On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 11:31 AM geneb <ge...@deltasoft.com> wrote: >[..] > On the surface of it, he's apparently asking for a "windows experience" in > a text mode operating system. DOS isn't a "point and drool your way to > fame and fortune" operating system. If he thinks this is bad, he'd have > a stroke when presented with a non-graphical UNIX system. ;) >
Let's keep this a respectful conversation and not start a "point and drool" grudge match. :-) Like any DOS, FreeDOS has always been a single-user "single task" command line operating system. FreeDOS is not trying to create the next "Windows" or become the next "Linux." FreeDOS is DOS, and that includes all the limitations that come with DOS. We could bolt on a graphical desktop environment onto FreeDOS, but the "graphical desktop" discussion never goes anywhere. Some people want *this* GUI and others want *that* GUI. We have three graphical desktops for FreeDOS: SEAL, oZone and OpenGEM. None are actively maintained, but OpenGEM is the most mature. When I demo'd SEAL and oZone for the YouTube channel, I found lots of bugs still present in both of these desktop environments. So I'd hesitate to promote either of those as "the one and only" FreeDOS graphical desktop. OpenGEM is nice and I believe it is quite mature. And being based on DR-DOS GEM (and the Atari TOS) the OpenGEM user interface should be somewhat familiar to old-school DOS users. I like OpenGEM, as much as I might like any DOS graphical desktop. Even so, I'm not convinced that FreeDOS needs to install a default GUI. A graphical desktop doesn't really help you to run DOS programs. For example: when you launch a "plain" DOS application from OpenGEM, you leave the graphical environment. It's not like Linux or Windows where the DOS application starts up in a "window" while you do other OpenGEM things. Jim _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
