So, if you’ve never heard of ReactOS, it’s an alternative to Windows, except it’s open source, and reverse engineered.
The end result is, if it works on Windows, it works on ReactOS natively.
Now, as you might imagine, there are some issues with this. The most glaring one being that they’re currently in the year 2003. That’s the level they’re at with software. It’s not even emulation. It’s running the software natively, and it’s written from scratch.
But my takeaway is that Linux running windows apps natively would improve people’s hesitation to running linux.
Now since ReactOS is FOSS, any improvements made upon it could then be forked over to Linux. And if someone made a ReactOS fork, that isn’t linux, that’s good too (as long as it stays open source). Any advancements made by this new theoretical fork of ReactOS could ALSO be forked into linux.
Right now, development is slow, because it’s a community driven effort without much of a community. If it had a large and engaged community, all legally reverse engeneering the ways of windows? That would allow basically EVERY OS to have FOSS unofficial native windows support.
So I guess my question is, for an OS that’s been in development since 1998, why doesn’t the linux community embrace ReactOS?
Wine already exists and can run pretty new Windows software. A fork also exists for MacOS and the other BSDs can also run Wine.
Running Windows apps on Linux natively seems impractical to me, the OSes are structured very differently and I’m fairly sure this would introduce many hard to fix CVEs.
ReactOS does actually submit patches to wine sometimes because they use parts of wine! But they have their own windows-like kernel so they only need wine for userland, not the whole thing
WINE does run wiindows apps natively on linux.
That’s not what natively means
You know what WINE stands for?
You know that running through a compatibility layer isn’t native whether you call it an emulator or not?
It runs natively. Compatibility layer or not.
The software run inside of wine makes windows system calls, which wine translates into *nix system calls. That’s not what native means. If that software was native it wouldn’t need wine.
That’s what libraries do. glibc converts application calls to Linux syscalls. libgl converts application calls to driver calls.
It depends on where you draw the line at “native”. Unless you’re writing assembly you’re using some sort of ‘compatibility layer’.