Many industrial users are not price sensitive. Having the keyboard, monitor, and computer in a single housing with a built-in UPS all in a compact device with a single power cord is a big selling point.
But if you use DOS still for industrial stuff you usually do it because you need some old-fashioned interface (i.e. real serial or parallel ports are the usual example). Which is going to work great from inside a VM, not.
Having worked in this world, I have sometimes patched DOSBox to communicate with all types of extravagant hardware, even ISA cards (look hard enough and you'll find even Core motherboards with ISA slots...).
I’m guessing they’re doing this because modern x86 processors can’t boot into BIOS mode anymore (edit: untrue, see reply by dmitrygr). This makes me wonder why they’re even offering FreeDOS as an option when they offer Linux for customers who don’t wish to purchase a Windows license. Maybe they have some sort of contractual obligation with a large customer?
The big market for this is K-12 schools. Microsoft has a licensing program for .edu that doesn’t require an “embedded” hardware license. There are also many places using Neverware to provide Chrome desktops while using the some warranty services, etc that they have with PCs. If you buy alot of computers, you can get desktops crazy cheap. Big enterprise buyers get low-spec desktops for ~$225 without windows or $300 wi…
Some countries have consumer protection laws that require that a factory-assembled computer must come with an OS. This whole FreeDOS thing feels like malicious compliance to me just to have something so it doesn't boot into a BIOS error. Though I've assumed that FreeDOS runs on bare metal. This whole Linux-with-a-VM feels strange, to say the least.
It's not malicious compliance. It's for power-users who already own or don't want to own a copy of Windows. It's a good thing that we (where I live) fought hard for - fortunately here it wasn't about laws but only about available options, so lobbying the vendors and sellers was enough.
But they also offer Linux. In fact they already ship you Linux when you order the FreeDOS option. Why the extra effort?
Shipping your PC with "some linux distro" means you have to support that linux distro. Selling it with freedos, you only have to support freedos, and people who buy that option will install something else anyway.
> Shipping your PC with "some linux distro" means you have to support that linux distro. But they do offer to ship with a Linux distro, even apart from this strange frankensystem option. Did you miss where straight Ubuntu is a pre-install option?
You are. (Weird that is). I find OEMs that bundle operating systems to be weird. Dictating choice is something a dictatorship would do. I used to argue the reasoning until the obscurities hit.
You may be able to buy a laptop with no OS and know what to do, but do the majority of people? It’s not evil; it’s just what’s required if you want to sell computers.
> Shipping your PC with "some linux distro" means you have to support that linux distro. But they do offer to ship with a Linux distro, even apart from this strange frankensystem option. Did you miss where straight Ubuntu is a pre-install option?
Yes and they charge for that, so that's consistent with what the parent comment said.
I don't know if the law changed in the last years but here (Spain) it's illegal to sell a computer without a operative system.
Today the most easy option probably is to install Linux but I remember this law was there at year 2000 and at that time Linux was harder to install than FreeDOS.
Alternatively, we can be happy that some legacy systems actually die when they're no longer useful. My general attitude toward retro-computing is that the good old days weren't actually that good. I, for one, don't care if the original meaning of "PC" passes into irrelevance.
Hell no. We're being pushed into draconian closed systems, this is starting to infect the PC, and it's only because there's little opposition.
As if BIOS is any more open than UEFI is. At least UEFI had an open reference implementation since the beginning. BIOS had to be reverse engineered from IBM's implementation AFAIR.
Besides, two wrongs don't make one right. BIOS was a clutch from the beginning (it was probably appropriate for the time tho) and we should strive for better. We should keep functional systems working of course (e-waste is a real problem), but we shouldn't keep using it for the new stuff because we see the past with rose tinted glasses.
Rather than push for the past we should push for the future, for having all boards ship Coreboot and have that support upstream instead. That's how you achieve openness, not by sticking to _proprietary blobs_ of an outdated interface.
The big market for this is K-12 schools. Microsoft has a licensing program for .edu that doesn’t require an “embedded” hardware license. There are also many places using Neverware to provide Chrome desktops while using the some warranty services, etc that they have with PCs. If you buy alot of computers, you can get desktops crazy cheap. Big enterprise buyers get low-spec desktops for ~$225 without windows or $300 wi…
Ok, but why the hell FreeDOS?
Why FreeDOS vs nothing or why FreeDOS vs Linux?
The former, because some OEMs have agreements with Microsoft that prohibit shipping systems without an OS. They found the loophole that they could ship a free OS as a placeholder.
Why not Linux? I guess it was easier at the time and they then just kept shipping what was already working. It was never intended to keep the original OS anyway (and in particular, Linux users tend to be opinionated and install their favorite distro anyway).