@hongminhee TIL about ReactOS, funny to read the wiki that ReactOS's name is from an IRC chat's dissatisfied "react"ion to Microsoft's monopoly on the PC market.

That was 1998. People were tired of Windows even before the year 2000.

Also interesting to see a couple OS's that attempted to combine Linux and Windows into a single super OS.

Longene (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Longene)
coLinux (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Linux)

Both projects were abandoned 10+ years ago.

I tried installing ReactOS in a VM. Even though I gave it plenty of resources, it doesn't seem as fast as I expected.

@hongminhee wow that’s wild. I have never even heard of this, and I know quite a lot of obscure operating systems!

I guess I’d ask why you’d rather run that than a VM? It’s pretty easy to virtualize it, and most of the South Korean software tends to rely on obscure deprecated APIs and implementation details, so I’m not sure how well this would work.

@hongminhee I tried ReactOS last year, it is still in alpha stage and it shows: Its horribly unstable and crashes if looked to sharply at. Doing regular backups (like, before ANY change in configuration or installation of new software) is a good advise because it easily self destructs. As of around early-mid last year printing was not implemented yet.

On the flipside it is an interesting project to play around with, but it is absolutely not, in no way useable in a "daily driver" sense (yet).

@hongminhee I couldn't daily it on my hardware, but it is definitely usable, especially in a VM context.

I'd put it below HaikuOS in terms of daily-driver readiness on hardware, but that is rapidly changing these days. It is advancing really quickly of late.