Hi, On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 5:28 PM Danilo Pecher <danilo.pec...@data-experts.biz> wrote: > > Quite frankly, I would throw them all on the scrap heap.
I wouldn't quite "throw them away", but for simplicity we really don't have to include them. I don't use any GUI in DOS (by default). > As Jim said, none of them has any number of apps worth noting I thought GEM included an art program and a word processor?? > and there is a reason why no GUI other than Windows 3.11 ever took off under > Dos. Desqview/X? (The devkit for that is still on DJGPP mirrors under "v1" whatever.) Calmira?? > I know that from painful experience of wasting two years on an attempt to > create one in the early 90s. It's just not what Dos is about, I think. DOSSHELL was quite nice (although I rarely used it). Same with Desktop2. However, for mixing tools and writing scripts and testing things, a UI is usually more of a hindrance than anything. (DOS Navigator was also very nice. In some ways I prefer TUI without mouse.) There were a *lot* of cool DOS programs and toolkits. For DJGPP alone, there was mGUI, JPTUI, Allegro, and others. It's sad how much got deprecated or ignored for DJGPP. It really is a swell suite of tools. > Unless someone puts together a serious attempt (perhaps PCGeOS > qualifies) I wouldn't include any GUI. Frankly, if you are after a > freeware GUI OS, Linux or ReactOS are better options. I wouldn't include any with FreeDOS "by default" either. I disagree about Linux as a suitable GUI for the same family of machines. There are not a lot of good distributions for old machines anymore. Something like ZipSlack (Slackware 11.0) is nice but from 2006. Well, I guess that's no worse than what we have, but it's unsupported and few would use or recommend it. Last I checked, the oldest supported Linux kernel upstream was from 2016. People are already giving up on IA-32 and even trying to split up x64 into separate groups (e.g. AVX2 or AVX-512, ugh). Chromebooks are quickly obsoleted too (which the FSF calls "planned obsolescence"). I'm not blaming anyone for not wasting time or money, but if something is shunned *and* unsupported, it makes little sense to say "just use Linux" when it either literally won't work (anymore) or nobody will develop with it or for it. Or did you mean TinyCore or some variant of Puppy? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_levels _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
