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Comment by iRobot | Hacker News Reader

The second they launch a stable version I can use to replace windows XP embedded will be a real milestone.

Lots of plant touchscreens and industrial computers run a stripped down version of windows NT 3.51, win2k or XP (XP embedded is just a stripped down XP) which dont need any bells and whistles, just a solid network connection and the ability to run the win32 api. I have over 30 of these panel pc's around various factories running touch screen apps in place of explorer.exe so the desktop is not important to me and the demand is expanding all the time.

Thanks for the time and effort lads, I'm downloading it now to give it a go :-)

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Not sure why you need ReactOS if that's the only requirement. You should just put stripped-down Linux installs in their place and run WINE, on which almost all applications work perfectly well. ReactOS in fact is mostly a kernel project. The majority of their userland support comes from WINE. The difference is that they are trying to clone the kernel to provide the truest Windows-like experience (including driver compatibility).

If you don't need the hardware support the reality is that you'll be much better off using a newer version of WINE on a Linux installation than you would be using a ReactOS snapshot.

Driver compatibility is likely to be more important as a lot of embedded systems use proprietary and certified drivers which will never work on Linux.

Not to mention, WINE is far from perfect. I'd argue that ReactOS, albeit with chunks of it coming from WINE is still far more likely to behave like a real Windows machine.

At the end of the day, it'll probably come down to cost and an in situ replacement of the OS without any application rewrite or hardware changes is cheapest.

>Not to mention, WINE is far from perfect. I'd argue that ReactOS, albeit with chunks of it coming from WINE is still far more likely to behave like a real Windows machine.

I would really like to know why you think this. ReactOS's userspace support is WINE almost entirely. They may write extra win32 applications like explorer.exe for use with ReactOS, but they do not use a separate runtime translator. They may modify portions of WINE to work with their ring 0 graphics code or whatever, but almost all of the serious work is done by WINE.

WINE is tested broadly on Linux platforms and the bugs usually get solved quickly. ReactOS is barely tested at all and I would not expect the kernel to be remotely stable for a long time yet. Why do you think ReactOS, which is usually not using a very recent WINE base (at least not in snapshots), would be more stable than Linux + WINE?

Is the cost of a Windows XP Embedded license really a significant part of the total cost of a custom touchscreen computer install in a factory? I'm genuinely curious.

Thanks for the effort, indeed. It's a hope for a more sane free world we will live in!

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