> 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.

maybe posts like this will move the needle. If i could withstand OS programming (or debugging, or...) I'd probably work on reactOS. I did self-host it, which i didn't expect to work, so at least i know the toolchain works!