Hi

Ralf makes a very interesting and important point here, especially as it
reminds me of my idealistic and somewhat overconfident self from 1993. Like
many people back in the day I thought I was a l33t hax0r after three years
of dabbling with Turbo-Pascal, Turbo-C and even some assembler. So,
naturally, I started to make grand plans to write a proper GUI for DOS.
Sadly, those grand plans consisted of starting up the IDE and get cracking.
Things like proper planning, defining interfaces - in my 1993 delusions of
grandeur that was for wimps. Needless to say; I went very fast, very
straight, nowhere when it became apparent that such an undertaking is, to
use a technical term, a s**tload of work.

And that was my thinking behind it. Writing yet another nondescript GUI
would be sort of pointless. The main strength of FreeDOS is its ability to
keep legacy software alive. But by definition there's no legacy software
available for a GUI that's written in 2020. Getting close to a free Windows
3 clone however would be a perfect continuation of a project that keeps
legacy stuff around. And more importantly, with the wine project there is
already a solid foundation on which such a project could be based.

Cheers, Danilo

On Mon, 28 Dec 2020 at 00:08, Ralf Quint <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 12/27/2020 11:10 AM, Jim Hall wrote:
>
>
> The challenge we've had is lots of developers have wanted to create a GUI
> for FreeDOS, but then they get halfway through building one before they
> realize it's a lot of work. And then the project gets dropped. That leaves
> us with things like SEAL and oZone that look cool - until you look more
> closely and find a bunch of features that don't work. Or it hogs memory. Or
> whatever. And that brings us to the conversation we started here some weeks
> ago about removing some stale packages, like SEAL and oZone. I don't want
> to get into another situation like that.
>
> Well, that is the problem with all of those GUI attempts. Some people have
> grand ideas and start to create some nice colored pictures but none of them
> is seriously thinking about (before they start coding!) on all the basics
> "behind the scenes", to make things really work and being useful.
> And when you point this out to them, they quickly get all defensive and
> pissy...
>
> IMHO, anyone who is REALLY interested to get  a working GUI for FreeDOS
> working, should much rather looking into participating in getting (Open)GEM
> a little bit more up to date.
>
> Ralf
>
>
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