Graphical user interfaces for DOS were a dime-a-dozen back in the ’90s, but of course faded into irrelevance as time went on. But what if you still run DOS today, and want a maintained graphical shell instead of the rather limited DOS command line?

Costa is a small and lightweight application which runs on top of MS-DOS or compatible operating systems. It replaces the DOS-prompt with a clean, user-friendly interface – a so-called GUI (Graphical User Interface). Costa comes packed with a bunch of useful accessories and can be used with or without a mouse.

Developed by Jacob Palm, a Danish IT-professional and hobby developer, the first release of Costa came way back in 2004. Over the years – and through several releases – Costa has gradually evolved into what it is today, with new releases still coming out regularly as of 2025.

↫ Costa website

Costa comes bundled with a number of useful utilities, a few games, and useful features like a desktop with custom icons, virtual desktop support, a file selector, and much more. The latest release, version 1.8.0, was released in late 2024, and should run on just about any IBM PC-compatible, but a 386 is recommended. It’s been tested with a variety of DOS flavours, including FreeDOS ad DOSBox, so it should run pretty much anywhere.

Ubuntu 26.10 has landed.

Ubuntu 26.10 brings significant progress for security, and strengthens the platform with the full adoption of Rust-based coreutils, post-quantum-ready package signing, and expanded TPM-backed full-disk encryption support. Enterprise authentication gains deeper integration with Microsoft Entra ID, including password and multi-factor authentication. Linux kernel 7.3 extends support for the latest hardware, alongside new RISC-V desktop images and optimized amd64v3 installation images.

↫ Ubuntu 26.10 release announcement

Of course, it comes with the latest version of GNOME, and the whole family of Ubuntu variants focusing on other desktops have also been updated. While I doubt many people here run Ubuntu, it’s still quite popular, and serves as the base for countless other distributions.