I used GEOS unironically in high school. I had two 1541 floppy drives which really cut down on the disk swapping and I was able to do productive work. Ultimately I used my employee discount to upgrade to a Tandy 1000 TL that would boot into DeskMate from ROM and took it to college, leaving the C64 in the dust. I still have all the stuff but not the time.
GUI64 does not use the VIC-II’s bitmap graphics mode, but operates in text mode. GUI64 is therefore character set–based... Strictly speaking, GUI64 should therefore be considered not a GUI, but a TUI (Text User Interface).
Currently, there are no applications for GUI64.
So, it is a file manager, inferior to an orthodox file manager. It supports the mouse, and it can launch BASIC. If you like your KERNAL ROM, you can keep your KERNAL ROM.
I never ran GEOS. I saw it advertised, and it seemed fascinating, but perhaps "too early". I had become fluent in BASIC and proficient at the command line. I could decipher the DOS commands and device IDs. For me, time spent on the Commodore 64 was programming, or in a game or application, rather than pushing files/objects around on the desktop.
Related, Contiki OS is good inspiration and a really cool: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=8197&show=summary
Open Source and available on github. The old web site seems to be down which is a bit of a shame.
Too bad it's not open source.
("NC" creative commons)
How much memory will be free for apps ?
One word: GEOS
GEOS comes with its own ROM and bypasses the Commodore 64 "Kernal". This one is a GUI that runs on existing ROM.
I used GEOS unironically in high school. I had two 1541 floppy drives which really cut down on the disk swapping and I was able to do productive work. Ultimately I used my employee discount to upgrade to a Tandy 1000 TL that would boot into DeskMate from ROM and took it to college, leaving the C64 in the dust. I still have all the stuff but not the time.
ContikiOS!
Limitations:
So, it is a file manager, inferior to an orthodox file manager. It supports the mouse, and it can launch BASIC. If you like your KERNAL ROM, you can keep your KERNAL ROM.I never ran GEOS. I saw it advertised, and it seemed fascinating, but perhaps "too early". I had become fluent in BASIC and proficient at the command line. I could decipher the DOS commands and device IDs. For me, time spent on the Commodore 64 was programming, or in a game or application, rather than pushing files/objects around on the desktop.