Jim,
I want to thank you for taking the work of Pat and carrying it on. You
are not underappreciated. Especially all the developers, translators,
etc. I was not understating what you have done. I was just implying
that it is and never has been an easy to use OS for a novice. Your
bullets prove that (I read that before). Bullet number 4 (four) is
important but not for the survival of the OS. It would not attract new
users.
Platforms have changed. The compute of things has and is evolving to
abstract. Nobody is going to care what hardware is running just as
long as it can run your software --- just as FreeDOS is relying on
Emulators; very few bare metal systems.
FreeDOS might be embedded on a SOc to deploy firmware. However, the
future of it for gaming is bleak. Nobody teaches this stuff anymore.
On Sun, Apr 24, 2022 at 8:51 PM Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Apr 24, 2022 at 8:37 PM Mark Olesen <markjole...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Just to chime in. Technically, FreeDOS is not for the novice. I
> > wouldn't expect my wife or daughter to be able to install it and then
> > figure out what to do with a prompt.
> >
> > Therefore, I suggest you try and understand your user base and gear it
> > towards those individuals instead of trying to make it appear (mask)
> > as a user friendly OS.
> >
>
>
> As a reminder, we conducted a user survey in 2021 to understand who
> was using FreeDOS today. Quoting from the end of the survey page on
> the wiki: (data is at the top of the page)
>
>
>
http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Survey/2021
>
> [..]
> > 4. What is your level of DOS experience?
> >
> > Not surprising to me, since I get a lot of emails from folks who clearly
> > are experiencing DOS for the first time.
> >
> > I can see three "plateaus" in this chart: "beginner user" (6% are 1-3)
> > "some experience" (25% are 4-6) and "more experienced" (68% are 7-10).
> >
> > My big takeaways from this survey are:
> >
> > (1) Most people use FreeDOS in 2021 for playing DOS games, running other
> > DOS apps (work or home), writing new DOS programs, and doing some kind of
> > "system" work (updating BIOS, testing systems, recovering systems).
> >
> > (2) A lot of people boot FreeDOS in a virtual machine, but there's a
> > sizeable community of folks who run FreeDOS on actual hardware (such as
> > "classic" collectors with XT/AT/'386/etc, and people running on post-2000
> > PC hardware).
> >
> > (3) Most (all?) who boot FreeDOS in a virtual machine are probably
> > running a "FreeDOS-dedicated" virtual machine. If you're running FreeDOS
> > on physical hardware, I'd guess you're probably dual-booting.
> >
> > (4) Most of the people who use FreeDOS are more experienced, but we
> > shouldn't forget the "beginner" users or those with "some experience."
>
>
> I mentioned in another thread when I first talked about the website
> update that one of the reasons for the website refresh was to "head
> off" some of the emails I get from new users asking for help. For
> example, "I downloaded FreeDOS, how do I use it" or "can I run FreeDOS
> on my Raspberry Pi" or "what do I type" or "what can I do with
> FreeDOS." These folks have never used DOS before, but somehow found
> out about FreeDOS and want to try it out. My guess is they discovered
> FreeDOS by reading an article about it (I sometimes write about
> FreeDOS for Opensource.com or other places) and/or are university
> students learning about operating systems.
>
> My goal with the website refresh has been to first come up with a
> design that works well for these "some experience" users, and that
> also benefits the "expert" users. For the mock-up website that went to
> usability testing, I thought the design was balanced for intermediate
> and expert, with more help for intermediate users, with the assumption
> that more expert users could get the rest of the way.
>
> Jim
>
>
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>
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