the-x512

Linux had no such a lot of money in beginning. Linux first proved its value and then investors joined.

ReactOS development is so slow because their project management is terribly incompetent. Instead of focusing on making OS parts that are actually working properly, ReactOS team recreates Windows as cargo cult, attempting to replicate all Windows parts as precise as possible, including undocumented parts that do not affect end user software operation. So they managed to make ReactOS look like Windows inside (including even BSOD), but implementation has a lot of bugs, that prevents actual use. The problem is that when there are so much bugs in all OS subsystems, it is hard to diagnose and fix specific issue. Application crash may be client libraries bug, may be kernel bug, may be some driver bug, who knows. It is hard to isolate issue.

Instead of replicating all known Windows 2003 internals in ReactOS, they should focus on components quality, possibly making some things different than in Windows or disabling some functionality that is proven to be unstable until proper implementation will be done.

Haiku for example had great project management at start, they split development into multiple teams that developed various OS components independently (kernel, GUI toolkit, GUI server, Media server etc.). Each component was initially made independently and tested on BeOS, instead of rushing to make whole OS right now, causing unmanageable amount of bugs. Haiku GUI libraries and servers were initially tested in BeOS before Haiku kernel was complete, creating BeOS window that emulates Haiku screen. Also unlike Windows/ReactOS BSOD, even now Haiku has proper informative kernel panic report screen with stack trace etc., that can be used to diagnose, report and fix bugs. ReactOS has classic Windows XP BSOD with single error message and obscure code, that almost useless for diagnosing bugs. It is quite stupid to not enable detailed kernel panic reports on alpha quality system, it makes much harder to fix bugs that users experience.

ReactOS still have no any journaling file system support or binary registry recovery. This often makes system unbootable after improper shutdown. Haiku implemented Be File System (BFS) from very beginning and it has journaling support. So system can easily survive kernel panics and improper shutdowns.