[giancarlostoro]

I feel like ReactOS should try to see if they can get with Steam / Valve to work something out where they both work on Proton together, and Valve lets them use their efforts for ReactOS, and gives them well needed funding. My understanding is they are reaching for similarish goals. One benefit of ReactOS is it tries to support Windows drivers, I'm not sure if Wine does this or not? But for something like SteamOS if it doesn't have driver support, it would make way too much sense to support it via Proton / ReactOS.

[actionfromafar]

I think they should focus on embedded devices, and a story as a replacement for appliances using either Windows or Windows CE.

Even in todays rather unstable state, it would work fine if it was easy to bundle it such:

  - an application EXE

  - boot with a readonly root file system

  - read-write partition for application/user settings

  - builtin watchdog to reboot when/if the system crashes

There's a shit-ton of stuff running Windows of some sort behind the scenes.

I'm sure there's also some kind of cloud application I can't quite put my finger on which would be useful, but maybe more niche. I have been known to test Win32 applications I have written against ReactOS. If it works there, it will run on every Windows version still running under the sun.

Maybe as part of a CI pipeline generating Win32 EXEs?

[giancarlostoro]

The only "downside" to the CI pipeline for generating Win32 EXEs is you can already do this from Linux, I don't recall if C does, but I almost want to say gcc will do it from Linux, I definitely know on Linux with FreePascal/Lazarus I've generated an EXE file. So you don't truly need ReactOS in this regard, but maybe the CI pipeline for testing and confirming that it works might be worthwhile to ReactOS to create some sort of profitable project. I'm thinking of things like Puppet or other web automation testing tools, but for GUIs on Windows using ReactOS as the host, with automated UI tests that output screenshots.

I would love to see ReactOS get more serious funding, and get farther ahead than where it is today.

[xet7]

Lazarus/FreePascal 32bit does work on ReactOS. Also some older versions of Tcl/Tk / Tclkit works. ReactOS has GUI package manager with some programming languages etc.

[actionfromafar]

I didn't actually mean generating the EXE from ReactOS, that's easy in Linux. (I develop for Windows in Linux and MacOS.) But I meant regression testing on ReactOS.

[ptx]

What about MSI installers? Any tips?

[mike_hearn]

You can use Conveyor to generate MSIX packages from Linux or macOS if you want to ship Windows apps from a Linux machine. (https://hydraulic.software/)

[actionfromafar]

The ones I know of are WiX[0] and NSIS[1].

0: https://wixtoolset.org/

1: https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Main_Page

[giancarlostoro]

Ah fair! I misunderstood.

[JPLeRouzic]

I think that one of the "very" early developers is now mainly interested with embedded devices.

https://github.laoxienet.cn/reactos/reactos/blob/34593d933be...

[_joel]

Re: cloud thing, https://www.balena.io/ ?

[actionfromafar]

For a greenfield project, sure, why not. I was thinking about existing stuff, like the gas station pumps with dodgy touch screens I worked on once upon a time. A bunch of stuff already written and moving to Balena would not exactly have been cheap.

But if there was a ReactOS BSP or SDK of sorts, or even a HOWTO for embedded ReactOS, it could make sense to take the plunge.

[_joel]

DirectX (not sure which version) has been show to run, the patches are in master now (that was 7 months ago). No idea about Vulkan etc.

edit: I've just seen Space Cadet Pinball running, what more do you want? :)

[giancarlostoro]

Space Cadet is definitely one I miss. I have seen devs in the past suggest making ReactOS into an omniuse OS that could someday also include Linux packages, so you could in theory also "apt-get install" whatever you wanted to install.

[anthk]

You a have a libre implementation of Space Cadet Pinball to compile it against SDL2.

[_joel]

That would be cool, they could leverage Flatpak I'd imagine, if didn't want to manage a distro as well as ReactOS. Just a very minimal shim to provide linuxy stuff.

[Dwedit]

Space Cadet Pinball uses GDI. Mostly Bitblt.

[xet7]

At Steam, there is usually mention about ReactOS, if game works on ReactOS.