We are pleased to announce the release of ReactOS 0.4.16! After a year and a half of development, we’re excited to showcase the improvements we’ve made between a new graphical installer; a unified bootcd and livecd image; video, audio, networking, and storage stack improvements; a new installation type; and third-party code syncs.
↫ The ReactOS Team on the ReactOS website
The amount of changes and improvements is quite staggering, honestly. They’ll always be chasing a moving target, sure, but if they manage to keep this rate up ReactOS might actually grow into something usable in its own right, full compatibility with Windows or not. Excellent progress.
Based on some YouTube videos, it appears to be getting good and stable enough for XP era gaming. Too bad Steam requires vista+ APIs to work now, otherwise you could try out your whole library.
I am not suggesting that Steam would work on ReactOS today, but you can build ReactOS to use Vista+ APIs now.
From the article…”If you’d like to experiment with Windows Vista and newer application support, build ReactOS using the -DDLL_EXPORT_VERSION flag.”
Here’s an idea. Microsoft offers legal protection for the stuff Copilot creates.
So, have Copilot implement everything missing in ReactOS. It will basically just recall the Windows code it knows, and it’s fair game. 😀
The most important line in the release docs for me is “Towards the end of the 0.4.15 development cycle, we abandoned this strict adherence to Windows Server 2003 compatibility”. This is the biggest obstacle keeping ReactOS from being more useful. You cannot even run a modern browser on Windows XP.
A 64 bit version of ReactOS that reported as Windows 10 or even Windows 7 would start to be useful. The goal could then be to pick specific apps that people want to run (like a web browser and perhaps an office suite) and ensure that the APIs required for that are in place. I suggest Windows 10 because many applications dropped Windows 7 support over UTF8 and Task APIs.
ReactOS lacks a WOW64 implementation but it looks like they at least have a solution for running 16 bit apps on 64 bit Windows now. WOW64 is not as important if you can run modern 64 bit Windows apps. It is a bigger deal if you limit yourself to the Windows 2003 API footprint as there were few 64 bit apps in that era. WindowsXP 64 bit relies heavily on WOW64 to be useful. But if you were reporting as Windows 10, 32 bit compatibility is not nearly as important.
That is not correct, the 144-r5 of supremium is from 2026-07-14 and runs very well on XP. So saying there is no modern browser for XP is not correct at all. it is rather close to regular chromium.
The only part of my comment you addressed was “You cannot even run a modern browser on Windows XP”. And you certainly cannot run a recent version of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Opera, Zen, Orion, or whatever else you are probably wanting to use. But thank you for the correction around Supermium. The supermium.net domain (still pointed to by the GitHub) is defunct and I did not realize that it was still being released.
My experience with using Supermium a few months ago (recovering data from my XP 64 desktop, powered off for 11 years) was far from enjoyable.
Opening just a few tabs to pretty dull websites lead to the whole thing crashing.
I’m glad I was at least able to run a web browser at all, but it’s nothing more than a hack.
I’ve said it before and will say it again….. ReactOS is a failure and they are wasting their time.
The only way ReactOS can be successful is if it has 100% support for Windows11 hardware drivers.
I believe you cannot buy a USB device and have any confidence the provided Windows drivers will work with ReactOS.
Let’s not get started on PCIe devices (especially graphics).
People who want to run Windows software are better served by Linux and Wine.
As ReactOS will never have reliable support for Windows drivers it is a waste of time.
You are not alone with this opinion:
1) either run your Application native on Linux/BSD
2) or a Windows VM Guest (hosted on Linux/BSD)
3) or use Wine/Proton (for games)
I do not see one valid use case for ReactOS, sorry.
It’s very simple. Use it in an virtual machine. There is a perfectly valid case for letting another OS handle base hardware drivers and running ReactOS on top of that. IMHO.
I see it useful as something like docker but for Windows apps. One example would be trading robots like Metatrader that are not available for Linux.
Hey, I say desktop Linux is an inherently bad design for a desktop OS all the time too. The problem with your argument is that it assumes there have been major driver changes with each version of Windows, when in reality there have been minimal changes since Vista.
Sorry dark2 but your post doesn’t seem to make any sense.
“There have been minimal driver changes since Vista”…… And my point still stands. You can’t buy USB or PCIe devices and expect the hardware drivers to work with ReactOS. You can download the Vista drivers if you want, we still have the major issue that ReactOS doesn’t work with (Vista) 3rd party hardware drivers.
You should admit that is a major failing of the operating system that claims it will supposedly replace Windows.
https://reactos.org/blogs/investigating-wddm/
A write up including how newer GPU drivers aren’t difficult once you get the Vista stuff down. You’re acting like every release is a going to be like rewriting the OS side from scratch, but Microsoft put a lot of resources into getting the driver model right with Vista, and minimal changes since then.
I am never sure how you guys get to such conclusions. It’s a hobby. They’re having fun.
This. I find it disappointing to see people here to have an opinion on how others donate their time to a project or cause. I’ve followed ReactOS with great interest as well over the years. I wish them the best and hope their efforts continue to seemingly befuddle others.
ReactOS’s mere existence seems to trigger certain Linux fanboys. My theory is they are in denial about ther own Linux desktop experience being bad, and take it out on ReactOS whenever it comes up.
dark2,
Many of us daily drive linux not because we’re “fanboys” but simply because it’s the OS best suited for our needs. I’ll be the first to admit linux has problems. You can prefer macos,, windows, bsd, haiku, whatever, it’s fine. I disagree with the OP as well, a working ReactOS would be quite nice. But trolling linux every time it comes up is just excessive. Give it a rest and accept that for some people the choice of linux is often a pragmatic choice, not driven by fanboyism.
All I do is surf the web and Linux Mint does the job very well.
ReactOS mission statement claims they want to “run Windows drivers”, yet I can’t see a list of supported 3rd party Windows drivers.
Since it appears they are failing to meet their own mission statement, they are wasting their time.
I guess it’s their choice what they do with their time, but it seems the project will never succeed.
I know I shouldn’t feed the trolls, but hey, I’d really just like to say that as someone who has used Linux on my PCs almost exclusively for the past 30 years, every other desktop experience is absolutely broken. So I’d say your comments say more about your own programming than “Linux fanboys”.
@tom9876543
I feel a bit odd defending ReactOS as I have been critical of it in the past but I think ” ReactOS will never have reliable support for Windows drivers it is a waste of time” is a bit dramatic even if your opinion is that “ReactOS is a failure and they are wasting their time”.
It seems especially ill-timed to say this in reaction to the first ever release to allow KMDF drivers. Linux does not support any WDF drivers, so the fact that ReactOS supports a few already puts it way ahead in this regard. In my view, this also disproves your statement, or at least the authority with which you delivered it.
The promise of ReactOS is different than that of WINE. First, ReactOS aims to recreate the Windows experience if that is what you prefer. But it also promises full compatibility with hardware and software that expects to interact with the Windows kernel. If you have an old piece of hardware for which only Windows drivers exist, ReactOS is meant to work with those drivers.
Now, ReactOS is far from complete as their development velocity is quite slow. As a side-effect of that, they target a version of Windows so old as to be almost useless to most of us even it if was finished (which it certainly is not). However, it already works for some people and it still has a development team that believes in its vision. Just because they have not gotten there yet does not mean that they have failed. And the idea that they are wasting their time is something for them to decide for themselves.
“ReactOS is a failure”, “The only way ReactOS can be succesful” – that’s a lot of personal opinions stated as facts Tom.
ReactOS should spin up some servers. E.g get Samba 4 running on it as a Domain Controller, get Remote Desktop Host working on it so it can be used as a Jump Box, get NTP and FTP working on it etc. There’s a lot of uses for running ReactOS as a virtualised OS to be a drop-in replacement for Windows Server. It’s probably a bit late though since Microsoft has been getting all the large corporates to move those services to cloud.
My youtube video “ReactOS 0.4.16 tutorial how to install and use” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZTbquchweY