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Comment by tekni5 | Hacker News Reader

I disagree, I applaud the effort even if in the current state few will use it.

Imagine a few decades from now, Windows has either transformed so much that it can no longer run certain things or it entirely disappears as a platform.

Something like ReactOS could become very useful to running legacy stuff or perhaps the code can be recycled for emulation/vm and legally offered for free. It can also be used on older hardware to bring back Windows applications/gaming, while also keeping it up to date.

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Surely you would want to support Wine and not ReactOS?

The only advantage of ReactOS over WINE is that ReactOS has Windows 2003 compatible kernel. This means native Windows drivers, and faster emulation of some features.

However, a few decades from now, there will be no devices left which have Windows 2003 drivers. And hopefully CPUs will become faster, so Wine overhead will be negligible. And I doubt all the new devices will have ReactOS drivers.

Rather than keep going on ReactOS, I would much more prefer people making wine better.

You should look at the current state of Amiga, while emulation is possible there are only two Amiga like OSes (AmigaOS & MorphOS) and both are closed source/proprietary.

What am I saying is that having an open source OS for Windows, is a huge deal if you are interested in hardware preservation for the future.

Therefore in reply to the original post about the current endeavor being "sad" I would say that it is quite the opposite.

Wine is very important as well, but it is a completely different piece of software in my opinion.

What about AROS?

I agree AROS is very much like AmigaOS 3.x and runs on multiplatforms including old Amiga 68K systems. It even has a Kickstart replacement ROM that is legal to use in Amiga emulators.

HaikuOS aims at BEOS compatibility and also works nicely.

ReactOS I've donated to them so they could reach their 4.x milestone.

If I was some rich billionare or a CEO I'd donate a million dollars to each alternative project.

Interesting, I only recently started watching a few YouTubers regarding Amiga stuff, wasn't even aware that AROS existed.

Thanks for correcting me, looks like a pretty cool project will have to look more into it.

Link for anyone else wondering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System

It even runs on original Amiga hardware as well as on emulators and on PCs.

ReactOS and Wine share a lot of code, so supporting one will also support the other.

WINE cannot run most drivers.

Wine by its nature can not run drivers at all. Wine is an emulation platform for running applications. Drivers reside on a lower level and are the OS kernel's job. That is roughly what ReactOS does (and Wine can't) - provides a NT compatible kernel for the Windows drivers.

Windows is pretty focused on backwards compatibility. A large portion of their market comes from the fact that the latest version of Windows can still run 10-20 year old programs written for Windows 98, XP, etc.

This is only true for certain programs.

I've already run into many issues trying to run older software from Windows 98/XP days. For example certain older tools for Quake1 modding don't work properly on anything past Windows XP.

Even something like Photoshop CS2 has certain bugs running under Windows 7.

Don't forget old games. There many that simply don't work on Windoss 7/8/10 without many patchs.

But if you go a little further back, open source has the advantage: It's now easier to run 16-bit Windows programs under Wine on Linux or OS X than it is to run them on a modern Windows machine, and Microsoft has completely ceded the vintage gaming audience to DOSBox.

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