You know that ReactOS development has been speeding up lately don't you? Either way it's kinda of stuck in NT5 because they threw out the most competent people of the project.
However... it still runs a ton of stuff better than Wine :)
I think they are way under confident and burnt out. The projects been going for decades and all the developers see is more work to do. It is a toxic place. On the one side you have people demanding things and one the other side you have the original people who started it who are older now and lack drive.
Last time I used it it was pretty stable and worked well. However I was repeatedly told it is in Alpha and that I would run into serious issues eventually. I never did run into anything serious and it never corrupted it self like it used to. I was very impressed but also saddened by how the developers are not confident in there own work.
My personal belief is that React OS could be somehow combined with Wine and Samba to create a Windows in a box that could run under other operating systems. You could run Windows specific software in this environment but then have shared resources with the guest and guest side windowing. There are still a few pieces of software that require Windows and it would nice to have the kernel portion combined with Wine. You could have a small KVM machine with PCIe passthough or a kernel module that acts as a wrapper for complex Windows drivers.
They threw Alex Ionescu out: the guy that actually wrote the majority of they only kernel that actually worked;
Martin Fuchs fired: the guy that made the explorer and a ton of GUI components. His code was later on bastardized by everyone else causing the issues you were told about;
... and many others.
They had competent people making the thing happen, then they decided to push them away and eventually replace their code with Wine backports and whatnot.
There are still a few pieces of software that require Windows and it would nice to have the kernel portion combined with Wine.
To be fair, if Microsoft was able to create WSLv1 without a kernel and it run just fine, why would Wine not be able to do the same? :) No drivers yes, but the software (including GUI stuff) run just fine and that's not the case with Wine + the mainstream Windows' software.
Does ReactOS already support the newest office and Photoshop out of the box!?
MS Office 2021 is garbage but at least 2016 and O365 Home (32-bit) are both silver. The linked Photoshop CC 2023 is also silver. That already seems like an impressive feat by the wine team.
Yeah, it seems impressive until you actually try to use it and find out that their "silver" is not even close to something you can work with.
Adobe products even when they say Silver you'll get artifacts when moving objects, resizing the window sometimes ends up on a full screen black square and whatnot.
Office 2016 kind of works, poor rendering but works, the thing is that if I only needed Office 2016 features I would survive mostly fine with LibreOffice. I indeed need features from 2019 that wont run properly.