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.
IMO, the is a monumental underestimation of the man-hours put into make Windows as compatible as it is, even ignoring the fact that Microsoft's engineers are/were highly skilled.
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.
But I'm not disappointed in ReactOS because it's not fully compatible. I'm disappointed because it's not stable.
(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.
> I like the ReactOS idea, but I think it will take decades to be compatible enough - and I'm even talking about enough.
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.
We've banned this account - it's not ok to mimic someone else's username like that, but it's especially not ok to add sockpuppet accounts to a thread you're already in. Doing that will get your main account banned as well, so please don't do that again.
not really a fair comparison, windows 95 had the advantage of not having to be developed from the ground up to retain perfect binary compatibility with blindows 95
