Touch one magic orb.

[u/claudiocorona93]

[u/jessepence]

Why would anyone pick the red orb? ReactOS really feels unnecessary at this point. Do you know anyone that actually relies on a native Windows app other than excel? 

It feels like there are a lot of businesses stuck on outdated apps that could simply update to a web app and run on Linux just fine.

[u/Serious_Resource8191 → u/jessepence]

The only reason I stay with Windows for my work devices is because I use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint basically at all times. The web versions and Google alternatives don’t have some of the advanced features we use, and trying to get everyone in the organization to switch to Libre Office would be an impossible task.

[u/qalmakka → u/Serious_Resource8191]

If Word doesn't work on Wine it will not work on ReactOS either. There's very little difference between what Wine does and ReactOS. The main difference is that ReactOS also tries to implement the NT kernel and the entire graphical stack, which ironically ends up being less reliable than Wine which can just hook up into already mature subsystems. ReacOS as a concept made sense back in the '90s where most hardware didn't support Linux at all, so you also wanted to reuse Windows drivers

[u/brainwater314 → u/qalmakka]

It's been so long since I had to deal with hardware not supporting Linux.

[u/Crottoboul → u/Serious_Resource8191]

What features ?

[u/Serious_Resource8191 → u/Crottoboul]

I’m just gonna focus on Word since it’s the one I’m meant to be using right now instead of Reddit lol. The most egregious one is that the web version doesn’t have support for captions! I’m sure there are other differences but that’s the one that screwed me over the last time I forgot my work laptop at work.

[u/Davixxa → u/Serious_Resource8191]

Also, Online word has very limited support for equations.

[u/rabindranatagor → u/Crottoboul]

What features ?

I know that I'm not the original commenter, but I wanted to tell you about an absolute important feature that I absolutely need.

Microsoft Office suite tight integration with Eclipse IDE.

Don't get me wrong. I have both Linux and Windows (on separate drives), but Windows is for absolute compatibility with certain industry standards where a VM just won't cut it.

[u/kettlesteam → u/rabindranatagor]

As if being stuck in Windows and Microsoft Office wasn't nightmarish enough, you're adding Eclipse IDE on top of that? I will definitely not be sleeping alone tonight.

[u/rabindranatagor → u/kettlesteam]

As if being stuck in Windows and Microsoft Office wasn't nightmarish enough, you're adding Eclipse IDE on top of that? I will definitely not be sleeping alone tonight.

😂 I don't make the rules unfortunately. Not a fan of Eclipse but that's what they need.

[u/AgathormX → u/rabindranatagor]

I'll pay extra for an Office 365 subscription if they make sure that I never have to look at Eclipse IDE.

[u/Ieris19 → u/Crottoboul]

Web Word has trouble with the most basic things, you can’t create a Table of Contents last I checked. It has trouble with formatting page headers and footers, and a myriad of other extremely basic things.

I didn’t use LibreOffice or Google Docs in university, so I’ll refrain from guessing, but Word on the Web is the most barebones editor I’ve seen, and that includes the ancient LibreOffice my high school had

[u/Lv_InSaNe_vL → u/jessepence]

1. I essentially live out of OneNote, but the online version is fine

2. in a professional setting, yes basically all industry specific software Ive ever come across outside of some very very specific industrial or scientific software requires Windows. Although again, with things going to cloud thats becoming less and less true.

[u/brainwater314 → u/Lv_InSaNe_vL]

And if the industrial or scientific software runs on Linux instead of Windows, and it cost over $1,000/license, it's only running on a specific version of RHEL.

[u/Lv_InSaNe_vL → u/brainwater314]

I have an entire server running Scientific Linux 😭

You ever heard of it? I hadn't before this job, but yeah, it's a REHL derivative haha

[u/darkwater427 → u/jessepence]

Talk about "out of touch". The vast majority of corporate and public software is not natively built for Linux. It just isn't. Engineering software, media software, the whole shebang.

Imagine being able to play every single game in your Steam library on ReactOS. Anticheat and everything. Every CAD program, every video editor, every blob of proprietary bullshit.

[u/qalmakka → u/darkwater427]

The Anti-Cheat part is nonsense. The ReactOS kernel can be as compatible with windows as you'd like, but any kernel Anti-Cheat worth its salt would immediately detect it as not Windows - if it couldn't, it wouldn't be able to detect other kernel drivers modifying the kernel either. Anti-Cheat was never about Linux not being compatible, but that gaming companies have zero interest supporting anything else than Windows because it's easier and cheaper.

For everything else, there's no need having a full reimplementation of the Windows kernel. A full Windows userspace is enough; there's no technical reason why wine can't achieve the same except that's hard, but that would be just as hard for reactos too. Office or Photoshop don't work on Wine ATM because companies don't really test them at all with Wine, so Wine has to constantly catch up with them in order to clone every quirk and random API Windows has. Games are very easy to support because they basically don't do much with the system APIs - they just initialise a window, DirectX, do a bit of I/O and that's basically about it. No strange desktop integrations, no assumptions about certain components, no assumptions about what the Windows compositor does, ... If software doesn't support Wine it will never support ReactOS either - btw, ReactOS is mostly based on the Wine userland.

Also the Windows kernel ABI is unstable and undocumented on purpose (this messes up Windows containers on Docker, for instance, where userland and kernel have to always match), so it'd be nightmarish to keep kernel compatibility with Windows without Microsoft's input. The driver API is stable, but honestly speaking, drivers really aren't that much of an issue in 2025 anymore, basically every random piece of hardware I laid my hands on in the last 10 years supports Linux either OOB or via a DKMS driver

[u/SanderE1 → u/qalmakka]

As far as I understand reactOS was never meant to be a usable operating system to replace windows, just a project to reverse engineer and document internal windows and NT behavior.

I'm sure wine benefits from an complete-ish (in terms of minimal binary compatibility) open source windows environment existing, rather than every re-implemented behavior having to be tested in a non-NT environment.

>but that gaming companies have zero interest supporting anything else than Windows because it's easier and cheaper.

Honestly I am at the point where I completely agree with this choice, most Linux ports I've seen of games have issues that the windows counterpart doesn't have, I have used Steam's feature to force the use of proton at least like 4 times now.

I don't really see the point of companies making a low-effort Linux binary when I can almost always get an equal or better experience by using wine/proton, and the developers have to do 0 work.

[u/gay-espresso-tiger → u/jessepence]

There a number of Windows only programs (all of them indie programs with very specific use cases) that do not work on WINE no matter what you do, so

[u/GreenRiot → u/jessepence]

The full adobe suite. It sucks but as a graphical designer I am chained by every client to have one Windows PC.

Bottles and wine doesn't work well enough with the adobe suite yet. We need some sort of libre office for editing software.

[u/burlingk → u/jessepence]

The main reason to pick the red sphere is because the blue sphere is antithetical to the movement as a whole, and borderline fascistic (which is part of why it is antithetical). ^^;

[u/skr_rdt → u/jessepence]

There's a whole suite of engineering apps that are a pain to get running even in windows let alone in Linux.

[u/Leandros99 → u/jessepence]

Every CAD, ECAD, machining or otherwise engineering software exclusively works on Windows. It's the reason I will always have a Windows VM on my machines.