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What kind of work do you do? (Users)

posted by mceric, Germany, 07.10.2023, 01:26

Hi!

While Linux, Windows and MacOS are complex under the hood, you do not need to touch their complexity if you do not want to. It probably is easier to just click that browser icon and just open your youtube bookmark on a complex operating system than to jump through many hoops to open a youtube video in DOS in any way at all.

Regarding your wish list:

Email is okay if you have a provider which supports ancient protocols. If your provider requires TLS/SSL or other secure connections to your mail server, it gets more complex and if you want to use some modern webmail website like gmail, it can easily get so complex that no web browser for DOS exists yet which can open it.

Office depends on what you want. If you just want to write text, easy. If it has to support Unicode, a few DOS editors can do that. If you want a text document with tables and images, then your choice already gets extremely small and I doubt that you would get one where the tables in a text document can include some sort of formula processing. You may want to check FLTK XFDOS for graphical office apps in DOS: https://sourceforge.net/projects/fltk-dos/

It is very unlikely that any DOS web browser will be modern enough to support online banking and the required level of secure connections and scripting.

Some basic PDF apps for DOS do exist. Same for image, video and audio viewing, listening and simple conversions. In particular for video, expect the same complexity as with mplayer and mencoder in Linux. You may actually end up just using a DOS version of the very same app.

For printing, it will depend on how fancy you want it to be. Some modern printers have hardware support for PDF and PS, so you could take that route when preparing files to print. Most printers will also support plain text files. In particular for more classic printers, you should be able to find apps which support very basic design things, such as printing some of your text in bold or italics. Also, apps such as Image Magick (which should have DOS versions available) might (?) help you to convert images (and PDF) to printer encodings like HP/PCL or ESC/P to print (things with) graphics, in case the PS/PDF method cannot be used. We also have some support in GRAPHICS for printing screenshots of graphics modes.

Support for scanners will probably only exist for very old scanners. However, there are scanner models, even affordable ones, which let you plug in USB sticks or memory cards and scan directly into PDF files, which you can then open in DOS after carrying the stick or card to your DOS PC. You will probably need USB drivers to access the stick or card on DOS at all, but luckily, very few such drivers already do exist.

The ability to burn DVD or use UDF formatted media in general is at the stage of being an exciting experiment for power users and developers, I would say. Burning CD with ISO9660 filesystem is slightly less challenging, but still a rather unusual achievement in DOS unless you have exactly the right hardware.

Programming, luckily, is a topic well covered by compilers for DOS, including 32-bit compilers. People even experiment with 64-bit memory models already, but you will need special drivers and tools for those.

Listening to music or watching videos from your harddisk or SSD are relatively well supported: There are few, but powerful apps for that, which support modern file formats like MP3, OGG or MP4 and moder sound hardware like HDA and AC97. As said, watching youtube will probably be very hard. Those videos are on a complex website which requires a modern complex browser. Plug-ins for DOS browsers may exist to let you access videos on youtube in some way nevertheless, maybe by downloading them and then watching them later with a separate video player app.

In short, the complexity which annoys you with modern operating systems in part also is necessary complexity of the apps needed to do what you want to do.

If you move from complex operating systems to DOS, you would still need complex apps. But because the DOS operating system is less complex and powerful, the apps may have to do more complex stuff themselves. Or you would have to install and configure more drivers and tools manually, while the complex operating system would have included plug and play mechanisms. DOS does not include graphical infrastructure either, so all sorts of graphical output will only be available for apps which include the infrastructure in themselves. A DOS app cannot expect Gnome, Unity or similar convenient frameworks to be provided by DOS. It can only bundle itself with some libraries to draw buttons, forms etc. from scratch.

You will not find a Firefox, Thunderbird or LibreOffice for DOS: Those all require a complex and powerful operating system as a foundation to do some of the hard work for them.

Alas, complexity always stays complex in one way or the other ;-)

---
FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...

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