Given that it's free, it's certainly worth a test to see if any of your older business-critical applications are compatible – setting up workstations without Windows licensing is a tempting prospect, although we can't vouch for its resistance to attacks.Ī ridiculous amount of business software relies on MS-DOS, even to this day. Furthermore, ReactOS now natively supports more file systems than all Windows versions combined. Incorporating parts of noted Windows emulator Wine, it runs LibreOffice, Firefox, Opera and more quite happily, and can even manage some earlier versions of popular commercial applications like Adobe Photoshop. So it's clearly a bit behind the times, but ReactOS does have its uses. It's currently aiming at full compatibility with Windows Server 2003. Your mileage may vary – it's certainly not going to play nice with high-end games or software, and ReactOS isn't quite up to the Windows 10 level yet. It's completely open source, uses no proprietary Windows code, yet ReactOS is designed to be (and in some cases actually is) compatible with Windows drivers and applications. ReactOS (opens in new tab) does the same for the Windows NT architecture upon which all modern Windows versions are based. Linux, as you may know, is a ground-up reinterpretation of UNIX. It's worth playing with just for the cleanness of its desktop, and there are working web browsers and media players, although it's still rather experimental and many of the features of BeOS haven't quite been fully realized as yet. In fact, even the second beta release of its under-development branch was released almost two years after the previous one. It’s been a while since the OS had a stable release. The spirit of the closed source BeOS lives on in the form of Haiku (opens in new tab), an open source re-implementation which began development immediately after Be's demise, and it has been in development since.īuilt from the ground up but designed to be backward-compatible with its classic quarry, Haiku follows BeOS' lead in its entirely modular design, allowing different components of the OS to be developed concurrently. A stylish multitasking OS that introduced a whole host of features that Windows, Linux and macOS would later adopt for their own, BeOS was a true multimedia innovator that left the market with a whimper when its rights were sold to Palm in 2001. We're a bit sad that BeOS didn't take off.

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