HI Johnpaul - whom are you addressing in your mail saying > "So my question is, why do YOU use FreeDOS?"
just in case… ;) here is my „ranting rating“: - I am 50ish and not so much nostalgic about computing, but: - want to get rid of networking on my „composing tool“ - want to have a lighting fast bootup - want to have 1 (one!!) single app that I use, - don’t want the virus thing (do we?) - don’t want all those hidden spying/cookies/passwords/logins - (single user instance, at home, old computer: who ever would want to get into my files? If they start the computer, they wouldn’t know what to do when seeing the FreeDos splash screen ; ) - Kidding) - don't want "update nagging“, this has become crazyness. (legacy program like, e.g. VDE Editor and others can’t possibly made any better … like in „here is the update to the wheel“..) - want to be able to switch the thing off with a button: „Zip!“ and walk away from the screen. - (and no waiting or „the computer was not correctly shut down … bla blabla“) - No „power saving“ or „standby modes“ which anyway also consume quite an amount of energy, with funny standby-lights flashing all night in your appartment. Just switch it entirely off. - single simple view of what I have written (actual OS suggest to become a virtuoso in creating folders/directories and drop files on a „desktop“ which is a fake folder, too… - want to have single files that represent an „app“. (not thousands of libraries, dependencies, installs, dlls, blablabl) - a disk with FEW files alltogether. (Windows10 uses around 300,000 files for a fresh 12 GIGABYTE install! THREEHUNDRED THOUSAND) - a system of a handful of commands I program on my „macro pad“ - and press it without need to type in, not even „dir“ or „cd ..“ or „type“ etc… - want SIMPLICITY, purism, „control“ ... - want to learn to understand a little how actually a computer works as a tool, not as a consumer gadget that could - theoretically - do EVERYTHING and drives me nuts because of the running „why doesn’t it do this and that“… - and a few more which sound quite similar to your reasons! I agree that there has been a huge amount of programming work, carefully written out documentations and alike become obsolete in the last decades. In my experience (Text/composing/editing( I don’t see ANY difference working on a Windows10 Computer in Word today and how it was back in say 1988 when I had my first machine regarding the workflow… Text-editing hasn’t changed in the last decades, that is why Emacs and VI(m) are still much in use. But I guess this is a different story and doesn’t fit into this thread. - T-h-omas > Am 14.04.2021 um 17:59 schrieb Johnpaul Humphrey <[email protected]>: > > In light of the "DOS was dead" discussion, I wanted to ask a question. > I was *born* after support was dropped for MS-DOS, so I can't claim > nostalgia as my reason for use. Recently I installed FreeDOS on my > modern HP-Pavilion laptop, alongside BSD, Linux, and plan9. I did this > because I like DOS's speed and assembly programming. > It worked fine after I fixed the beep bug with your help. > So my question is, why do YOU use FreeDOS? > Is it primarily nostalgia? Legacy program support? Speed? > Note that I don't consider running legacy software a bad reason. I was > shocked by how much good software has been "thrown away" because of > its age. On Linux all my favorite software (vi, siag office, twm, > motif &c.) was written before I was born. However, that is not my > primary reason for using FreeDOS. my primary reason is because it is > like the motorcycle of operating systems. It is lightweight, has no > red tape to cut through to do things, and is monotasking. (Monotasking > is also why I don't use it as much as I would like to, but why I use > it at all.) > I figured that if I had a different reason than what everybody > assumes, that some of you might as well. Everyone seems to assume that > DOS is used by people who are unable to cope with progress and have to > run their ancient version of word perfect. If that is your reason, it > is not a bad reason. I was thinking of eventually writing a 64-bit dos > work [sort of] alike eventually, but it would not be able to support > legacy programs due to segment offset addressing and a million other > things. > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
