Please don't blame FreeDOS for beeing incompatible with GEOS in general!
At least not from my experience. There were some versions (I think it was 1.1) that failed to run GEOS because of an issue in the FreeDOS kernel. But using kernel 2042 it run verry well on many of my Igel thin clients. Jim Hall and the other developers of FreeDOS are trying the same as we - to improv the way it runs on modern hardware. This unfortunately can breake compatibibility with existing hard or software sometimes. But this is the same with FreeGEOS where the improved VGA16 driver produces false colors on e.g. the famous Matrox Millenium graphics card. But no one complains about, because we all love how it supports modern high resolution, wide screen displays.
Last year I spent hours to find out why GEOS crashed on FreeDOS 1.3 installed on the Asus EeePC. It was the stacs=0,0 setting they had removed from the default config.sys, but not an incompatibility in general!
Back in the 90ties we all played a lot with different DOS configurations to find out what worked best und still benefit from that knowledge. I think that's the reason why it's sometimes easier to go with DR/NW/MS-DOS. And so do I when setting up an old Pentium I system. But then I also go with NewDeal Office because it was the probaly most stable and polished version of GEOS.
The future is FreeDOS&GEOS because annicent 90ties hardware becomes more and more rare and expentive and some development is required to fully support more modern and still available hardware. The AC97 sound card driver developed recently is good example for great progress in this regards but it also relies on a more modern version of the JEMM386 DOS memory manager....
Thomas