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Costa 1.0

by Jacob Palm

Speed & Stability

I ran into zero stability issues with Costa, and it run very fast. I'm sure that even the oldest of machines would run it fine.

Entertainment Applications

Costa includes a tic-tac-toe game that works very well, I could easily see it taking up some time.

Productivity Applications

Costa includes a calculator, an icon editor, and a text viewer.

File Management

Although Costa doesn't have a separate file manager, it is possible to set file associations through the GUI config tool.

Bells & Whistles

Costa is full of bells and whistles, for example it has a basic text-based configuration application in case you need to relocate Costa on your hard drive. It also manages to fit on a floppy disk and the pop-up dialogs can be manipulated without using the mouse. On top of that everything is documented very well, which is pretty rare in a GUI.

Multitasking

This GUI doesn't have this feature.

Launcher

The launcher is where Costa really shines. Costa is meant to be a great desktop for a DOS based system, and it truly is, however I'd like to see a way to create shortcuts without having to type out the entire location of the executable.

Customization

Costa is pretty customizable, it has a number of different themes to choose from, and it's easy to select them in the GUI based configuration program.

Final

Costa is very polished and does what it does well. It's a very competent desktop launcher. If you want tons of applications look elsewhere. If you want a desktop that'll hold your hand through finding where a program is, look elsewhere. But if you want a fast, polished, easy to use desktop, look no further.

2021 Brandon Cornell