FreeDOS 1.3 Released

FreeDOS 1.3 was released on February 20, 2022, roughly five years after 1.2 — the same steady, unhurried release cadence the project has followed since reaching its first 1.0 release in 2006.

What this release included

FreeDOS 1.3 refreshed the distribution’s core package set, continuing to prioritize broad DOS API compatibility and support for both legacy real hardware and modern virtualization environments — by this point, running FreeDOS inside QEMU, VirtualBox, or VMware for development, testing, or firmware-flashing use cases had become at least as common as running it on genuinely old physical hardware.

Why FreeDOS releases keep shipping at all

By 2022, MS-DOS itself had been out of active commercial development for decades, and the practical demand for a DOS-compatible environment had narrowed to a specific set of use cases: BIOS and firmware flashing utilities that still ship as DOS executables, legacy industrial and embedded control systems, and a retrocomputing community actively interested in real-mode PC computing. FreeDOS 1.3’s continued development reflects that demand hasn’t disappeared — it’s simply become more specialized than it was in the era when DOS was the default PC operating system.

What followed

Development continued past 1.3 toward FreeDOS 1.4, released some years later, maintaining the same multi-year cadence and the same core commitment — DOS API compatibility, an open-source and freely redistributable license, and active maintenance — that has defined the project since Jim Hall’s original 1994 proposal.

Sources: FreeDOS 1.3 : The FreeDOS Project — Internet Archive, Releases/1.3 — FreeDOS Wiki