run Windows drivers, which Wine can't do. There are old specialized devices with Windows exclusive drivers still running in production requiring something like Windows XP or 2000. You can't replace these with Linux and Wine. It makes sense for Russia to sponsor it; they probably depend on these old installations in either their refineries or somewhere in their nuclear program.
Fuck Russia but I wouldn't interpret too much into this
That's an interesting use case but why wouldn't they just keep using WinXP for those specialized aplications? Why fix what is not broken?
I know it's not secure, but it doesn't really matter when it's not connected to the internet?
Apart from security and upgrades, there might arise situations where you want to change aspects of the underlying operating system, and these changes might require changes to the source code.
Also if you remember Stuxnet, those computers were also ~~airgapped~~ not connected to the internet.
Remember working for like a week to get the audio drivers working so I could finally figure out how to properly pronounce “Linux…”
And I still couldn’t.
And we’ll send five dollars American to anyone who gets that reference*.
*The contest is over.
damnit, I saw this too late! I remember torvalds_says_linux.wav being a rite of passage for getting ALSA to work, along with days of strife and increasingly desperate modprobing. ahh, the bad old days.
Honestly didn’t expect a single other soul to remember that, so not late :-)