Why cant you use it yet?

I only tried a few XP-era programs, but so far they work fine out of the box. Including a Win32 application i've developed myself.

If you managed to get it to boot to a usable state you got farther than ~80% of people here will get. That's before factoring in any apps.

Really? I've been able to do this for pretty much every version I've ever downloaded, at least in a VM but also on my old K7. It's unstable but not that unstable.

He beats me, but only every other day...

I have no idea what this means in context.

"it's unstable, but not that unstable"

And that has something to do with justifying domestic abuse?

I'm not saying that instability or domestic abuse is okay.

+1. I couldn't manage to make it boot on vmware for the life of me the last time I tried a few months ago.

I think that is terrible. Many people would try it on virtual machines and see what happens, and those people could be potential developers in the future. But the way it's now...

please read the manual first (before you try)

https://reactos.org/wiki/VMware

https://reactos.org/wiki/Installing_ReactOS

I'm wondering what the community could do to make this less hands on and more out of the box friendly. I can install usually any Linux Distro without having to fuzz about too much with the settings, except with VirtualBox if I really want the extras installed, but it's still usually usable.

As others have noted, setting it up isn't so straight forward. There's even Wikis for installing it on a VM that don't seem as straight forward as just mounting an ISO[0]. Also, getting internet to work / websites to load seems problematic. I want a OS that is as usable as installing any Ubuntu derivative or Debian for that matter!

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19305312

If your use case is VM-related, why not just use Wine? The only real advantage to ReactOS over Wine is its support for Windows kernel drivers, which only matters if you're running on native hardware.

Still, it would be nice to have a Windows drop in, without having to administer a Linux install too.

You still have to admin the reactos system. Granted, if you're not used to Linux, that's still better.