An interesting and mammoth project. This should in theory, keep a lot of old software alive in the future. Is that its purpose?
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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I don't think anyone knows it's purpose. It been in prealpha for a long time.
However its pretty cool to me that we can reverse engineer windows
A lot of people seem to hope for this, which is probably why the project development picked its pace back up.
while still in its infancy
Eheheheh.....heh....
...eh.
All "casual mockery" aside... do we really need a Linux distro that is 1/1 par with Windows? Is there anything that would benefit from this?
It isn't a Linux distro. Its built from the ground up
Oh. My point still stands however -- I (honestly) see zero purpose/reason for this project to keep on going.
You've never run into obscure but vital software being run on old and unsupported versions of windows that also can't be moved to newer hardware. It's a niche use case, but when you consider that includes some medical equipment, that niche is way more important than it seems. There's still plenty of things running custom software that can't be changed without a fully rebuilt program that could cost enough to make it impossible for smaller organizations to feasibly do so.
Besides, it isn't like this project takes anything away from any others. The devs wouldn't just magically shift to something less niche. If they were interested in something else, they'd already be doing it. Whatever they might move to would also be a niche interest.
Analogue: Why have more than one text editor when vi already exists? There's no reason for any of the others to keep on going.
Yes, there are other ways of getting Windows software to run under other operating systems; WINE being the main one, but also virtualisation, building from source, or - loosely - substituting for similar. There's only one that aims to be an OS in its own right.
You might call ReactOS the Emacs of Windows emulation. Everything else is just a text editor.