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Comment by israrkhan | Hacker News Reader

ReactOS used to be a free and opensource alternative to Windows, with binary compatibility. It is an excellent project from technical point of view. However I am no longer sure about its utility.

windows 10 is last version of windows (continuously updated like a service), and free for most users. This takes away one of the advantage (free) of ReactOS. Microsoft may well opensource windows, before they catch up and hence taking away second advantage.

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ReactOS system requirements:

   x86 processor, Pentium-class or newer
   96MB of RAM, 256MB recommended
   650MB of free space minimum, 5GB+ recommended if you intend to do testing
   VGA compatible graphics card, VESA BIOS 2.0+

Doesn't seem like it's comparable to anything after WinXP. For one thing, its disk footprint is sane.

This is a good reason for it to exist. I still keep a Windows 2000 VM around on my Mac so I can run a few Windows programs I need, and while I also have a Windows 10 VM, the Windows 2000 version is so much faster & less resource intensive.

I'm playing with ReactOS tonight and it's still extremely buggy, but I can at least start to see a future where that Win2K VM might get retired. Version 0.4.3 looks like a good improvement over v0.4.0 earlier this year.

One point would be to have a platform for legacy applications. There's probably quite many PC's running in various places, doing what they have been doing for the last 20 years (for example running some control software for some machines).

While I think this is the meaningful use case, that also puts a MUCH larger burden of "this needs to be 300% correct" to the project as a likely significant percentage of those legacy applications work BECAUSE of bugs and idiosyncrasies of that specific version of windows.

Whereas the easier target of "emulation", such as with DOSBox and WINE, can get away with a lot more.

Windows 10 just cost me $200, on a new computer. This after a different copy of Windows 10 killed my previous computer motherboard dead during a forced reinstall due to an incompatibility between Windows 7 and Windows 10 (the HD was accessed by Windows 7 on another computer, after still other Windows 10 problems that began the whole debacle.) So that's one computer and $200 that Windows 10 has cost me, lately.

"This after a different copy of Windows 10 killed my previous computer motherboard dead during a forced "

Wow, that's quite a claim!

I had a lot of problems after Windows 10 took over, but finally, an accidental unplugging during a Win 10 reinstall killed the motherboard. Not likely a coincidence, not something I'd have been doing except for numberless problems.

Ignoring the dubiousness of the claim, make sure that you log-in to your MS account with your new install to tie that serial to your account so that future activation is just "log-in". I recently reformatted a new laptop (probably paid for Windows in the price of that, but was reasonable) and made sure to do that as I had no serial to reinstall with. Worked like a charm.

You can't log in on a new motherboard or computer - OEM only these days. This was a forced reinstall as stated above, NOT a new install. The dead comp was four years old.

Lots of governments want to adopt open source solutions. If ReactOS was more mature, I could see a lot of them switching to it.

Windows Server just got more expensive with Server 2016.

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