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Add to SafariWhen comparing Tails vs FreeDOS, the Slant community recommends Tails for most people. In the question“What is the best laptop OS?” Tails is ranked 34th while FreeDOS is ranked 43rd.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Privacy focused
Pro Has TOR built-in
Use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship; all connections to the Internet are forced to go through the Tor network.
Pro Easy to use with an USB key
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 Not for daily use
Tails is a privacy focused Linux distro. The updates that you will receive are only for improving privacy and not for improving user experience.
Con You can't install it to a hard drive
Con Saved states are not present for security
For security reasons, saved states are not supported in Tails. Files can be stored in a separate, persistent volume which must be accessed with a root password. Personal settings (e.g. -- keyboard layout, window settings, etc.) are not saved persistently across reboots. This can be a hindrance for anyone not using English as their language, or not using a QWERTY keyboard layout.
Con Only GNOME desktop environment
Con Slow internet
Tails uses the TOR network and as a result the internet on your computer will be very slow.
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.
