Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: mlankton on June 28, 2009, 01:59:03 PM
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I'm a operating system enthusiast. I've been a NeXT guy since early 1997, using OPENSTEP 4.2 on my primary workstation from 1997-2002, when I bought my first Power Mac, and I've been using OS X since. I usually have a FreeBSD box around as well, and have spent considerable time with linux, Be and Solaris over the years as well.
I have had a strong compulsion toward Amiga OS 4 and MorphOS ever since I first started reading about them, years ago. I have never shelled out the money for a box that would run either, because I couldn't justify the expense. It's hard to get approval from finance (the wife) for things like this after kids come along.
I am really jonesing for a sam440 so I can run OS 4, and I am hoping now that Genesi has gone ARM that MorphOS will get ported to sam so I could run both systems on it. It seems a nicer alternative to me than running a 5 year old box (pegasos II).
So anyway, here's my question. Having missed the Amiga boat back in it's heyday, and joining the NeXT/Apple camp 10+ years ago, as a guy with a NeXT and unix background, am I going to like the Amiga experience in the first place? I love how fast these systems boot to a usable desktop, and I love the idea of how resource-friendly they are- it's one of the reasons I strongly prefer BSD to linux. I also think that both systems have lovely GUIs. But as a unix guy, am I going to "get" the whole Amiga thing once I get there?
Appreciate your opinions, thanks in advance.
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I too once was jonesing for a Sam440, and ended up buying one, but sold soon after as while it was fun, it was disappointing in some ways. I too am a UNIX guy, and I think this did not help matters.
Basically, I'm used to computers being reliable, in the case of Solaris, I've never seen a kernel panic in the wild, ever. The Sam on the other hand, very unreliable, if an app crashed, the OS was generally not long after crashing too.
This was the major problem, the second problem was although as you say, they're *very* quick to boot, for compiling stuff like C/C++, it's painfully slow, to the point that my productivity was affected, combine that with the unreliability, I soon ran back to my Mac.
It's purely a matter of opinion, but I find the GUI sound, decent, but not outstanding. I really like the Amiga screens system but the Sam440 does not have enough video memory to make it shine, so you'd be best with a Sam Flex and get a better video card.
I don't have much experience with NeXT, but some with BeOS, and I think BeOS has the nicer UI than Amiga, but again, purely opinion.
Just my 2 cents.
Garry
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Thanks for the reply.
So is the general consensus that Amiga OS 4 resembles Win9x or Mac OS 8/9.x more closely than it does a unix os in the area of stability? That would annoy me.
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I would say that my Sam was generally not as reliable as Mac OS 9, although I would say that the Amiga was both snappier and has better multitasking than OS 9.
It's not even close to Solaris in terms of reliability unfortunately.
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I wonder if MorphOS fares any better in the area of stability.
Maybe Aros becomes a more attractive alternative as applications get ported to it. I have it on VirtualBox and I like it so far, but it is a little empty in the area of software.
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I think Amiga / MOS is likely to be quite different in responsiveness, that is they will "feel" fast even on relatively slow hardware (only BeOS is similar in this respect), unfortunately that's all that's ever to likely to appear.
With a dwindling user base the hardware is actually getting slower with time, the Pagasos II may be 5 years old but it's probably quite a bit faster than the Sam!
However it is the only system that will run MOS and OS4 if you want to try both.
As for reliability OS 4 and MOS are based on the Amiga OS design that was built back in the 80s, without memory protection a misbehaving app is quite likely to bring down the entire system. That said Win 9.x supposedly has memory protection and should be pretty stable but I found Amiga OS 3.1 to be a lot more reliable.
OS4 appear to be experiencing some issues with the hardware that haven't been quite worked out yet, that appears to currently causing some reliability concerns.
Another option is to wait and get MOS for the (PPC) Macmini. If it ever appears, at least the hardware will be cheap and good.
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@mlankton
None of the amiga family of operating systems have unix-like stability. It isn't so much the OS most of the time as naughty apps. The lack of protected memory is the main problem. It's too easy to bring down the system if you trash memory.
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@mlankton
None of the amiga family of operating systems have unix-like stability. It isn't so much the OS most of the time as naughty apps. The lack of protected memory is the main problem. It's too easy to bring down the system if you trash memory.
I remember that as a kid I found it amusing to write AmigaBASIC programs to Guru the Amiga. They went something along these lines:
FOR I = 0 to 1000000
POKEL(I, I)
NEXT I
Goes to show how easy it is to bring the system down. Yet it was fun at the time.
Edwin