Submitted by ReactOS 0.4.2 has been released, as part of the project’s new, faster release cycle.
Beyond the usual updates to external dependencies such as Wine and UniATA, much work has gone into refining the experience of using ReactOS, especially with respect to the graphical shell and the file explorer. Perhaps the most user visible change however is the ability now to read from and write to several Unix filesystems, namely ext family, ReiserFS, and UFS. Native built-in support for these filesystems should make for considerably easier interoperability than the current out-of-box experience provided by Windows, and there is more to come in the future.
Great news on the ext filesystem support. I seem to recall you could get commercial ext support on NT. I wonder if this could spur Microsoft to change its attitude on filesystems.
Read/write support, maybe, but they’ll never let you install Windows into another FS other than one they control. Unless they open source NTFS, which is highly unlikely.
If you doubt that, think of the direction they are moving with secure boot. Installing into other file systems won’t let them lock things down like they obviously want to do.
Why would it? They’ve gone for 30 years without Unix filesystem support for Windows so far.
…but maybe that is changing now that they added the Windows Subsystem for Linux: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/06/15/wsl-file-system-supp…
Why all this excitement about ext2 (2!!!) support? MOSIX support would be so much more appealing.