Do you prefer building things yourself, packages that might literally be years out of date because Debian so chooses, or up to date things?

A lot of out of date stuff will work fine 99% of the time. I remember upgrading from redhat 4 to say 4.6 or something, and a lot of it were utilities that although had some fixes didn't really affect the system as a whole. Not only that the 'improved' packages for XWindows, Gnome and KDE slowed down my computer so much (400Mhz I think) that I preferred to downgrade.

Stable versions unless it's something that has to be the latest and greatest will probably work fine. This is from my experience.

As for building things myself. No, there's often too many things I'm not sure what the packages are for, so I'd take the newest version unless it required some odd package nothing else needed. Best to go with some stock version of Debian or something with a good solid layout and stick with it.

For this purpose I’d suggest a Debian stable (Jessie as of now), with backports enabled for the couple packages you want in "up-to-date" versions.

Nice to see ReactOS evolving this much, plus that video of HL2 is impressive. In time I can see this as the ideal OS for running some Windows-only tools.

But what about the argument of JWZ on the matter of flat out refusing to provide newer packages?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myKYhDcLwoc

Playing UnrealGold in ReactOS

so it has taken about 18 years for ReactOS to reach v0.4? can we expect v1.0 in about 20 years, then?

Hardware OpenGL in 25 years, sure.
I would really use Gentoo (Calculate etc) if hardware power allows this. Otherwise, what you said - is a very good solution.

I don't know, really. I'm referring to core packages and commandline programs that make the OS work and what everything depends on for the most part. Tools that have been around for 20 years and get updates still and are powerful programming scripting and other basic tools that you can mix in and create scripts and small programs similar to batch files.

Screen savers? Not a high priority in my mind.

Nope. Only 2 more years are needed for 1.0.

Anyone notice all the screenshots were made on ReactOS Version 0.5-SVN? So they have a 0.4.3 release announcement but all the screenshots are from 0.5...

This are trunk builds. they all are marked as 0.5.

I don't mean to be an ass...but you just said nothing. What do you mean these are trunk builds? That SVN is used? Or that there is no notion of release cycles? Or no notion of revisions? Or branches? I don't get it. I'm sorry.