DOS ain't dead

> From a desktop system to be useful for me, I'd need to use:
> 1- email
> 2- office documents
> 3- pdf
> 4- web stuff/ banking/ purchase orders/ assessing some other services and
> resources
> 5- print to a Brother MFC-J430W printer
> 6- scan from the same device (or optionally from a Acer flatbed if it's
> fine)
> 7- photos (save, convert, rename)
> 8- videos (save, convert, rename)
> 9- save photos and videos to DVDs as a backup
> 10- programming
> 11- listen to music
> 12- watching youtube (and other platform) videos
Most on your list are solved in DOS. Assuming you have a compatible packetdrive and NIC card which works in DOS, there are e-mail readers, web browsers (Arachne, Dillo, links port, etc
For 2, there's Blocek by our very own Laaca, for 3, there's mupdf and other PDR readers for DOS.
Printing is a bit harder, unless you've got a printer with a parallel port, but even if it's usb-only, it may be possible to get it working through one of Bret's DOS USB drivers. Scanning I don't think is possible from DOS, perhaps only through old LPT-based scanner (which would be extremely slow, of course).
7,8,9 are covered. You've got tons of great photo viewers / converters (Display, nconvert, SEA, neopaint, our newly-minted commandline utility for JPEG2000 just discussed below will even support "modern" JP2 format in DOS.
Videos through the great DOS Mplayer port. CDBurning / DVD through the DOS ports of DosCDroast. You of course need DOS ASPI driver and CDROM drivers (many of those exist).
10 -- lots of great stuff, including a DOS port of Python, FreeBasic, lots of ASM variants, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, etc
11- many fabulous options. Now we have stupenduous SBEMU program which gives sound to modern PCI-chipsets in bare metal DOS, emulating Sound Blaster 16 and lots of great players, such as Mpxplay, Quickview 2.61, OpenMPT, LAME for MP3 conversion, .FLAC support (ports), etc.

So, DOS is indeed usable for lots of "modern" work. I use it every day for all of the above (including playing a few games!). It's a great system for emulators as well. Many are represented.

Look at this page with many useful DOS programs.
http://dosprograms.info.tt/indexall.htm

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DOS-u-akbar!

> 4- web stuff/ banking/ purchase orders/ assessing some other services and
> resources

Well, any website requiring JavaScript will be a no-go in DOS

> 12- watching youtube (and other platform) videos
>

Also a no-go in DOS for the same reason... JavaScript.

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http://glennmcc.org/

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

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FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...

> Hi,
>
> I'm feeling exhaust with all the complexity of the *nixes,

while all of your washing list might be achievable in DOS, achieving even a single item (with the possible exception of "programming") will be significant more complex the your complex *nix which can do all of this.

edited to add:
what is probably even worse is that you can't google for "how do I create a PDF in DOS" or "how do I listen music in DOS". (Actually you can google this, but get no reasonable results).

replace DOS with UBUNTU (or windows) and you get tons of sensible advice.

I too wondered about "would it be possible to use DOS as a daily driver?" in the past.
Honestly I think it's more of a novelty thing than anything else. These days it's easier to find an old machine that runs a Linux based OS, than an old enough machine that runs DOS based OS. Ahahah.

Anyway, I do like to revisit that thought from times to times and there are some interesting ideas I can throw your way:


Regarding social media, if you just want to access posts of other people, these are great days to be alive. Nitter, Teddit, Invidious, Proxigram, all these make it possible to access without JS or even modern HTML5. Quetre even allows to access Quora answers if that is interesting for your work, and SearxNG will give good web search results. I recommend Links in graphics mode.

If you want to actually post stuff, I remember there was a twitter client named Quitter, a Mastodon client that I can't remember the name, and there was even a ChatGPT client that could run on DOS.

As for watching video, I recommend www.phr.ee or other AllTubeDownload instance still running to get the MP4 file and using QuickView or MPlayer to watch them.

I never heard of an RSS client for DOS but there are RSS2Email solutions around. And you can use www.danwin1210.de/mail for accessing SquirrelMail webmail interface, works well with Links.

Hope this helps.


> Hi,
>
> I'm feeling exhaust with all the complexity of the *nixes, dislike Windows
> as a user is not the owner of the system, and won't buy anything from
> Apple.
> My hope is on other systems, like Haiku, Serenity, others and... DOS.
>
> I don't play games, so games are out of consideration.
> From a desktop system to be useful for me, I'd need to use:
> 1- email
> 2- office documents
> 3- pdf
> 4- web stuff/ banking/ purchase orders/ assessing some other services and
> resources
> 5- print to a Brother MFC-J430W printer
> 6- scan from the same device (or optionally from a Acer flatbed if it's
> fine)
> 7- photos (save, convert, rename)
> 8- videos (save, convert, rename)
> 9- save photos and videos to DVDs as a backup
> 10- programming
> 11- listen to music
> 12- watching youtube (and other platform) videos
>
> For printing and scanning, the support from Brother has no DOS drivers, the
> furthest on the Windows line is for Windows XP 32 bits.
>
> Regarding programming, I found Tcl/Tk as the simple tool that fits my
> brain.
> Could also consider returning to Pascal that I don't use since my youth.
> I could also try Cobol, one of the hated languages from the computer
> (complex) "science" world. And could do the same for Forth.
>
> So, my question is. What could I achieve from DOS with all the modern
> tools available?
> There's surely a lot to learn, only for memory there's extended, high, and
> some other modes.
>
> Another question: what kind of "modern" work (not games) do you use DOS
> for?
>
> Thank you.