Sure, right now ReactOS is no threat to Redmond. At this point you may be asking: 'Why would Microsoft be worried about an OS that still needs a lot more work?' Newer versions of MS Office and Visual Basic have troubles, though. Firefox (with Flash), MSN Messenger,, StarCraft, Diablo 2, Quake III arena and many more apps run acceptably well, albeit with the occasional crash. So, is it compatible? Chasing Microsoft's vast APIs is no easy job, especially with so many undocumented calls to fathom out, but ReactOS does an impressive job. Chunky widgets abound, and the Start menu, taskbar, window buttons and so forth are where you'd expect to see them. Right now, it looks and feels much like Windows 2000.
ReactOS is available as a Live CD or as an installable OS. Today, ReactOS is based around a home-grown kernel, but the project makes heavy use of the WINE libraries that are popular for running Windows applications on Linux. In 1998, ReactOS rose out of the ashes of FreeWin95.Įarly progress was slow, but in 2004 version 0.2.0 arrived with a usable desktop and respectable, albeit very limited, Windows compatibility. As time went on, however, there was little serious code to show and it was clear that the NT code base was the future for Microsoft.
