networking on every os that copied berkley sockets is a mess.
Does FreeDOS have any decent software?
William Morgan
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
...
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.