Not sure why you need ReactOS if that's the only requirement. You should just put stripped-down Linux installs in their place and run WINE, on which almost all applications work perfectly well. ReactOS in fact is mostly a kernel project. The majority of their userland support comes from WINE. The difference is that they are trying to clone the kernel to provide the truest Windows-like experience (including driver compatibility).
If you don't need the hardware support the reality is that you'll be much better off using a newer version of WINE on a Linux installation than you would be using a ReactOS snapshot.
Driver compatibility is likely to be more important as a lot of embedded systems use proprietary and certified drivers which will never work on Linux.
Not to mention, WINE is far from perfect. I'd argue that ReactOS, albeit with chunks of it coming from WINE is still far more likely to behave like a real Windows machine.
At the end of the day, it'll probably come down to cost and an in situ replacement of the OS without any application rewrite or hardware changes is cheapest.
>Not to mention, WINE is far from perfect. I'd argue that ReactOS, albeit with chunks of it coming from WINE is still far more likely to behave like a real Windows machine.
I would really like to know why you think this. ReactOS's userspace support is WINE almost entirely. They may write extra win32 applications like explorer.exe for use with ReactOS, but they do not use a separate runtime translator. They may modify portions of WINE to work with their ring 0 graphics code or whatever, but almost all of the serious work is done by WINE.
WINE is tested broadly on Linux platforms and the bugs usually get solved quickly. ReactOS is barely tested at all and I would not expect the kernel to be remotely stable for a long time yet. Why do you think ReactOS, which is usually not using a very recent WINE base (at least not in snapshots), would be more stable than Linux + WINE?
If you don't need the hardware support the reality is that you'll be much better off using a newer version of WINE on a Linux installation than you would be using a ReactOS snapshot.