ReactOS is celebrating its 30th birthday.
Happy Birthday ReactOS! Today marks 30 years since the first commit to the ReactOS source tree. It’s been such a long journey that many of our contributors today, including myself, were not alive during this event. Yet our mission to deliver “your favorite Windows apps and drivers in an open-source environment you can trust” continues to bring people together. Let’s take a brief look at some of the high and low points throughout our history.
↫ Carl Bialorucki at the ReactOS website
OSNews has been following ReactOS since about 2002 or so (the oldest reference I could find, but note that our 1997-2001 content isn’t available online, so we may have mentioned it earlier), so you can definitely say we all grew up alongside ReactOS’ growth and development. All of the events the team mentions in their retrospective on 30 years of ReactOS were covered here on OSNews as well, which is wild to think about.
Personally, I don’t really know how to feel about the project. On the one hand, I absolutely adore that dedicated, skilled, and talented individuals dedicate their precious free time to something as ambitious as creating a Windows NT-compatible operating system, and there’s no denying they’ve achieved incredible feats of engineering few people in the world are capable of. ReactOS is a hobby operating system that survived the test of time where few others have – AtheOS, Syllable, SkyOS , and so many others mentioned in that oldest reference I linked to are long dead and gone – and that alone makes it a massively successful project.
On the other hand, its sheer ambition is also what holds the project down. If you say you’re going to offer a Windows NT-compatible operating system, you set expectations so insanely high you’ll never even come close to meeting them. Every time I’ve seen someone try ReactOS, either in writing or on YouTube, they always seem to come away disappointed – not because ReactOS isn’t impressive, but because it’s inevitably so far removed from its ambitious goals.
And that’s a real shame. If you take away that ambitious goal of being Windows NT-compatible, and just focus on what they’ve already achieved as it stands now, there’s a really impressive and fun alternative operating system here. I really hope the next 30 years will be kind to ReactOS.
I absolutely love ReactOS. The project fills a dream of “running legacy Windows software” (especially “released once” software for closed-source engineering hardware) , but in a minimal slimmed down open-source environment.
The problem is, every single time I try to shove it in as a solution… it fails me. Either application incompatibility (Not ReactOS’s fault), or hardware incompatibility/instability (Still not ReactOS’s fault.. hardware support is a difficult beast to conquer.) I’ve spent around 15 years professionally trying to use it for random legacy stuff… I haven’t been able to make it work in a viable way as a solution (even stop-gap) a single time..
I wish an angel investor with more money than they need would step in and fund some full-time developers for this.