We are hackers. We do things not because they're good for business, and not because we want to be pragmatists with every decision. We don't create startups because we're Harvard MBAs (apologies to Harvard business majors), we create startups because we change the world (or try our best to, anyhow).
It's disheartening and a little saddening that after the amount of delight I had that one of my favorite open-source projects reached #1 on the homepage, discussion about how people have lost motivation for a system fully compatible with Win32 APIs ensues.
Yes, it's slow. Yes, it's laggy. Yes, it crashed on me when I tried to install any applications depending on libgtk2.0. Yes, now my VirtualBox image is corrupted and won't boot anymore. But as I started testing it seriously for the first time ever 6 hours ago, it was undoubtedly a magical experience. I was able to install Audacity, FreeBasic IDE, Notepad++, the Windows version of Firefox, 7-zip, and Bloodshed's Dev-C++. I tried to install X-Chat 2, but it would not run, and segfaulted every time I tried to. Pidgin crashed the entire system and rendered it unusable.
That unsupported GTK apps brought down the system is irrelevant, however. Installing this many Win32 applications without any hitches on an OS kernel and graphic environment developed from scratch is an incredible feat for an open-source project with very limited time and funding.
Those of you that say that this is no way forward and that more resources should be given to Wine are completely misunderstanding the purpose of this project. The purpose is to develop a completely integrated Win32 compatible system with a similar look and feel so that it can function as a drop-in replacement for Windows NT. This is far easier to get going and give to a prior Windows userbase than installing Linux, and then Wine, and trying to run NT executables with Wine is. It also benefits greatly from being a fully integrated system, which Wine is not -- applications share none of the integrated L&F and the syscalls are translated JIT, so you still feel like you're running an application on a system it wasn't designed to run on.
Some may say running a hypervisor like VirtualBox or VMWare in a seamless environment is the solution, but even that is not. First of all, you have slightly more performance overhead compared to Wine, and you still have to pay for Windows, thus rendering the entire point of a project such as Wine or ReactOS obsolete.
So yes, it's a laggy and crashy piece of work in progress, but it's come a hell of a long way since 2006 when ars reviewed it.
Words cannot express how much of an impact this OS would have had if the amount of time and resources dedicated to Linux, which is yet another UNIX clone in an age where 4-year CS majors do UNIX clones as assignments[1], were dedicated to ReactOS. Where might Microsoft be now if that had happened?
In essence: this is not a project to be ignored, spat on, or buried far too soon. This is a growing project with growing potential, so let's be hackers for just a moment now and help build the open future. Building an open Web, open operating systems, open energy, and when possible, an open government -- is in reach.
Let's build the future and help this little project out.
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[1] I still love Linux, don't worry. :)