I wonder if this is anybody's ace in the hole yet? I've done plenty of legacy systems support to know there's value in being able to say "this is a currently supported and active project that supports some tech otherwise unavailable on a commercially supported OS." i.e. the people still supporting Windows XP for things.

Is there any known/public system that use ReactOS? Is there a goal for this OS? a use-case? Any dev-story I can read?

I'm not criticizing their work or passion, au contraire, it's a spectacular effort the developers are doing, developing an OS with the same API than Windows 2000 from scratch. For me they are giants.

In a former job, I was a sysadmin at a company that does process engineering for industrial plants, and sometimes the automation/SCADA people would turn to me for help. It was very exciting to me, because a) I got to leave the back office for a short while and actually engage with a customer and b) I got to see firsthand and learn (a little, at least) about industrial plants, which was fascinating.

I find history fascinating, and I have soft spot for retro/vintage technology, so I got to see and touch some interesting stuff. One customer was doing an upgrade in 2015(!!!) from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows XP (!!!). They could not go further, because they were dependent on some piece of hardware whose vendor had gone out of business, leaving behind device drivers that would not work on any Windows after XP.

For this kind of customer, I think, the prospect of an operating system where those device drivers would continue to work while also supporting more recent hardware would be very attractive.

Industrial installations apparently have lifetimes that are far longer than what even "enterprise" operating systems offer, and replacing that Windows NT 4.0 box with a Windows 7 box (let's not even think of anything more recent) is a huge challenge just from the technical perspective. But it gets a lot more hairy when things like certification and compliance to legal requirements come into play, where you cannot just upgrade a box from Windows XP to Windows 10, because then you lose your certification, and re-certifying the installation is a costly and (I assume) tedious procedure.

TL;DR: I believe there could be pretty lucrative market for ReactOS in industrial applications. It would require a fair amount of up-front capital to get going, but if you can provide support for large-scale industrial customer to keep their systems running for twenty or forty years, there has got to be a lot of money in it.

How does ReactOS attempt avoiding being affectable by malware? Does it "fully" inherit the "attack surface" of the system it tries to be compatible to? Or are there improvements? Is one supposed to run anti-malware software over it (or keep it networkless)?

From the About page:

> ReactOS looks-like Windows

But even Windows does not look like Windows anymore.

Its great to see ReactOS still going.

I wonder how much of the newer Wine gaming stuff could be used for ReactOS

I love watching Druaga1 install these on ancient hardware.

How is this different from ReactJS? </s>