r/reactos • u/Straight-Ticket-6850 • Sep 02 '26

React OS for Daily Tasks

Hello,i have been thinking for a wile top switch too React OS but i fear that it night not be fitting for my Daily Tasks like Using Gimp,Playing Games from RPG maker,Stream,browse the web,using Applications that are supported by Windows 10/11 too,soo i wanted too ask you guys for an opinion,Thank you for your time

15 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

8

u/jvy7122 Sep 02 '26

You shouldn't use ReactOS as a daily driver. It's in Alpha stage, and if you want to try it, you can use a virtual machine or a secondary PC that's XP-compatible.

I still wouldn't recommend replacing your Windows installation to ReactOS at the moment.

1

u/Straight-Ticket-6850 Sep 02 '26

Thanks you

2

u/dangling_chads Sep 02 '26

Also important: ReactOS has historically targeted Server 2003 for it's OS at the applicaton layer.

Think about the age of software you'll be running on that machine ... some newer things could be run, but you probably wouldn't use anything close to modern (eg browser) on it.

But the WinAMP vibes are strong.

2

u/FlatAssembler Sep 03 '26

but you probably wouldn't use anything close to modern (eg browser) on it.

Firefox 52 seems to work fine on the last two versions of ReactOS, and today most of the web does work in Firefox 52. SourceForge worked until recently in Firefox 52 too, but now CloudFlare rejects the requests from Firefox 52 coming to SourceForge as if they were bot requests. GitHub works somewhat, in fact, a lot better than it did a year ago. Much of (but not all, accessing global variables from JavaScript does not work) WebAssembly also works if you go to about:config and explicitly enable it. Enough so that, if you are careful about which WebAssembly features you use, you can make a Huffman-tree drawing program in WebAssembly that works in Firefox 52.

10

u/legluondunet Sep 02 '26 edited Sep 02 '26

For a daily use, you will obtain far better results with a Linux distribution and using Wine for Windows apps.

-3

u/jvy7122 Sep 02 '26

The cons is that you'll lose half performance in Wine if you have a weaker computer.

5

u/Seledreams Sep 02 '26

Not really. wine isn't emulating. It's running natively. The performance should be similar or even better.

However, it's more likely to see bugs and issues since wine hasn't implemented everything yet

5

u/legluondunet Sep 02 '26

Really? It is not my experience.

2

u/8ig8en Sep 02 '26

I have seen slight better performance on doom running through steam proton than on Windows, but it depends on the game. I can't think of any game I have tryed that cut frame rate in half.

1

u/Different_Water7545 Sep 04 '26

My Pentium 4 runs some apps better in Wine than on XP natively

2

u/edjak53 Sep 02 '26

i would advise against it. assuming reactos even manages to boot on your pc without a bsod (it probably won't) it will still be very unstable, and it can't run basically any apps made for any windows after xp anyway

1

u/tpimh Sep 02 '26

Try it. GIMP might run just fine, some games might not. The biggest problem is probably the drivers, so without a list of hardware and a comprehensive of software, it's hard to tell. Don't just overwrite your main partition, install it as a second OS alongside your favourite Linux distro, and compare how much time you spend in each OS and how much you enjoy it ;)

1

u/Astrodion123 Sep 02 '26

Daily driving react os is like asking for trouble. Welp be ready to be limited to only half of the old windows software and occasional crashes

1

u/Different_Water7545 Sep 04 '26

You're only going to be able to run windows XP apps, and some of those even will be buggy. ReactOS is still highly experimental. Linux with Wine and Proton is what you're looking for