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?
Mostly the fact that it’s been in development since 1998. Linux has thousands of developers, yet ReactOS has 30 developers who fight with each other, and haven’t had a stable release since 2021.
Thats tons of developers for one project. You can’t compare it to linux in general. Last release 2021 is not that long ago compared to some to. Knoppix is a very well known one and its last release was 2022. React has come a long way since its NT compatibility days.