One of the current issues that makes ReactOS completely useless for real stuff is not that it cannot run app X or game Y or doesn't support my network adapter. The most annoying thing is it's instability.
You have no chance to use any of the great features, because most likely reactos crashes before you are at that point.
Try downloading something that is > 300MB, or installing a bigger application... good luck :(
It just crashes way too often. We all know our crappy Cc and yes, I know win32k also crashes from time to time.
And after a crash it's quite likely that things don't work anymore  (for example downloader) and you need to reinstall reactos. If we could fix that, the system would look much better than it does today.
Before a 0.4, we should start a stability offensive.
It would also improve developing, because the crashes can really be a pain when it comes to testing something. Excessive testing is more or less impossible, because of all the crashes.

Just my 2 cents,
Timo


Steven Edwards schrieb: 
On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 6:06 AM, Aleksey Bragin <aleksey@reactos.org> wrote:
  
Background information: In the past and nowadays work in ReactOS is
getting done "as it flows". E.g. if we get developers, who wanted to
implement sound support, would do it, and we advertise this in a
release. Or, like Evgeniy Boltik who shows a nice cooperation with
Timo, Jim and Ged on fixing various nasty palette and drawing issues
which were not touched for a few years, often fixing errors
introduced in revisions like 1000 or 4000.
There is no central plan, just a very rough roadmap, mainly
relatively short-term.
    

Everyone is doing a great job nailing down these issues!

<snip>

  
This involves, first of all, getting hardware support at a decent
level. From a billion of personal computers in the world, we could
easily support the most common hardware without need to develop
complex drivers or different HALs. Even SATA would not really be a
strong requirement, since most of PCs have IDE compatibility mode,
which many non-technical people even forget to switch to "SATA" mode
in the BIOS when installing their Windows OS! Again Linux's
philisophy could help us: they are proud that their hardware is Linux-
compatible, while we are embarrased that "our OS doesn't support
specific hardware". Feel the difference.
    

Yes its a mental shift, but a hard one to adopt. ReactOS having more
value over other operating systems is the selling point. Linux has
been able to show its value over Windows in certain situations, and
that value is greater than the hardware support value. An example,
Google runs Linux, Google could not have built its network running
Windows due to licensing costs. Therefore Linux has more value than
Windows in that situation. It makes it worth the effort to find
hardware that is Linux compatible.

ReactOS related comments at the end....

<snip>
  
What we thought would work good so far is a list of working apps. As
Olaf said: "it'll be ugly, not scientifically statistically fine,
crude comparing to wine appdb and limited. Bit it can be done". The
amount of text to enter for an app entry must be as minimal as
possible: app name, platform (real hardware, emulator), bug number in
bugzilla for possible issues (max. 2 bugs for one entry).
Also, no division for "installs, but doesn't start" or "works only
via manual installation". Either it works, or it doesn't, no
intermediate stages.
As we thought later, it may even be just three columns: appname, ROS
revision, Comments.
    

I agree with this. All software has bugs. I think the (Works/Does Not
Work) is a point of view, of 'can I use this software even with its
bugs?'. If yes, then it works. If not, then it does not work.

Now back to the value thing. Windows costs money, ReactOS can now run
hardware GL and Wine DirectX in select virtual machines. If you want
to show the value of ReactOS its time to make ReactOS run as many
Windows games as possible in these virtual machines on Apple Hardware.
This will save OS X users the need to dual boot or acquire a Windows
license. Also hardware support is not a big problem, which again helps
us. This is the future.