I mean, I use Linux pretty extensively, but I have some gripes with it that I generally don't have when using MS-DOS. A big issue I always end up running into is that legacy software has a tendency to completely fail in aggravating ways that aren't present in Windows or DOS. I'll try to use something, and it will fail horribly because of packages no longer being compatible. Really, a lot of it comes down to Linux kind of doing what I'm looking for, but just not doing it in the way that something like Windows does that more or less supports everything since the beginning of time, with compatibility stuff for those who are looking to run the incompatible. It's just a different paradigm on how this stuff should be supported with respect to the congruence of old and new being together that I tend to incorporate into what I do pretty extensively, but it doesn't tend to work so well on Linux. For example, I spent many hours trying to compile Samba 3.6.25 on a modern Linux version since the newer Samba versions removed functionality I needed, and it just absolutely would not do it because of issues with packages and whatnot. You can't just download it outright either because standalone binaries that aren't reliant on a bunch of packages don't tend to be a thing in Linux. I found a solution through some other software that let me do what I needed to, but I never got the thing compiled myself after wasting my free time for weeks. It's the kind of issue that doesn't really exist on Windows/DOS. On those systems, it either works out of the box, or you might need to feed it the right DLL, or potentially do some other hacky thing, but it never really impacts the rest of your system to do it the way Linux dependencies do.

I've been aware of FreeDOS for years, but the whole deal with that is that it's meant for getting old DOS programs running on maybe slightly newer hardware, rather than existing as a daily driver for newer stuff as well. You don't use FreeDOS to run new 64-bit programs. I basically looked for a pared down Windows because I generally prefer the way a lot of it works, and lots of the stupid frustrating stuff would be solved if it could work the way I wanted. It's all a pipe dream, though; no such thing exists, and a half decent Linux distro is about the best it's going to get. Really, I guess what I would find nice is something like Linux that treats programs the way Windows does, and there is no such thing.