I don't know if I ever heard of XFDOS. The screenshots look promising, I'll have to check that out. Apparently it comes with Dillo, so, the web should be browsable. Even has a media player. If it could stream videos with yt-dlp, it would be pretty usable, actually.

But yeah, I'm still looking for my definitive setup. I have been doing some tests to figure out why the fuck everything is so heavy. Why even programs from the 90s now use more RAM than entire OSs used in the 90s. I want to reduce RAM usage. Would be nice to build everything with -Os, but I'm not going to use Gentoo, because I'm only willing to build my system occasionally, not every other week. FreeBSD may be good, but it doesn't support -Os.

Also, I want a system that doesn't change, for the most part. Even Debian changes too much for my tastes. And I want backwards compatibility, something that MAYBE Guix and Nix can do, but maybe appimages will be able to do as well (I think they still depend on glibc, and can still break from that being updated). Apparently Guix has this "guix pack" thing, that works similarly, and Nix has something like that as well. No idea how good Nix and Guix are for building packages from source. FreeBSD has the clear advantage there, because of the ports collection, and it also seems to just play nicer with older programs in general, and Nix does work on it. On the Linux side, Crux is one distribution that also has a ports collection. It's probably the biggest source-based distribution that isn't rolling-release. I guess I could also install Slackware and then just rebuild the things that I want, maybe, and then never fuck with them again because it's Slackware, it won't be updated again before the world ends.

Anyway, backwards compatibility may be particularly useful to keep GTK2 programs alive as they are abandoned and maybe break. GTK2 is probably the best toolkit overall. It can actually be themed, and has way cooler themes than anything else, and I have loosely compared it to FLTK, and it doesn't seem like there is much of a performance difference.