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Review: ReactOS 0.4.16
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
I try out new versions of ReactOS every few years to see how the project is coming along. Up to this point, I have felt that the warning the ReactOS team shares in their FAQ document has been accurate: "First and foremost, no-one should actually be attempting to use ReactOS as their daily driver as it is an Alpha grade operating system under heavy development now. This means that it is unstable and possibly even quite capable of damaging your data." This is a pretty strong warning and, given the stability and capability issues I've had with previous releases, I tended to agree with the team.
ReactOS 0.4.16 though feels like a different beast and a more polished platform. It still has limitations (32-bit only, old applications in the software centre), but it has advanced a lot in recent years. ReactOS is visibly more stable, it has a unified ISO rather than separate install/demo editions, and the performance is quite good. While I couldn't run ReactOS on my laptop, it performed quite well in a virtual machine. In fact, it performed well enough someone asked if I would try installing it on their laptop when they saw me putting the "free Windows" through its paces.
Basically, ReactOS looks like 25 year old Windows and it runs 25 year old Windows software. These are tasks it does quite well and it has most of the same features, settings, and options as 25 year old Windows. It also has most of the same limitations as 25 year old Windows. This isn't an operating system you'd want to run on a new machine or use to run modern Windows applications. However, ReactOS does seem a good choice for running old games on older hardware or running old Windows applications in a virtual machine.