One day when Windows drifts too far away from its golden age functionality, it will be great if ReactOS can fill the gap. However, I feel like MS could one-up them overnight by providing a sandboxed 32-bit XP VM as part of current windows. We’d get back DOS support and compatibility with old programs would be better. Call it Windows Subsystem for Windows or whatever. That would also pave the way to removing a lot of Win32 cruft from the main codebase, which MS seems very itchy to do.
It was already a thing in Windows Vista - at least in Enterprise, you could download a "windows xp " compatibility package, right click on any application and start it in windows XP - it would silently start XP in the background and render the app the same way as a native Vista app, while running on the XP kernel in the background. I have no idea if it exists in newer versions of Windows however.
What's the point in doing this for MS? There's no money in it and they'd need a serious team backing it. And by no money, I mean at scale - there are going to be small companies needing something like that and there are going to be huge companies. Huge ones already got a public offer of "pay an increasing tax for XP support" and likely a private "this corporate deal is possible" if they're important enough. The small ones put together, I don't think could collectively fund ongoing xp support.
If anything ReactOS picking up those small companies is beneficial to MS by keeping them in the MS ecosystem.
Like a sibling comment mentioned, it wouldn’t be the first time MS has done this sort of thing (XP on certain SKUs of Vista or maybe it was 7). I assume they already have a serious team backing tons of legacy Win32 cruft. So, instead of maintaining that, they freeze it and shift it into a VM. MS gets to cut down modern Win32 to something closer to the UWP subset, and users that want it—-make it an optional subsystem—-get better legacy compatibility than they have had in years.
Maybe the 2020 win7 end of life would be a good time to do something like this. I don’t know if there is a good enough financial reason for MS, but from a user’s perspective I think it would be better than the situation today.
