I've been looking into valid UNIX alternatives lately- not just because of the CoC shit, but because alternatives are important than general, and one of those toy operating systems that I see come up less often than I'd expect is DOS.
Aside from just ancient proprietary shit, does it have any good software? I imagine there's at least a few window managers, and maybe an extension to add 32-bit software or UTF-8 support, but there's so little conversation on it that I can barely tell.
Is FreeDOS a good desktop OS? Is it worth developing software for?
Does FreeDOS have any decent software?
Lincoln Flores
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Nathan Cook
A lot of GNU software works on FreeDOS. However, networking on that OS is a mess afaik. Without networking a computer is just a glorified document manager.
Austin Nelson
Oops forgot to remove my wangblows flag
Easton Williams
Freedos has a Ciforth port.
William Thompson
Dude, DOS barely qualifies as an operating system and it's certainly not a viable alternative to any variety of Unix.
MS DOS may have been used into the 90s, but it's still little more than a shim to make writing and loading software on a microcomputer more convenient.
Trying to poorly replicate the features of a Unix shell was something of a rite of passage for anyone stuck working on a DOS machine.
Nicholas Jenkins
DOS is a viable alternative to Unix if your computing requirements amounts to single tasking (TSR services notwithstanding) applications and limited access to memory (4MB RAM).
Christopher Reed
Networking on MSDOS was a lot fucking worse (KA9Q, Trumpet..)
Joseph Russell
I used the packet drivers and other DOS stuff that was hosted on ftp.cdrom.com back in the day. It wasn't too bad, could run the typical Unix stuff like arp, ping, tracert, telnet, ftp, lynx, pine, and so on. No multitasking though, unless you had Desqview. But probably the FreeDOS is nicer and easier to setup.
Dominic Jackson
It's not OS. It's bootloader + framework for applications + several file management tools using that framework.
Picrelated.
There is nothing to extend. COMMAND.COM reads executable from disk into memory, than JMP into start address. Application then does whenever it wants. If it want to make clear exit, it calls DOS code that loads COMMAND.COM back and jumps into it. If it does not - machine just hangs or crashes, as CPU executes random junk from memory.
Carson Hill
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William Morgan
networking on every os that copied berkley sockets is a mess.
Julian Hill
your a mess
Juan Roberts
FreeDOS comes with an integrated multitasker. You can switch virtual consoles like on a linux box.
Liam Clark
This. Same with GNU/Linux, *BSD, OSx, and Windows.
Levi Smith
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Luke Murphy
Much of the "ancient proprietary shit" was actually pretty good, like early MS works, Borland C, WordStar, etc. If you want to go the free route that's out of the question though.
GEM is the best free GUI, not sure about 32-bit support or UTF-8.
There's TELNET and FTP clients/servers, and web servers if you're on an 8088. If you've got a 286 or better there's SSH and web browsers.
In all honesty though, if you're using something old enough for DOS to be a contemporary system, you might as well run Minix or an early Debian/Slackware with DOSEMU. 386 and higher isn't really utilized by DOS. Even an 8088 will run XENIX, Minix, or ELKS, but you'd probably want to dual-boot as there's much less software than for DOS.
I run FreeDOS on a 286 and it's pretty comfy as an office and C/QuickBASIC machine. It's sluggish on earlier hardware though, probably because there's much more C than ASM compared to MS-DOS.
Jason Ramirez
All an OS has to do is let you load, save and run programs. There's nothing that mandates it has to let you multitask. DOS and CP/M are operating systems. So is the ROM BASIC that came on most 80's home computers.
Evan Nelson
You can compile programs under DOS, you can download the current gcc toolchain (8.2.0) pre-compiled somewhere, there's even ncurses in there somewhere. (don't remember where right now, google it) Then you can compile lua under DOS which is a very nice programming language and runs just fine. There's also vim and emacs for DOS, so you can pick your poison. I'm pretty sure microemacs and nano works too.
I have an old Cyrix (About ~Pentium 166 Mhz speed, with some CPU flag tweaks) setup with FreeDOS which even has appropiate realtek network packet drivers which are quick to setup if you know how. It's a nice, botnetfree machine I don't go online with but use for documents, spreadsheets and such. I can also remote into my linux system via RS232 and Kermit. It's all very minimalistic and nice. No weird updates that break shit. Nothing like that. Also uses very little electricity.
Jaxon Peterson
FreeDOOM, I think. I don't know if you could run any sort of GUI on it, though.
Lincoln Rodriguez
DOS normally doesn't have or need a GUI, but you can still run GUI programs, like for example Deluxe Paint, or a Doom editor.
William King
Not going to lie, but something about DOS software always looked appealing to me. Especially the blue backgrounds. Maybe because it always reminds me of the computer that was used at the VHS rental place back in the day.
Even now DOS word processors have an ability to draw me in, but maybe it's all just because I've never been keep on large screens and the 80x25 resolution scales down well.
James Anderson
I tried it out an old laptop for a little while. There's a decent selection of software, at least enough to make it useful for very basic office work. OpenGEM works well as a very bare bones GUI. Networking is a hundred and one kinds of fucked, so don't even mess with it if you're going for the "it just werkz" approach. The install was easy and installing additional software isn't hard, just do your homework on it beforehand.
But at the end of the day I still despise DOS. It's an operating system so disgusting and so repulsive that even Microsoft depreciated it as soon as they could. Unix isn't perfect but at least it isn't DOS.
Austin Rogers
Unix is worse than DOS though. DOS ran well on a 4.77 MHz machine with 640k memory and two floppy drives.
Joseph Rivera
That'd be fine, but DOS becomes a mess when you legitimately need more ram than that- whether it's games or productivity software. Luckily the newer stuff often does its own memory management, so you're not completely doomed to mess with system config files.
Aiden Scott
I would just let QEMM optimize memory, and then make a boot menu in autoexec.bat for different profiles. Don't think I ever needed to make a boot floppy for HD-installed games, even though some manuals mention that as a way to free up memory.
Robert Russell
you can run microsoft space simulator: en.wikipedia.org
and demos and you can do just about anything you want on it and nothing gets in the way except your imagination and hardware. also having a soundblaster makes freedos a lot more fun/useful
Julian Torres
That mess was fixed with the introduction of DPMI. Earlier programs using EMS or XMS (or, heaven forbid, manual protected-mode shenanigans) were indeed a mess.
No, the newer stuff comes with a DPMI server like DOS/4GW or CWSDPMI that does its memory management when ran on bare DOS.
Ian Jenkins
I'll admit that I haven't really used DOS extensively, so I don't know many of the specifics other than the 640k limit and EMS/XMS- but a few DOS applications I own that use DOS/4GW still have the need for a certain amount of free RAM under 640k. So it evidently wasn't completely solved- or at least I'm assuming so, because I don't imagine the option to create a boot disk would be necessary otherwise.
I suppose I'll be better able to mess with that once I get a motherboard and case for those 486 parts.
Dominic Nelson
Shit is broken, even the installer doesn't work properly.
Utter garbage
Chase Watson
Are you using the legacy or standard CD image? It could help if you're installing it on an extremely old machine.