Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing macOS vs FreeDOS, the Slant community recommends macOS for most people. In the question“What is the best laptop OS?” macOS is ranked 25th while FreeDOS is ranked 43rd. The most important reason people chose macOS is:
The UI of Mac OS is rather unrivaled. The smooth, responsive, and cohesive UI makes the system quite joyous to use.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Polished UI
The UI of Mac OS is rather unrivaled. The smooth, responsive, and cohesive UI makes the system quite joyous to use.
Pro Easy access to lots of great dev tools
There's a large selection of great development tools available for OSX. The operating system itself comes bundled with a powerful terminal emulator, called Terminal. Additionally, Apple provides tools, like Xcode, an IDE that contains a comprehensive collection of tools for developing OSX and iOS software, for free.
Pro Based on Unix
macOS being a UNIX certified system means that you can install a lot more stuff with a lot fewer headaches than if you were on Windows.
Pro Powerful terminal
It's very similar to a Linux terminal.
Pro Best support for Objective-C
Pro More commercial software and gaming support compared to other Unix systems
Adobe CC, MS Office, Steam games.
Pro Has many special tools for developers
Has support for multiple IDEs.
Pro Lots of open-source software available
Because it's Unix under the fancy GUI, most open source ports easily to it.
Pro Ideal setup, out of the box
Next to no custom configuration is necessary.
Pro Great Git GUI tools
Tower, Kaleidoscope, SourceTree.
Pro Has software that only runs on Mac
For example, Sketch.
Pro Streamlined workflow between devices
Because this is an Apple product, there is a streamlined workflow between your computer and all mobile devices. For example, if you type an a Pages document, once you save, you can open the updated document just moments later on your iPad, and vice versa. The same goes for iMessage, (yes, you can text people with your phone number from your computer. Actually, you can text other people with apple devices with just your Apple ID, with or without a phone number, for free!) Numbers, Notes, Reminders, Contacts, and just about any other Apple workflow application.
Pro Great modifier key layout
Pro Using VMware you can also run Windows 10 on the Mac
This is useful for testing and some development tools that are Windows-only (XML Spy, MapForce).
Pro You need it to compile macOS or iOS apps
Pro Open Source
GNU GPL
Pro Large and friendly community
You won't be let alone, any question submitted on FreeDOS forums will be detailedly answered in a few hours time.
Pro Compatible with MS-DOS apps
Pro Supports FAT32 partition
As opposite to every MS-DOS version equal or older than 6.22, or any DR-DOS version, you won't be restricted by a 2 Gb large FAT16 partition.
Pro Highly portable OS
It takes ten minutes to make a portable, USB FreeDOS drive, All you need is a USB device FAT or FAT32 formatted (128 Mb should be enough, but a 2 GB device would be better). First make a FreeDOS bootable USB drive with a program like Rufus (on Windows) or UnetBootin (on linux or Mac). Select it at boot and run fdisk to make a Primary DOS partition and install FreeDOS on it. Final step: reboot and run fdisk again to make the new partition active (optional: delete the installer partition). After that, the system is ready to boot with any computer.
Pro Extremely lightweight
Takes less than 10 seconds to boot.
Pro Easy to dual-boot, either with any Linux distro or Windows
If you install a Linux distro after Freedos, GRUB2 will automatically detect it. As for Windows, newer EasyBCD releases implemented FreeDOS and automatically recognize it.
Cons
Con Expensive
OSX is tied Apple hardware and Apple hardware tends to be expensive for what it gives.
Con Limited hardware
Usually, the hardware that can run this can't be upgraded.
Con Most software is closed source
For people who like to use open source tools for their development work, this may be a problem. There's plenty of advantages to open source software, one of which is the ability to tinker with and customize the tools themselves that you are using. Although there's plenty of FOSS tools available for Mac, especially through Homebrew, the number of packages available is much lower than the number of packages available for any Linux distribution.
Con Closed source
Mac OS is closed source itself, which means that it is developed more slowly and has more problems.
Con No native package management
A comparison of package managers available for OSX can be found here.
Con Poor application support
Fewer apps run on Mac OS than on Windows or Linux.
Con Bash version is obsolete
macOS comes with an obsolete version of Bash, due to licensing issues.
Con Vendor-Lock-in
You are now forced to use the Apple services.
Con Silly modifier keys layout
The Command key is strange, Alt is where Super should be.
Con Poor X11 integration
The most open source software does work but is very poorly integrated due apples ancient version of the X-server.
Con Very few options for running hosted, on the cloud
Con Too little customization options
Con Touchbar on Macbook Pro's
Con Not very user-friendly
Con Unlikely going to be your PC main OS
If looking for a lightweight OS, and thinking of FreeDOS as a possible option, consider that it will only useful when having to deal with legacy software, or other dos-based programs still commonly used at workplaces. Nonetheless it's a fantastic solution for Retro-Gamers who still own a a supported sound card. However the lack of modern software makes it hard to accomplish common everyday tasks, such us opening a document written in UTF-8, not mentioning, obviously docx and pdf files. The best choice is to install it on a USB drive, in order to have a portable OS, with basic hardware and all your files (and if you want games) ready to be launched with every machine. Useful to edit partitions, as well as restore MBR, check errors, install a light bootmanager on any kind of FAT partiton of every IDE-mode compatible hard-disk.
Con Obvious lack of sound card drivers
If you own a sound card produced after than 2000, you won't find a driver to make it work.
