I agree. Though ReactOS isn't finished yet, I think support for it (or Server 2003, since it is binary compatible) should be added!

Guys I think you missed a detail when you where reading the info on ROS, it's intended to be a full replacement for windows when the use is cash strapped. This means that the developers will support the later standards of Windows Vista/7 once they have stabilized the code for day to day usage so even if GOG ignore the old WinXP the games will still run on ROS once the developers get round to supporting the later standards. Besides I somehow doubt the developers would ignore it if GOG games didn't work on the system they worked so hard to program, plus they probably own a few GOG games themselves and are likely fully aware they will attract more users by ensuring support for both GOG and steam

I agree, it would be indeed nice to have. I have no idea how many people would be affected though, so this might not be worth the effort. I'm actually one of these people stuck with XP, since any upgrade to my system would break at least some games, so this is no option.

I've been aware of and tested ReactOS since before it was ReactOS when it was known as Freedows back in the late 1990s before Microsoft sent them legal papers to get lost on the name. It's certainly a valiant effort, and about every 2-3 years since then I download and install the latest version of ReactOS out of morbid curiousity than anything else.

I certainly think the underlying fundamental goals of the ReactOS project is sound and I certainly wish them the best of success in accomplishing their goals, and I'd likely find a use for it in some limited capacity if they ever do. Idealistically and academically it is a great idea.

Having said that though, the ReactOS project and anyone using it, following it or considering what it is useful for needs to be seriously realistic about it. They have been hacking on that operating system for 20 years now and it is nowhere remotely close to being a drop in replacement for any former version of Windows and it probably wont ever be because despite their best efforts, they simply do not have enough developers working on it for it to move out of a very small hobbyist/enthusiast niche clique essentially for very few numbers of individual programs running on very specific hardware that is known to work. It is not a complete OS, nor is it a stable OS, it is a developmental research project essentially for all intents and purposes, and it is one that almost nobody has ever even heard of. If it were 10 times more complete than it is now it'd still probably be about 100 times less than it needs to be in order to come even close to something that a company could consider purposefully testing their software on.

It's taken about 24 years to get a small fraction of companies out there to accept Linux in the marketplace for purposes other than webservers and other Internet and back office infrastructure and routers and other embedded devices and that is with literally thousands of developers working on it and hundreds of corporations pouring millions of dollars into funding development of the kernel and various other projects that make up your average Linux distribution. Linux is slowly moving towards being something in the consumer market for gaming and certain other things but it still has a way to go until it is where it needs to be. I say this as someone who has been using Linux since 1994 and used it ever since heavily every day of my life and put 6 years in as a systems engineer at a major Linux vendor.

After all of the tremendous work and resources that went into Linux over all of that time, just a couple of years or so ago Valve announced support for it with Steam and SteamOS and technically have not shipped a product with it yet (this November), and they started supporting Linux in their Steam store around the same time-ish indicating they felt it was finally time to move in that direction. It took a while but a couple of years later roughly GOG decided to move to support Linux also. That's with zillions of people aware of it, and lots of developer mindshare, users, and tonnes of money thrown in from all around the world to the Linux/OSS ecosphere.

While I can applaud ReactOS's efforts, and the enthusiasm of people who follow the project and use it and wish both the best - it's completely unrealistic to think that ReactOS is remotely ready to be having companies offer to support their products on it on a large consumer grade market scale such as a video game developer/publisher and distribution platform. I don't mean to sound negative, but it is just an unrealistic thing that is not going to happen. 20 years from now if ReactOS has the number of people hacking on it that the Linux ecosphere does, and people pouring money into it by the millions, and it is fully functional and runs on the majority of hardware that the various Windows platforms do, and there is strong consumer demand for it in terms of millions if not tens of millions of end users, then some companies may look at it and consider whether or not they are missing out on a part of the market that is worthwhile pursuing.

There's another thing to consider too though, and that is that ReactOS is trying to clone Windows essentially. If it does a proper job of that, developers/publishers/distributors do not have to do anything except ship their software for Windows and it should work equally well on ReactOS. They wont likely say they support the OS however for various obvious reasons until the customers number in the multi-millions however.

I'd suggest anyone who wants to see commercial ReactOS support officially listed as a supported OS to directly email contact 100 software companies, they could all be game developers or distributors, or any other software - and ask them if they would consider officially supporting ReactOS and list it among the operating systems they support their software on. Keep track of the responses that come back - it wont be difficult because there probably wont be any except perhaps polite automated form letters mostly, or polite comments that are more or less saying "not a chance" in the politest possible way.

ReactOS's intentions are totally good, but the product itself is nowhere remotely close to what it intends to be some day and Windows is a constantly moving target that moves away faster than ReactOS can react. It's just not a commercially supportable product to support as a video game platform at this point in time and wont be for eons if ever. I'm not criticizing them in any way either, but it is just the cold hard truth.

Voted and did a wishlist of my own for Windows 2.0 and ZX Spectrum suppourt
http://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/add_suppourt_for_windows_20_and_zx_spectrum_to_galaxy

+1 :)

The problem is that it would mean they'd have to guarantee support of new games on old systems as well. That's something the developers would have to do and definitely would not for obvious reasons.

If you need an old system, get one of the Linux distros. That's what they're there for - to get you non-modern people on a modernly supported OS.

A bunch of selfish people in this thread. I'm not using Windows XP myself, but I know people who do, and I fully support Galaxy working with XP. There are millions of people on XP worldwide for a multitude of reasons, and it's absolutely a good thing for GOG Galaxy to work with it (after all, doesn't GOG want to sell more games? Why leave out a market segment?). It's absolutely not an insignificant percentage of PC's worldwide that run XP.

If you think about it for a moment, the majority of games on GOG have low system requirements and work well with older computers. It's a great use of older PC's to run classic games for cheap, especially for people in poorer countries. A lot of older PC's don't have motherboard drivers for Vista & later, but they work perfectly fine with classic games like Icewind Dale and System Shock 2.

and how are these people selfish ?

windows XP is 14 years old
its old clunky cantankarous and more importantly not supported by microsoft anymore
its a liability its a swiss cheese and nobody should be online with windows xp at all ( unless they know exactly what they are doing )

most people who still use XP either have no choice or have no clue and they are not the type to upgrade windows any time soon untill they get a new pc and then it will be windows 10

windows xp is a dying animal and its numbers are dwindling fast

and people in poorer countries generally have other things to worry about whether a 20 year old game is supported by their machine or not

It really has nothing to do with anyone being selfish. Consumers ask for all kinds of things, and it's ok for them to ask for all kinds of things. A company however exists in almost all cases primarily exists to make profit. All companies have limited resources both limited money and manpower and can only do a finite amount of things with those resources. This means that a company can't do every single thing that their customers and potential customers want or might want them to do - even if they wanted to because they simply don't have infinite resources.

For a company to be successful it has to know what the market is for their products and this will also change over time and they have to be aware of that and adapt to the changing marketplace. They have to see who the customers are, and part of that is gathering data, statistics and other information, as well as looking at other potential opportunities that could be pursued. Since all companies have finite resources they must carefully decide how to allocate those resources in a way that tracks the marketplace and puts the most research, development, and support funding into the projects, products and features that hopefully reach the largest number of customers possible in order to be successful and grow.

In the case of a software developer, publisher, or distributor this means knowing as much information as you can about who your potential customers are and targeting the majority of your resources and effort to products, services and support of the majority of your potential customers are, and allocating less of your resources and effort to lesser profitable products, services and support. What you support will change over time based on statistics of what users are using, and the load it puts on your company's resources to continue supporting any particular product on any particular platform.

For example if it turned out that to support a particular legacy platform it would use up 25% of your manpower resources and by supporting that platform the customers that use that platform bring in only 5% of your revenue and perhaps consume 30% of your resources, you have to contemplate if there are other products, services, support with which those manpower and other resources would be better put to use and result in increasing profit/growth of your company by reaching more customers and potentially lowering expenditures on service/support for a legacy system.

Every company will go about determining that on their own and they'll all have different amounts of resources at their disposal and their prospective customers will vary depending on their products etc. so all companies wont make the exact same decisions to support or drop a given platform for example at the same time - they all evaluate their own situation in the market and make those decisions based on their own view of opportunities that exist.

At a certain point, supporting an aging platform has ever decreasing numbers of users/customers and ever increasing burdens on manpower resources to continue supporting and eventually it crosses a line where those resources could be spent on other projects/products/services/etc. and reach more customers and more opportunity out there.

It's generally a bad idea to develop brand new software for an obsolete platform that is no longer supported by the operating system vendor and has many known security flaws as it dilutes a disproportionately higher amount of finite resources to supporting a smaller customer base than the number of customers those same resources would reach by dropping support for the legacy platform(s).

The same is true for technical support resources as well. When there are no security updates for an operating system that is no longer supported it will be increasingly likely to be infected with malware, viruses, and other problems and that's practically guaranteed on any system that is no longer supported. When people have security problems on their computer and aren't even aware of it and some piece of software does not work - they often contact the technical support of the vendor of that software and also often are angry at the vendor because their software doesn't work - when it may actually be and probably is because their system is infected with malware or has other security problems etc. This causes the technical support costs of continuing to support that platform to raise while the number of users using that platform are continuing to decline. At a certain point the revenue made by supporting that platform are lost by the manpower costs in technical support and engineering to continue supporting it.

Sooner or later a company/developer has to make a good business decision to focus the majority of their resources towards products and services that reach the majority of the potential customers out there and to withdraw putting resources into products and services that increasingly drain the resources with ever decreasing amounts of revenue and increasing support costs.

It's not whether there are hundreds, thousands or even millions of people using XP that matters, but rather it is a matter of allocating resources to products, services to reach the majority of customers and build and maintain a healthy and growing business. I don't believe GOG collects or publishes any data they might have on what hardware and software platforms their existing customer base are using, but Steam does publish this information and it is a reasonable estimate of what it probably looks like here on GOG as well.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

These stats are provided to help developers determine just who their target customers are, what hardware and OS platforms are currently in use and whether they're on the incline or decline etc. The prime target market is the ones with the biggest numbers, and with enough resources one arguably wants to target the largest portion of that that makes business sense, but also factor in whether the numbers are inclining or declining and at what rate. Right now any operating system that doesn't even show up in the statistics is completely dead and nobody is going to support it no matter how upset someone gets. Those that are very low numbers and are on teh decline are also the ones more likely to loose support when resources are needed to be allocated to new products/services/support for the ones with high numbers and increasing green percentages.

Currently XP is not only unsupported by MS and horribly insecure, it has 3.29% of the gaming market and declining steadily month over month (information on that can be found elsewhere on line).

If a company currently supports XP with existing products and those individual products consume few if any of their resources they may choose to continue advertising support for it as long as that is the case, but if a product experiences the opposite it will probably end up dropping support.

It's extremely unlikely though that many if any companies out there will come out with brand new products and services that specifically target Windows XP because it just makes no financial sense to do so when the resources that would be put into that could achieve a lot more results for a lot more customers focusing efforts on what the majority of customers are using.

I tried to be as serious and thoughtful about my explanations/views on this as a developer. I know many people will still not like the fact to hear that their operating system is obsolete and unsupported and that it's only going to become more so as every day passes but it is the realistic truth and it is not because of any evil doing, it is pure common sense to anyone running a business and wanting to survive and thrive in a highly competitive marketplace instead of being tossed to the dogs.

Wait, Galaxy doesn't support XP? Is that why I haven't got it to run for longer than 3 minutes straight?

Sadly I'm one of those people who doesn't really have the resource to get a new computer. Right now I'm running XP on an Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.1GHz with 1.5GB of RAM (cause one slot has stopped working, I had 2)

I have been considering though, taking the hit and buying something. I can't decide if it would be more efficient to go all out and buy something in the hopes it will last, or try to make the best out of a small budget. My other option is buying a newer OS and a couple bigger sticks of RAM and upgrading the tower I'm currently running. The motherboard can support upto 8GB, well 6 now that a slot is busted. Which makes me think, how long is this thing actually gonna last? The fan is pretty darn noisy too… Anyway I should stop rambling, but ya there are some people who are stuck with XP.

I'll admit I'm not looking forward to the day that I'll suffer from the same issue regarding Windows 7. It may still be some way away yet, but I know it'll come eventually.

You maybe stuck with XP, but that doesn't mean that developers should risk security holes and feature stripping because of machines still on creaky last legs. At work I simply tell them stay the f***off of IE8 for example when it comes to brand new internal web functionality I develop.