Hi Rugxulo, > If you already have the original gold standard of DOSes, i.e. MS-DOS > (which was widely tested and hugely popular, by far the most > ubiquitous DOS), then you don't urgently "need" any other DOS > clone at all all, period.
Being the most widely used does not equal being the best. For example Linux is great for certain use cases and this is not changed by "but millions already have Windows" as an argument to use Windows instead for those use cases... Similarily, FreeDOS gives you a lot of DOS, a lot newer than the early 1990s Microsoft version, often in a much smaller package both in terms of disk space and in terms of the amount of RAM needed. And newer drivers :-) On the other hand, all DOS clones have to be extremely similar to MS DOS when it comes to supporting software apps for DOS. Because if you first have to port your XYZ app for Linux to "the cool new OS ABC" which also behaves a bit like DOS, then most users would simply use XYZ directly in Linux and not care about DOS. But as FreeDOS and other clones basically run ALL the good old software for DOS, clones are clearly attractive. Note that if you want to use more than 1 core of your CPU or more than 4 GB of RAM, then DOS is not for you. A multi tasking 64 bit OS will make you more happy then and nobody complains about a few GB of disk space there. A reason to use FreeDOS in spite of already having MS DOS: Your new hardware has bad support from MS DOS and you want to have more RAM free and a few new drivers. Of course you are free to achieve that by MIXING the best files from both versions of DOS, as you already owned MS DOS in my example. Cheers, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
