On 4/29/21 4:57 PM, 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.
I'm not particularly attached to any particular GUI, or to having a GUI in FreeDOS per-se, but I'm a bit concerned, in terms of preserving historical software, that the Win16 API is not well served by existing options (Wine, NTVDM, MS-DOS/Win3 under virtualization, Win3 under DOSBox, etc), compared to the resources that are available for DOS, so I'd really like to see something I'll call "Free-point-one", a FOSS implementation of Win16 built on FreeDOS. I imagine that you probably regard it as out of scope for FreeDOS, and in any case it's late for such a project to get started, but given the history of the Win16 API, it's a very DOS-adjacent problem, if you know what I mean.
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