However, and you are free to disagree, in achieving the goal of becoming the ubiquitous one-size fits all solution for most people's computing needs, a lot of clever ideas have been packed into a system built on an architecture that in any sane universe would have been drowned at birth.
Can you give me some examples? Every clever or interesting thing I can think of about PCs got stamped out in standards transitions.
And the fact that it all works is very interesting.
No it isn't. A machine being in a state of proper function is a fine thing, but that doesn't make it
interesting.Also, you mentioned just a handful of "uninteresting" operating systems. There are literally dozens of esoteric operating systems for PC hardware. MenuetOS was the last one I played with; an esoteric OS for people that want to write everything in assembler.
What I said was "there aren't any interesting options
that aren't stuck in perpetual beta." Or, more fairly to some of them, "that have enough of a software base to be generally useful." MenuetOS is neat as hell, I agree - it's just that when it comes to stuff you can use for your day-to-day computing needs, people are often stuck with the big, boring players that aren't very good but aren't bad enough to keep them from being the standards.
Don't get me wrong, the Amiga will always be my favourite, but I don't get the need to rant about perceived shortcomings of PC's in 2012. It's like raging about the inadequacies of your fridge or TV set.
Well, I can't speak for Iggy, but there's a couple reasons this often feels rant-worthy. First and foremost, 'round here, is the group of people who, despite being members of an Amiga forum, and typically professing to
like the Amiga, respond to any thread about next-gen Amigoid systems, exercises in pushing the boundaries on classic Amigas, attempts to "switch over" to next-gen or classic Amigas for daily-driver use, hypotheticals about where the Amiga might have gone, or threads about the weather with ritual chanting of "THERE IS ONLY AND SHALL EVER MORE BE ONLY X86, DECLARED THE ONE TRUE ARCHITECTURE BY GOD HIMSELF THROUGH HIS PROPHET DON ESTRIDGE, BOW DOWN AND WORSHIP, O YE IGNORANT HEATHENS!" Often with an added chaser of "and anyway the Amiga was totally crap because it couldn't play
Doom unexpanded, I don't know why you people here on an Amiga forum seem to like it so much."
But even aside from that specific annoyance, the whole attitude that "PCs are meant to be identical and boring" is pretty frustrating. It didn't
used to be that way; people used to be interested in computers for their own sake, and consequently computers used to be really interesting. Back in the day, there was a veritable
menagerie of quirky, interesting little systems to choose from - or you could use a common backplane standard to play mix-and-match in a way that modern PCs don't even
begin to approach.
Then the IBM PC came along and triggered a mass extinction event; a few survivors hung behind or thrived in specialty markets for a while, but eventually it was just PCs as far as the eye could see. Even that wasn't so bad, back when PCs still had some interesting features, but that creeping homogeneity has all but completely overtaken the world of personal computing by now. Even
Macs are PCs now! Hell, the most diversity we've had in
years has been due to the hesitant, not-yet-fruitful dalliance of ARM hardware from the smartphone market with laptop form factors.
Some folks here remember those earlier days with fondness. Some of us weren't around for them, but
wish we'd been. In either case, we're maybe not so gung-ho about standards and interoperability that we wouldn't like to see
some variety in the market again - and you don't even need to want that to think that the IBM PC-compatible architecture is looking pretty icky after thirty years of progressive kludges. You can talk about how great standards are all you want, and I'm not going to claim you don't have a point, but it's like arguing that dinosaurs were just too big and inefficient and it's their own fault that they didn't survive changing climate conditions, for being too dependent on a predation cycle based around lush, plentiful vegetation - that may be true, but you're missing the point that dinosaurs were
hella cool in a way that very few mammals are.
