ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Steadily Improving x64 Port

[Quackdoc]

I'm confused - your post seems to suggest you disagree with me, but your example aligns with what I said. If a company is held back by outdated software that does not work in WINE, it is unlikely to work in ReactOS too. If it does, great, but there's a pretty good chance that whatever makes it not work with WINE is related to hardware, hence me saying that ReactOS can really find its niche if it were to be compatible with Windows drivers.

meant it as an appendage

[schmidtbag]

niche market / Dead market.... it never makes sense to chase the trailing edge at least not from a profit / sustaintability standpoint... the issues with that start compounding and the profits will start falling as your offering becomes less and less competitive and or interesting. Nobody gives a flying crap about running XP era software for pay.

I disagree. If something is niche because it's generally undesirable (whether that be because the design is stupid, too expensive, too inefficient, too tacky, whatever) then sure, it is a dead market. But if there is loud minority of supporters then a niche product can thrive. There are countless of such markets in the computer industry. I think where my proposition for ReactOS's future would appeal most is to people who like playing Windows games from the 90s and 2000s, particularly if they want period-correct hardware too. But, maybe you need a web browser compatible with modern sites, or maybe you want something that can transcode modern video formats. That's where it's nice to have something that potentially can use more modern hardware and software, even if it's geared toward retaining compatibility with legacy stuff.

If a company is truely held back by some XP era software, they are going to fail anyway and as such aren't a reliable stream of income.

I disagree with this too. So long as outdated hardware and software is reliable and there are people who know how to work with it, there isn't necessarily an incentive to replace it. In other cases, the outdated product is used because nobody knows how to replace it, so it needs to be kept alive until a replacement can reliably be placed in parallel.
So, let's say for example your application depends on an internet connection but requires Windows XP to work. Obviously, that's a security risk, especially if you can't find a dependable antimalware to protect it. That's where something like ReactOS could really come in handy, since it could (in theory) have modern security patches but retains compatibility with outdated software that perhaps is otherwise totally reliable.

[phoenk]

I totally disagree. They should completely focus on being a guest in a VM. By doing so, they just have to support the usual batch of "virtual hardware", like all the virtio devices of qemu. The complexity of this task is by magnitudes lower than supporting physical hardware. No more hassle with self written hardware drivers or ironing out issues with third party drivers.

And, honestly, who is going to run this on bare metal?

People who need legacy hardware support. If they're only running in a VM, then that application likely is already covered by wine.

[jamesblacklock]

Isn't it waste of time and resources ? how many years it take to reach to the stage of Windows 7 (let's not say Windows 11) ?

I've never understood this attitude. The time and resources in question are not yours to spend. Imagine knocking on someone's front door and saying, "Excuse me, but that tree house you're building in your backyard? It's a waste of time and resources. You should be building something else." That's essentially what you are doing here. Presumably it is worthwhile to those who are working on it, and the buck stops there.

[Ironmask]

Yeah, WINE covers almost everything ReactOS can do (it even uses WINE). The only thing WINE can't do is support unsupported APIs (well it could but it would be annoying for no benefit), which nothing uses anyway, and driver support.
Driver support is the main thing. But I think what would probably be better is to just implement the Windows Driver APIs over Linux, kind of like how FreeBSD has a couple Linux networking driver APIs implemented to support some Linux NIC drivers. I'm not too familiar with the Windows driver stuff, but I'm pretty sure it's not much different from the concept of the Windows API itself in that its a thin API wrapper over native system calls (which is what WINE is doing in ReactOS).
I'm kind of curious why nobody has done that before, actually. I'm sure it's a monumental task, but it sounds like something somebody would have attempted by now. Albeit its not a very useful project, I can only see it being used for game DRM or installing on some ancient factory equipment which you shouldn't even be touching in the first place (and probably wouldn't even support modern Linux anymore).

[ehasis]

ReactOS has always been more than just an operating system. We are a community of people focused around the Windows ecosystem — with various projects to research and document Windows internals, improve Windows support in applications, or otherwise make life easier for the broader Windows developer community. In fact, most developers likely had their first encounter with ReactOS not by downloading the operating system, but when looking up an undocumented API on the web and ending up in our Doxygen-generated documentation.

Actually this is was my case.

[cb88]

I disagree with this too. So long as outdated hardware and software is reliable and there are people

It's not. that's just a statement of fact. Old software is unsupported... if you cant' get support move on already rather than attempting to continue building on sinking sand.

[lateo]

One word - Vulkan.

Coprocessors.

No much meaning in paying the Apple extra-fee for their in house CPU if you're *not* going to be able to use the special features it comes with.

[Quackdoc]

Yeah, WINE covers almost everything ReactOS can do (it even uses WINE). The only thing WINE can't do is support unsupported APIs (well it could but it would be annoying for no benefit), which nothing uses anyway, and driver support.

People who need legacy hardware support. If they're only running in a VM, then that application likely is already covered by wine.

this is not always true there is a good number of retrogames that work poorly in wine and bad in something like dosbox

[rogerx]

It is about time ReactOS is picking-up Microsoft's greatest Windows XP operating system open source code!