ReactOS is a clone of Windows. No, not a version of Linux pretending to be Windows. It’s a completely new OS, complete with its own kernel. Not only is it planned that Windows software will run on ReactOS but Windows drivers should also work. No more non-functional wifi cards!
Of course, ReactOS has an uphill struggle. In fact, the hill is almost 90 degrees. Windows is a moving target that’s constantly improving. It’s developed by thousands of paid programmers working 24 hours a day. ReactOS somehow has to more than match that effort. However, it is allied to the Wine project and has been sponsored by the Google Summer of Code project.
I downloaded version 0.3.0 RC1 today to try it out. It’s still alpha software and it shows. I couldn’t get any software to install, seemingly because the latest Windows Installer isn’t supported. I even managed to get a blue screen of death (the full Windows experience!). But flakiness like this is to be expected at this early stage.
The milestone of ReactOS’s development will come when it can run Microsoft Office. Let’s be honest–this is all that many Windows users want (alongside web browsing and email, which can be provided by the likes of Firefox and Thunderbird; these are open source so can be tweaked to ensure they don’t present any problems for ReactOS).
As far as many users are concerned, Windows and Office go together like a horse and carriage. The former powers the latter. Up until now it’s been impossible to change the horse. But maybe that will change soon.
For more information, and downloads, visit http://www.reactos.org.
Jan 10, 12:38 pm
We don’t need MS Office, we have OpenOffice. It’s an OS OS (OpenSource Operating System, does that make sense to you?), we need OS applications to go along with it! Well, if you already have MS Office license and paid quite a bit to have it, you probably want to use it so, I guess it’s ok to make an effort to support it. But that should not be primary objective.