According to the article, they already do have a Linux option.
I’d wager the FreeDOS is a legacy option because they’ve supported it in the past an figures have shown it sells. Even if those figures don’t take into account how many of those legacy FreeDOS installs were for other alternative OS like Linux (though it could also be BSD, Haiku, Illumos, ReactOS or others).
Or there genuinely might still be FreeDOS users out there. Eg running industrial applications. Though I’d wager they’d be more likely to run DosBox and not on laptops either. But “industrial applications” covers such a wide spectrum of uses so never say never.
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.
That's not a universal truth. I've worked with plenty who are.
> 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.
That's not a universal truth either. Sometimes the device will be a headless controller. In which case a laptop wouldn't always the right form factor. There might be additional hardware that needs supporting, which can be much more complicated with laptops. There might be other requirements (eg environmental constraints) too.
"Industrial" covers a pretty large spectrum of use cases.
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’d wager the FreeDOS is a legacy option because they’ve supported it in the past an figures have shown it sells. Even if those figures don’t take into account how many of those legacy FreeDOS installs were for other alternative OS like Linux (though it could also be BSD, Haiku, Illumos, ReactOS or others).
Or there genuinely might still be FreeDOS users out there. Eg running industrial applications. Though I’d wager they’d be more likely to run DosBox and not on laptops either. But “industrial applications” covers such a wide spectrum of uses so never say never.