it isn’t pleasant but Wine isn’t either.

Yes, but wine in general is simpler. ReactOS isn’t a ‘functional’ system, so you either have a dual-boot or virtual machine. It doesn’t compose well with your main system. Have you tried Bottles? A very simple and good-looking gtk frontend for Wine. They have a powerful default runner: “soda” .

The thing is that there’s already a bunch of stuff that works fine in ReactOS but is still broken in Wine, particularly old Win32 APIs around since Windows 95 that should’ve been fixed by now.

I didn’t know that. I used ReactOS very little and was very disappointed with it. Maybe that’s why I have a skewed view. However, some time has passed; maybe it’s better now.