Every time I’ve tried it, it falls apart within minutes of using it. You’d think after 20 years of development it might be somewhat stable but I guess not.
My impression is that most of the work on the project is motivated by interest in learning about OSs, rather than demand from real use-cases.
If the problem had strong enough demand from real use-cases, I presume it would be stable by now.
I like the ReactOS idea, but I think it will take decades to be compatible enough - and I'm even talking about enough.
If the objective was to run obsolete software, I personally had to distribute resources, I'd just do assign them to Wine. It's surely much more productive to make software compatible on a per-case basis, rather than writing a whole operating system with the objective of being compatible.
It has been under development for decades. That is more than twice the time it took to develop Windows 95. I've tried ReactOS a few times over the years, and it has never worked for me.
I know of two specific examples of ReactOS code that as of a couple years ago were identical with Windows code. There are likely other instances pointing to a non-clean-room implementation.
Cool; if they're specific then you ought to be able to cite them for the rest of us.
What I'm wondering is if you just chanced upon a submission that wasn't actually accepted into the tree at any point?
Perhaps because it literally says:
>/* This part was copied from Windows source /
> / We should obfuscate this somehow? */
And looks sketchy as hell?
I'm not part of their project (just a fan) and my knowledge of git/github is shaky at best -but that's the way it looks from where I'm standing.
Also, I'm not seeing the original windows source code itself; only a comment.
(Or was, last time I tried a couple of years ago.)
I think they should go for rock solid stable first. Then people could build on it. It's perfect for embedded, Point-of-Sale etc where the vendor want to keep their codebase untouched but hop off the Microsoft bandwagon.