Case in point, ReactOS is far behind what Windows 11 is capable of, and this not taking into account the ARM and CoPilot+ PC hardware changes in modern motherboards.
It is nonetheless relevant, especially in the presence of escape mechanisms to oppressive governments, and digital sovereignty.
Not just for that. There's an awful, awful lot of ancient embedded hardware running machinery sometimes worth dozens of millions of dollars, and it's running even more ancient software. Siemens, for example, recently searched for people capable of (and willing to) working with Windows 3.11 [1], presumably to deal with the HMI displays for locomotive/train drivers.
When dealing with hardware or software that has lifecycles measured in half-centuries, bridges to allow modern tooling to work with it are really, really important.
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Deutsche-Bahn-sucht-Admin-fuer-Win...
lol I guess, it doesn’t annoy you with endless ads and pop ups, doesn’t try to steal your data and passwords, doesn’t force you to buy an entire new computer just to run it. Far behind indeed.
Difficulty: QoL features added to undo the effects of bad design changes in Win11 don’t count, such as “compact view” in Windows 11 File Explorer.
Here is another one, enforced application sandboxing and signing, comming up in a future update this year, year another useful one for security.
Yet another one, ability to actually use Windows containers without having the same kernel version between host and guest, useful for Windows developers.
Three for the price of one, there you go.
Only downside is that defining custom sequences is… less than intuitive.
More importantly, as I've mentioned, ReactOS is not stable nor reliable enough to even use as an offline O/S sans the Win 11 dross.
If these stability/compatibility issues were fixed then it'd develop a reputation for being reliable which would lead to further development work.
Unfortunately for everyone except Microsoft this is not the case.