The ReactOS free software project is turning 30 this year and its “open-source Windows” OS ambitions remain. They are starting out this year with another “major step” towards Windows NT 6.0 compatibility.
ReactOS developers shared that after months of prep work, their MSVCRT implementation in ReactOS has been synced against the Wine 10.0 state. MSVCRT is the DLL as part of the Microsoft C Runtime library.
I wonder what the fine folk of the Phoronix comment section have to say about this!
Let’s check out comment #2:
Does anyone still care, besides maybe Putin? [emphasis mine]
- anarki2
I see…
What is this good for?
Well, not a super duper lot by itself per sé. But ReactOS tries to be a binary compatible, open source Windows clone and was stuck at an 2000/XP-level scope of compatibility for ages. Now they progress into the Vista-7-8(.1) era. I suppose this can open a few doors for some further improvements to the rest of the system, given some time.
Interesting, thank you.
Nothing directly, but it’s indirectly quite useful for wine.
Mostly hardware where you need some special driver only available for Windows. Because WINE can’t run drivers.
Maybe it can help getting software to work that would otherwise only work with older Windows version, eg: software for scientific equipment.
This project has such a weird niche now that Bazzite is catching on.
The number of places you’d consider an XP VM - or god help you, actual 32-bit hardware - is steadily shrinking. If this project Just Works for programs with hideous picky installers, hey great, but that seems untenable. Sometimes even era-correct hardware won’t satisfy the wizard. Like this EXE knows it’s not not 2003 anymore, because the stars are misaligned, and your WinRAR trial has expired.
Some commercial, science, and industrial machines require specific versions of windows, which this can imitate. Old MS Windows is of our development and very vulnerable it allowed on the internet. My giant organisation had until recently a 16 bit PC because it carried an ISA card that formatted a particular letter. Management only authorised a replacement (use of current software tools to make the letter, make a data path from the legacy system that collates the letter data to our newer system) when one of the two machines died and couldn’t be repaired due to lack of parts
That and it probably didn’t work properly at the time either
