On 4/22/2021 3:21 AM, Thomas Desi wrote:
There are many different reasons why people would want to install FreeDOS (if
they get to know it).
„ Different" like in „different people“. The needs and equipments are different
and the mixture of technical generations
should not restrain FreeDOS, IMHO, to „retro computing“ and nostalgia only.
Nostalgia is very much ok and brings up new and other thoughts, too. But there
is 2021, too.
I understand that there is a difference when installing on to Harddisk and
booting, or just having a USB Stick and using it on top of Linux or Windows.
It depends, as I say, on what people want, and - what they could want if the
just knew…
Well, here I think lays a huge problem for us (the FreeDOS project), a
lot of people don't seem to know what they want. There are always a
number of people showing up at random times, who come up with all kinds
of glorious ideas or serious (in their eyes) complaints as what to add
or change in FreeDOS. Which, when looked at it at the baseline of those
ideas, would result in a second coming of Linux.
These are a lot of times people that voice their grievances about how
bad Windows/Microsoft is, even if the only practical reason is that it
seems to be en vogue in certain circle to bash on Windows/Microsoft.
Or there are those people that can't cope with the alleged complexity of
Linux, thinking of (Free)DOS as being their savior, but then requiring
all those complexities, which would result in something that is looking
like just another Linux. Or Windows. Or macOS...
It seems to be hard for some people to see that FreeDOS is indeed a lot
more retro than cutting edge. And that some things just are not a real
fit for FreeDOS. Like someone on the FB page recently suggesting that it
would be great to have a Apache/MySQL/PHP stack on FreeDOS. Without
actually thinking about or realizing that the very design of DOS makes
such an endeavor rather unfeasible...
How do I use FreeDOS? Well, not as an everyday tool. I certainly won't
bother to use the Internet (email, web browsing, etc) with it. Those are
things that I can do much easier,much more efficient in Linux or
Windows. Nor would I do any graphics work in DOS, or any word processing
these days. Again, those things can be done much better, with way more
options, on any modern GUI bases OS.
What I would like to do is however to do some retro computing, even if
it is just "for fun", as it reminds me on how I got started with
computers almost 45 years ago. And have seen them developing. I would
like to use DOS on some SBC/maker projects where I could make use of a
text based UI or a basic, proved, lightweight file system as is DOS with
FAT. And that doesn't exclude certain embedded commercial/industrial
applications as well, where DOS would introduce much less overhead than
even the most trimmed down Linux can do. And where you can do
development on such systems without having to deal with multi-megabyte
tool chains and multitude of rabbit holes that lead into dependency hell...
Ralf
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