On Thu, 29 Apr 2021, Jim Hall wrote:
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.
Realistically, OpenGEM/FreeGEM don't *need* to be maintained. They're
feature-complete.
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.
Preaching to the choir - I got it open sourced in '97. ;)
g.
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