The reply kind of opened my eyes. If Wine/ReactOS do continue the trend of becoming better more stable platform than Windows itself, thanks to Microsoft hell bent on destroying their reputation, eventually, Wine/ReactOS can even Embrace-Extend-Extinguish Windows itself.
A man can dream..
[0]; https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/commit/f39...
One example is folks stuck with the legacy nvidia driver. If the game can still run, they can still get fixes this way. It's nice when we can sidestep the process of waiting on nvidia or whoever in the various closed source drivers on both linux and windows.
This might also facilitate developing cross-platform support for the Win32 option in a VM rather than on a live Windows machine -- e.g. a ReactOS VM. Besides avoiding licensing issues, some kinds of developer on-boarding could be facilitated by just pointing them to an available VM, rather than a gauntlet of environment setup.
In a sense, all this points toward an alternate reference implementation for Win32, or at least some subset, for some purposes. And/or a possible phrase: "ReactOS-First" development on Win32.
Some hacking on Wine was able to get SAI2 running, but SAI1 is elusive due to the design of Wine’s wintab32 implementation; XI2 events only go to the window that is being interacted with, whereas wintab32 events can and often are pumped to hidden background windows (for reasons unknown to me, though I guess if the window is on a different event loop it probably helps to mitigate events lagging. WM_POINTER magically coalesces events when the loop is tied up, and lets you grab the coalesced events, so it has less of this problem.)
I’ve thought about it a lot, but… The Wine input stack is fairly complicated and I haven’t grokked it all. I do have some projects I made for (clean room) examining behavior of the WM_POINTER events though. (Also, testing for this will suck.)
Oh... if only...
I can't remember the last time I tried to run a non-game application and it actually worked. And I try often - I can think of three instances in the past few weeks alone (if you want to know - Fusion 360, an internal .NET app from 2010 that by rights should have worked perfectly, an old DVD of Altium Designer).
Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely grateful for Wine. But perfectly compatible it ain't, not even close.
On the other hand if ReactOS and or wine try to do the same thing then we could see some shift but I don’t think it is likely.