ReactOS (React Operating System) is an open source operating system with support for Microsoft Windows NT 5.x onwards applications and drivers, that is, compatible with Windows XP and later versions of the Microsoft system. It was created using reverse engineering of the Microsoft product to find out how it worked and to create an open source clone, although it was originally created to seek compatibility with Windows 95, although little by little it has evolved.
The ReactOS project is written in C primarily, and has been ported for architectures x86, AMD64 and ARM so that the Windows API clone can work on more machines. And as a curiosity, to say that ReactOS has a lot to do with Wine, since it takes parts of this project to work well. And despite the statements of two developers who claimed that they used original Microsoft files and disassembled Windows assembly code, the project has continued forward in the face of such a fallacy.
But make no mistake ReactOS is not a Linux distributionThis project does not have a Linux kernel, but the operating system kernel is totally original and has been created from scratch for this project. Now, developer Ziliang Guo has announced that it is ready to download ReactOS 0.4.0, another step forward for this system and that brings numerous improvements over previous versions.
Some of the improvements are the support for NTFS filesystem, although it can also read and write to ETX2 partitions. Support for new themes for the explorer and the system shell, support for SATA, support for improved sound, support for improved USB and Wireless, as well as support for VirtualBox and VirtualPC software. Support for Visual C ++ with CMake, GCC, WinDBG, support for 16-bit DOS applications, etc. has also been added.
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