If you’re pining away for the days when Windows ran well on 64 MB of RAM, there’s a new version of open source NT clone ReactOS promising easier installation and fewer bugs. ReactOS 0.4.16 was announced over the weekend after a year and a half of development, and its list of improvements is substantial. For those unfamiliar with the ReactOS project, it’s a long-running effort (it spun up in 1996) to create an open source equivalent of Windows NT, with the aim of running Windows applications and drivers. If you miss the halcyon days of Windows XP that began a quarter of a century ago, in other words, it’s the project for you. Given that it’s an open source project driven by a group of volunteers who’ve had to dodge accusations that they’re just ripping off old copies of a research kernel, compatibility, ease of installation, and stability have all been sore spots for ReactOS. A number of essential elements have been fixed and improved as of 0.4.16, per the team. “We’re excited to showcase the improvements we’ve made,” the ReactOS builders said in their release notes, with “a unified bootcd and livecd image; video, audio, networking, and storage stack improvements; a new installation type; and third-party code syncs” all mentioned as having been added. The unified bootcd and livecd mean a single disc can now be used to boot into a temporary version of ReactOS to have a poke around, and to install the OS itself. A graphical installer is also included in the new unified disk image, meaning that there’s no longer a need to navigate a truly old-fashioned interface to get up and running. Fixed OS functions Running old-fashioned software (or modern iterations of it) on newer hardware is bound to be a complicated mess, and that’s true for ReactOS. Video drivers from “all major … vendors” have been causing issues in the experimental OS for years, the team notes, but apparently one source of the problem has finally been identified and addressed in 0.4.16. The kernel’s system page table entries, it turns out, were filling up when loading third-party graphics drivers because they eat up more memory than most others, so the memory manager layout was modified to increase the number of system PTEs. A different problem with blank OpenGL windows on AMD video drivers was resolved separately. Both improvements “fixed many edge case bugs in our win32k.sys driver,” the ReactOS team noted. A new HD audio bus driver was brought in to replace an older implementation that was never quite finished, addressing frequent bugchecks when attempting to install HD audio controller drivers. As for storage, the 2009 implementation of UniATA gave ReactOS the ability to recognize disk partitions over 8 GB, but the aging driver has since begun to cause slow boot times and load failures. It’s been replaced with a new ATA driver that also allows ReactOS to boot in more environments, including first-generation Hyper-V VMs. A disk cleanup utility was also added. Networking support has also been improved, with support for more adapters and virtual environments added. Asynchronous connections are now supported as well. There’s also a new headless Server Core installation type of ReactOS available with this release that loads a full Win32 subsystem without the GUI, similar to Windows Server Core that Microsoft released with Windows Server 2008. Finally, the ReactOS team has abandoned Windows Server 2003 compatibility restrictions, meaning that its Wine fork designed to interface with Windows-like kernels is no longer limited to Wine 2.x and 3.x, the latest of which was released in 2018. The abandonment of that restriction means ReactOS has been able to update its Wine fork toward Wine 10.0, which was released in early 2025, with 0.4.16 incorporating a significant amount of that work. Support for WineVDM, which increases compatibility for 16-bit Windows applications, was also added in the release. “The mission for ReactOS is to ‘[Run] your favorite Windows applications and drivers in an open-source environment you can trust,’” the team said. “With each release we come closer to fulfilling this goal.” You can download version 0.4.16 of ReactOS here, but the team’s usual warning applies: Despite being a 30-year-old project, it is still in an alpha state “and provides no guarantee of stability, of safety for your files, or that it will work at all on your hardware.” ®

Oracle is betting that AI coding will deliver “Star Wars” levels of software engineering productivity, CEO Mike Sicilia told investors last week. With its shares sharply down over the past year, Big Red claims its engineers’ productivity will skyrocket as the company mainlines the AI wonder drug it prescribes to customers. Speaking at Deutsche Bank’s 2026 Technology Conference, Sicilia insisted that AI would be a net positive for the software industry, despite fears of a so-called SaaSpocalypse in which coding tools and agents strip value from business application vendors. Many SaaS companies have seen their valuations plummet this year. “The software industry will probably be disrupted in a positive way. Let me be clear, I don’t mean the SaaSpocalypse fears and all these things. [But] the fact that we’re able to disrupt ourselves and become so productive is because we have decades of experience with building and delivering mission-critical applications and infrastructure like Oracle Database,” he said. Sicilia, who began his career as a software developer in 1993, said he would once have dismissed today’s claimed productivity from a single AI-assisted engineer as fantasy. “I’d have said that’s like Star Wars, futuristic stuff. There’s no way… but it is real. I mean it is super real. It is incredibly interesting,” he told the investor conference. Curiously, Oracle has told contributors to OpenJDK – the open source Java project that it stewards – not to submit AI-generated code or other material. In a post tagged “legal,” Oracle said it was drafting a full policy on generative AI but had set interim ground rules. It cited risks involving review workloads, safety, security, and intellectual property. “Contributions in the OpenJDK Community must not include content generated, in part or in full, by large language models, diffusion models, or similar deep-learning systems,” the post said. That apparent contradiction did not temper Sicilia’s enthusiasm for using AI inside Oracle. Big Red has spent the past few months making clear that it expects to do more with fewer people. The company’s workforce shrank by 21,000 over the last year, according to its annual report. In May 2025, Oracle reported approximately 162,000 employees. By May 2026, that figure had fallen to approximately 141,000. US headcount fell by 9,000, while the international workforce declined by 12,000. “Our periodic workforce restructurings and reorganizations can be disruptive,” Oracle stated. “The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.” “We may initiate new restructuring plans in the future,” it added, ominously. Customers have already encountered another side of Oracle’s AI push through the vendor’s support portal, which relaunched late last year. The revamped service offers AI-powered interactions, streamlined navigation, improved search, and better access to knowledge, according to Greg Parikh, Oracle veep for information development and operations. Customers, however, complained that the AI was “not working that well.” Support note numbers had disappeared, automatic service requests could no longer be created, and users reported wasting time on broken or internal links and limited patch searches and downloads. Perhaps when Sicilia invoked Star Wars, he was thinking less of futuristic productivity and more of the Great Pit of Carkoon. ®