> Twenty years ago this week, as Microsoft announced that it would end support for the MS-DOS operating system, James Hall announced to the world that he intended to create a public domain version of the OS in order to keep the universe of character-based DOS software alive. Hall’s “PD-DOS” project eventually became FreeDOS, which today supports an ecosystem of developers, retro gamers, and diehards who will give up their WordStar when you pry the floppies from their cold, dead fingers.. WordStar, George R.R. Martin's favorite word processor, also runs happily in FreeDOS.
I've installed Asahi on my Mac and so far have been happily computing with the following
Emacs
Firefox
foot (terminal)
swaywm (and the associated utilities)
KeepassXC (password management)
mpd (music)
calibre (ebooks)
mpv (for the few local videos I still watch on my computer)
evince (for pdfs)
various cli utilities
What I like about these is how consistent it is. No sneaky updates that shuffle things around (I don't mind learning new stuff, but I don't like to have my workflows break for no sensible reason). If WordStar was everything I needed, I wouldn't want Office 365 either.
My personal software setup is almost identical :D. The only differences are: I use EMMS in Emacs for music, pdf-tools in Emacs for PDFs, and I also use mpv for remote videos (with pipe-viewer for YouTube).
I have spent more than a decade now working to GPL-ize as much of my stack as possible, carefully evaluating and picking my tools, and what you touch on is huge: a consistent, reliable, small footprint stack that is easily auditable is a bigger deal than people realize.
(2014) https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/07/dos-b...
> Twenty years ago this week, as Microsoft announced that it would end support for the MS-DOS operating system, James Hall announced to the world that he intended to create a public domain version of the OS in order to keep the universe of character-based DOS software alive. Hall’s “PD-DOS” project eventually became FreeDOS, which today supports an ecosystem of developers, retro gamers, and diehards who will give up their WordStar when you pry the floppies from their cold, dead fingers.. WordStar, George R.R. Martin's favorite word processor, also runs happily in FreeDOS.