ReactOS is a free, open source new operating system designed to be based on Windows much as Linux is based on Unix. ReactOS looks like Windows and can run Windows software and drivers, but the project is ongoing and may not be perfectly compatible. The best way to do this is to install ReactOS on a virtual machine and check for compatibility.
ReactOS uses the X.Y.Z version naming scheme: X indicates whether the project meets its expectations, Y indicates major releases (key features and enhancements), and Z indicates minor releases (Bug fixes and general development). The first documented release was 0.0.7, released in July 1998.
As an open source project, ReactOS does not have a fixed roadmap because of the variable number of community developers. However, they will try to release a version in two to six months. 0.4.0, 0.5.0, and 1.0.0 are the milestone releases for the current Settings. The 0.4 series release is the final Alpha release. Starting with the 0.5 series release, the project will go into Beta testing, with 1.0 and above indicating that the project is ready for daily use.
ReactOS 0.4.6 has been released recently. This release is an important step towards true hardware support. Several dual-boot issues have been resolved, partition management security has been improved, and conflicts in partition list structures can be avoided. The ReactOS Loader can now load custom kernels and HAL.
In 0.4.6, the printing subsystem is still immature, but Colin Finck has implemented a number of new apis and fixed some bugs exposed in automated testing.
On the driver side, Pierre Schweitzer added an NFS driver and started implementing RDBSS and RXCE, with SMB support in the future. Sylvain Petreolle introduced the digital TV tuner driver for it. Several bugs in UDFS, CDFS, SCSI, and HDAUDBUS have also been fixed.
On the compatibility side, 0.4.6 introduces a SHIM engine as part of the new application compatibility framework. In this release, the engine is turned off by default and can be enabled through the ReactOS registry. The release also includes a dedicated NTDLL library that provides some of the NTDLL Vista+ functions that newer software needs.
ReactOS 0.4.6 also improved the user experience and became more stable by fixing several memory management, NtoskrNL, and file system bugs.
For more information, check out the change log, which has a less technical community version. Click here to download the ReactOS ISO image.
Thanks to Guo Lei for correcting this article.
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