While I think better Linux integration and improving WINE is probably better time spend... I do think there's some opportunity for ReactOS, but I feel it would have to at LEAST get to pretty complete Windows 7 compatibility (without bug fixes since)... that seems to be the last Windows version people remember relatively fondly by most and a point before they really split-brained a lot of the configuration and settings.

With the contempt of a lot of the Win10/11 features, there's some chance it could see adoption, if that's an actual goal. But the effort is huge, and would need to be sufficient for wide desktop installs much sooner than later.

I think a couple of the Linux + WINE UI options where the underlying OS is linux, and Wine is the UI/Desktop layer on top (not too disimilar from DOS/Win9x) might also gain some traction... not to mention distros that smooth the use of WINE out for new users.

Worth mentioning a lot of WINE is reused in ReactOS, so that effort is still useful and not fully duplicated.

> I do think there's some opportunity for ReactOS, but I feel it would have to at LEAST get to pretty complete Windows 7 compatibility

That's not going to happen in any way that matters. If ReactOS ever reaches Win7 compatibility, that would be at a time when Win7 is long forgotten.

The project has had a target of Windows 2000 compatibility, later changed to XP (which is a relatively minor upgrade kernel wise). Now as of 2026, ReactOS has limited USB 2.0 support and wholly lacks critical XP-level support like Wifi, NTFS or multicore CPUs. Development on the project has never been fast but somewhere around 2018 it dropped even more, just looking at the commit history there's now half the activity of a decade ago. So at current rates, it's another 5+ years away from beta level support of NT 5.0.

ReactOS actually reaching decent Win2K/XP compatibility is a long shot but still possible. Upgrading to Win7 compatibility before Win7 itself is three plus decades old, no.