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Comment by ant6n | Hacker News Reader

At this point, I wonder whether it wouldn't be easier to bundle linux and wine together.

Wine is a mess, to be honest. It's amazing in that it gets Windows applications to work on Linux. The first time I tried that, I was amazed and so very very grateful as I made a full switch to Linux one day without looking back (too-much).

But from a usability perspective, it seems to still be a "second-class" citizen in the Linux world for lack of a better way to phrase it.

Some applications create a separate set of "windows" folders, so interoperability between them is a pain. Click and drag support, just doesn't work properly. The folder structure thing seems to be really jarring for me, as I figured it would be as easy to use as Cygwin's folders on Windows, but somehow isn't.

Any who, it's not a perfect or exhaustive criticism, but Wine is still not a good "drop-in" replacement, even if it does amazing things.

What if you want to run vendor provided Windows-only binary drives for some weird hardware?

ReactOS attempts to implement the driver interfaces as well.

Exactly.

Those 0.1% of the users are likely going to have to buy Windows. After 17 years of development, ReactOS is not really usable with mainstream hardware, so it is unlikely to be a solution for weird hardware.

"it is unlikely to be a solution for weird hardware"

But it's there for the taking and tweaking! It's the same as you solve your own problems in the *nix world, but it's for the cases where you really don't have any other solution but but to work with the hardware vendor's black-box provided driver. BTW, don't expect that buying Windows will solve your problems (because Microsoft seems to have acquired a taste for moving fast and breaking things lately).

I've thought this as well. I agree there's value in aiming too-high, but the amount of effort which has gone into ReactOS would have served Wine really well.

There's a ton of shared code between Wine and ReactOS. They are rather complementary.

Only 5%

One is an operating system and the other is a Win32 compatibility layer for *nix. I'd say 5% is a lot.

The converse is true also.

"the amount of effort which has gone into ReactOS would have served Wine really well"

That may be partly true. Partly, because you falsely assume that anyone contributing to ReactOS would contribute to Wine. These cover common technical ground (of Windows application binary support), but from different ideological prospectives.

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