>I suspect HP could(and do it appears) get away with a minimal console only linux install for their firmware flashing needs. but the long tail of low level dos

>I suspect HP could(and do it appears) get away with a minimal console only linux install for their firmware flashing needs. but the long tail of low level dos tooling for the PC world is still hanging on. Historically, the FreeDOS option existed because Microsoft banned OEMs who sold computers with Windows from also selling computers without an operating system because they thought it would encourage software piracy. OEMs didn't want to have to provide end-user support for Linux or other alternative OS's, so they instead decided on FreeDOS since it qualified as an OS, but was basic enough that nobody would actually use it. Before anyone mentions old industrial/scientific equipment, that stuff all depends on hardware ISA cards or physical parallel/serial ports so it's irrelevant on a prebuilt computer made in the past 20 years. I'm not sure why FreeDOS is offered here since there's also an Ubuntu option for people who don't want to pay for a Windows license. In this case, because the FreeDOS installation is inside a VM, it won't let you do BIOS updates or whatever since the VM doesn't have access to the computer's physical hardware. I imagine what happened was that HP had a hard drive image they'd been loading on PCs since the early 2010s set up to dual-boot FreeDOS and a Debian kiosk installation with the digital manual. Someone at HP was tasked with making the image work on newer computers that didn't have firmware support for booting in BIOS mode, so they came up with the solution of booting up a copy of Debian that then auto-starts a FreeDOS VM.