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Comment by curtis3389 | Hacker News Reader

It's really saddening if you've been following the project for years. They had some good progress back when the Russian government got interested in ReactOS, but lately they seem to just be doing webdev stuff not directly related to improving ReactOS.

To the ReactOS devs: what's the deal with the last couple years of GSOC projects? Why is there little to no work going on to improve compatibilty?

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ReactOS dev here. As of today, compatibility is primarily hampered by the fact that many applications don't run under Windows XP anymore. We don't want to change the entire OS target to something newer than NT 5.2 (XP/Server 2003) at this point. Let's better stabilize on one target than chasing a moving target forever.

This is why a versioning system is being implemented right now to allow applications targeting NT 6.x to use newer DLLs/APIs not available under Windows XP. Check e.g. this recent PR from a few days ago for details: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/3239

> Let's better stabilize on one target than chasing a moving target forever.

Fuck yeah! That's a solid engineering decision.

Thanks for the response and keep up the extremely impressive work!

>To the ReactOS devs: what's the deal with the last couple years of GSOC projects? Why is there little to no work going on to improve compatibilty?

Why are you asking this here in the HN comments section? Maybe communicate directly to them through a means of contact on their page. Why "grill" them on their progress? Maybe go invest in the project yourself.

This just comes off as lazy criticisms. It's not like GSOC is your money, nor does Google "make it rain" with their stipend.

> To the ReactOS devs: what's the deal with the last couple years of GSOC projects?

There are a qute a lot of pretty ideas https://reactos.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2020_Ideas

The problem is in lack of students ^)

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