ReactOS, the long-running open-source project aiming to recreate a Windows NT-compatible operating system, has released version 0.4.16 after 18 months of development, bringing significant bug fixes and usability improvements. Although still officially in alpha nearly 30 years after the project began in 1996, this release tackles longstanding pain points around installation, hardware compatibility and stability that have dogged the volunteer-driven effort, arriving fittingly around the 25th anniversary of Windows XP.

Key changes include a unified boot/live CD image with a graphical installer, fixes to video driver issues (including a memory manager change addressing system page table exhaustion and an AMD OpenGL bug), a new HD audio bus driver, and a replacement ATA storage driver enabling faster boots and support for first-generation Hyper-V VMs. Networking support was widened to cover more adapters and virtual environments with asynchronous connections, a headless "Server Core" installation option was added, and the team dropped old Windows Server 2003 compatibility limits, allowing its bundled Wine fork to move towards Wine 10.0.