I'd be glad to hear your story. Please share around! Oh, and here's also my little story of how I've heard about ReactOS:
It all started in the nearly end of the month of December, 2016. Was surfing the web around for FOSS Operating Systems in articles and oddly the name ReactOS pops out claiming to be a Windows compatible, both at low and high level. I was like, hmm, in theory it's great but in practice it's completely a clusterfuck to reverse engineering an OS which has its source code closed, let alone the documentation of some components of the OS being written poorly. Few days later ReactOS seems to bug on my head so I decided to give this OS a try and found an ISO to mount it on a Virtualbox machine. While the OS being alpha and many critical bugs still in the wild, what did it impress me is that they (ROS developers), with the huge amount of work, have made this OS just like Windows. Look, experience, feel. Even in the lowest level as possible, the NT kernel (I know, it's still under development but at least the kernel does its job). In January 2017 I decided to open an account and here I am, whose my adventure within ReactOS and forum has begun! Cheers!