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ReactOS- An Open Source Windows Replacement

Imagine running your favorite Windows applications and drivers in an open-source environment you can trust. That's ReactOS. Not just an Open but also a Free operating system.

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Rajkumar Maurya
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Imagine running your favorite Windows applications and drivers in an open-source environment you can trust. That's ReactOS. Not just an Open but also a Free operating system.

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ReactOS is an open-source operating system for x86/x64 PCs intended to be binary-compatible with computer programs and device drivers made for Windows Server 2003. It is a Windows 95 clone project, which was started  in 1998  and continued as ReactOS.  As stated on the official website, "The main goal of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system which is binary compatible with Windows ... such that people accustomed to the familiar user interface of Windows would find using ReactOS straightforward. The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows and install ReactOS without the end user noticing the change."<8> As of May 2016, ReactOS is considered alpha software, feature-incomplete but with many Windows applications already working (e.g. Adobe Reader 6.0, OpenOffice etc<9>),<10> and therefore recommended by the developers only for evaluation and testing purposes.<11><12>

The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows and install ReactOS without the end user noticing the change. ReactOS is considered alpha software, feature-incomplete but with many Windows applications already working (e.g. Adobe Reader 6.0, OpenOffice etc), and therefore recommended by the developers only for evaluation and testing purposes.

ReactOS is primarily written in C, with some elements, such as ReactOS File Explorer, written in C++. The project partially implements Windows API functionality and has been ported to the ARM and AMD64 processor architectures. ReactOS, as part of the FOSS ecosystem, re-uses and collaborates with many other FOSS projects, most notably the Wine project which develops a Windows compatibility layer for Unix-like operating systems.

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