ReactOS Working On A Community Windows OS
At the beginning of the year their cloud desktop was to be called Thorium Core and they sought $120k from crowd-funders to develop this new ReactOS spin, but in the end it was a failed attempt with just pulling in $48k. ReactOS is now trying to pull in funds for a "Community Edition" of ReactOS. ReactOS Community Edition aims to have a new explorer interface, feedback from the community/users about what apps/drivers should be focused upon for support, will offer better hardware support, and promises up other features.
The re-written user-interface for the ReactOS Community Edition is not to be inspired by Microsoft's Metro interface of Windows 8. This Community Edition OS is to run on the ReactOS 0.4 kernel, which is the project's first official release with sound, network, wireless, USB, and Serial ATA support. Those wishing to see their computer hardware supported by ReactOS with the Windows driver support can "vote" by participating in their crowd-funding campaign, if contributing at least $40 to vote for a piece of hardware or at least $20 to nominate a Windows app to focus on support by ReactOS. At least $250 needs to be contributed to become a beta tester of the new ReactOS.
The campaign began at the start of April and to date has only raised $12k of its $50k goal, which ends on June 1. Unlike the first campaign on Kickstarter, this IndieGoGo campaign is using flexible funding so the project ends up receiving the money regardless of whether the campaign was successful.
It's an interesting campaign but in some ways outlandish (even calling itself "The first Operating System controlled directly by its Community") and likely won't do too much to make ReactOS more viable as an "open-source Windows" nor provide any real reasons for Linux/Windows users to switch to this open-source Windows-compatible OS. Hobbyists wishing to learn more can visit community.reactos.org.
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