Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: ElPolloDiabl on June 29, 2013, 05:48:23 AM
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Is Linux a substitute for Amiga OS? Due to the fact that AROS might be awhile before it (a) runs heaps of programs. (b) Is compatible with everyones hardware.
I've only used Linux on x86 so I can't give an opnion on the 68k or PPC version.
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Hi,
Although Linux and Amiga OS are designed basically off the same family, Unix. Linux was designed by a bunch of geeks that speak an entirely new, difficult language, with long numbered version numbers that actually make no sense. I have been using Linux for close to 20 years now, and some of the stuff that they do, I ask why, there actually seems to be no pattern to Linux, but when you get deep down into it, there is. It is just learning the hundreds of patterns to figure out what they are doing. The only operating system that is worse is Windows. Not only don't you know what is supposed to be in the windows os, but where they put the stuff. I doubt that even Microsoft knows what files go where in their system, that is why I believe they have so much trouble with hackers and virus's.
Can Linux be a substitute for the Amiga OS, I would say yes, if we could reprogram the hundred step file and hide process.
Would it be worth it?
Not really, because the Amiga users today have no direction, and a lot of them would still be wanting PPC orientated cpu's.
I myself think that AMD's eight core CPU's are the greatest, and if used correctly would become one bang up multi tasking machine.
Intels eight core CPU's are faster, but the money is huge, not really fit for the average home user.
I just want an answer to this question:
Does the PPC Cpu come with a hand crank to get it started and instead of kickstart would you call it crank start?
smerf
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The question of Linux's overall quality aside, it's not a "substitute" for the Amiga because they're basically nothing alike. (And smerf's notion that the Amiga OS was based on Unix is a myth. (http://amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?p=739176#post739176)) They don't operate in a similar way, Linux doesn't run Amiga software, etcetera.
There is some similarity of philosophy in that both are designed to be hackable, which is why classic Amiga OS has remained as usable as it has this far past its last update; however, Linux does this in typical Unix fashion, by being constructed piecemeal out of discrete components that communicate through scripts and pipes, while Amiga hacks integrate much more tightly with the system as a whole. But Linux is definitely nothing like a "substitute."
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I've also been using 'Linux' for close to 20 years. I put it in quotes, since Linux is just the kernel, and it's the multitude of userland utilities that you actually use.
The file hierarchy system, I'm guessing is what you're referring to? Actually I'm not even sure what your comments were talking about. When I started, the first thing I learned was the file hierarchy system. Once you've learned that it's EASY. Besides, it is very Unix, as is the AmigaOS. Actually a lot of the 'inadequacies' that people talk about with even the newest Linux distribution is "why do I have to do that with the terminal?" Because it's just the most efficient way to do some things. Even in AmigaOS, there are tons of command line software. It's useful, to say the least.
Anyhow, to answer the actual original post, you can get an Amiga Look & Feel. It can get pretty close, but just not quite spot on. There are themes for GTK (Gnome based) as well as Qt (KDE based), but most of that hasn't been updated in a while, so newer distributions will use the newer versions of gnome/kde that haven't had the themes upgraded for them.
There is a window manager called amiwm that makes the window borders look like the Amiga. And someone has 'ported' Ken's Icons (the ones from AmigaOS4) for the Linux desktop environments.
slaapliedje
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amiwm is a fun novelty, but it doesn't come close to actually making Linux software behave like Amiga software. It is exactly and only what it intends to be: a way to throw a cute Amiga coat of paint over the windows.
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No, not even remotely similar. Which is a good thing.
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Just want to chip in and say.
As an amiga user , begrudgingly switching to windows back in the 90's.
Upon discovering discovering linux it was like a breath of fresh air. In particular I found bash / scripting to be reminiscent of the Amiga.
The abundance of open source software also reminded me very much of the PD scene i was used to on the Amiga.
While today Linux has continued to be developed and is very different in many ways I cannot deny that my first experiments with Linux circa ~2001
made me think , gosh this reminds me of the Amiga.
Today things are a different kettle of fish though - but Linux is still my OS preference for work and multimedia duties. (No dedicated windows machines in my house - although I do have an Intel Mac Mini 2013 I use as a testing machine and also as a PLEX server)
N.
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No, Linux doesn't have an Amiga feel, I think it's too much like Windoze.
AFAIK, I first heard of Linux while reading Amiga Format magazine. After Amiga Format closed down, its Editor Nick Veitch became Editor of Linux Format.
I was persuaded to buy a PC to get Internet access at home, because of the prices of upgrades to my Amiga A1200 system and various stories about the Amiga dying, not much support, as well as someone saying "You don't know about computers, only the Amiga".
Before buying a PC I decided to install Linux on it as a dual boot system. The results with various distros weren't much like the Amiga. They looked and felt too much like Windoze. I installed amiwm, but it seemed to be just a joke hack showing a blank Workbench screen with a bar you could use to pull the screen down. It didn't do anything else!
The directory and file hierarchy of Linux is quite like the Amiga, as well as various libraries and concepts such as Exec, pipes, and some shells which are available. I think that Linux was originally based on Minix for the Amiga and Atari ST.
Nowadays, there's a system called Aeros, which is AROS hosted on Linux. This seems to be Linux with an Amiga feel, which can run Amiga, AROS, and Linux software, so it seems to be just what I wanted years ago. I'm looking forward to installing it, but I haven't managed this so far.
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Now, le'see... if you lose case-sensitivity and text-based displays, rewrite the DOS so that it's "Englishy." Add volumes, assigns, datatypes. Replace the swap partition with a ram disk. Put it all together in an easy to understand way... yea, then maybe Linux might feel like AmigaOS... maybe...
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Yeah, I'm seriously not getting this notion that AmigaDOS looks anything like Unix...I mean, there's no global directory tree, everything is on separate volumes like DOS or DEC operating systems, it uses assigns like VMS (or like DOS barely had) instead of custom mount points, non-stream devices aren't represented even as pipes, let alone being found anywhere in the filesystem hierarchy, commands are full or less-abbreviated words, etcetera etcetera...about the only point of reference I can find is that the system volume has some root-level divisions-by-type with folders like /s and /c that loosely resemble Unix's traditional /etc and /bin directories...
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Well this is a difficult question to answer, since there are so many different "flavours" of Linux, each with a different look and feel (and which can change quite a lot from one version to the next). Sadly I think Ubuntu and its kin have been aiming to copy Windows far too much, but there's no reason the GUI side of things couldn't be made a lot more Amiga-like. There is a lot of scope for getting quite close since it's very flexible, if anyone seriously wanted to put the time into doing it.
I personally use Kubuntu and put my task bar and start menu at the top of the screen instead of the bottom, which makes me feel a little more at home.
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Oh if we are talking about the GUI then I use Ken's Icons on my Linux machines. Well, the ones that have a GUI installed on them that is.
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Yeah, I'm seriously not getting this notion that AmigaDOS looks anything like Unix...I mean, there's no global directory tree, everything is on separate volumes like DOS or DEC operating systems, it uses assigns like VMS (or like DOS barely had) instead of custom mount points, non-stream devices aren't represented even as pipes, let alone being found anywhere in the filesystem hierarchy, commands are full or less-abbreviated words, etcetera etcetera...about the only point of reference I can find is that the system volume has some root-level divisions-by-type with folders like /s and /c that loosely resemble Unix's traditional /etc and /bin directories...
Well, I'm gonna disagree with you slightly, John. Is Amiga directly derived from Unix as Linux is? No. But TripOS, AmigaOS' predecessor, was designed in '76, and the best example of OS design at that time was Unix.
But that's what I like about AmigaOS, instead of, as Linux did, copying Unix directly, TripOS took the major concepts of that day and improved on them. Instead of anally sticking to what was, they took a step forward and improved it all.
Of course, that to me is what makes Amiga "Amiga." They didn't give us what they could, they improved on it all and gave us quite a bit more.
Of course, sadly, this is also what destroyed the Amiga in the end... :(
Dos Centavos.
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Now, le'see... if you lose case-sensitivity and text-based displays, rewrite the DOS so that it's "Englishy." Add volumes, assigns, datatypes. Replace the swap partition with a ram disk. Put it all together in an easy to understand way... yea, then maybe Linux might feel like AmigaOS... maybe...
If they think of a whole new approach to gui's (think of perspectives, like work, internet+music, gaming, 'console-gaming', with each their configurations), standardized ways how programs communicate with each other, and program configurations should be standardized (with for instance xml/xsd). There is a lot to be done in OS land, pity many ict folks are conservative and only think in bouncy animated windows and cr*p like that.
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Well, I'm gonna disagree with you slightly, John. Is Amiga directly derived from Unix as Linux is? No. But TripOS, AmigaOS' predecessor, was designed in '76, and the best example of OS design at that time was Unix.
That's a fair point - then again, what I've seen of TriPOS looks a lot more like a seriously expanded RT-11 than Unix.
But that's what I like about AmigaOS, instead of, as Linux did, copying Unix directly, TripOS took the major concepts of that day and improved on them. Instead of anally sticking to what was, they took a step forward and improved it all.
Of course, that to me is what makes Amiga "Amiga." They didn't give us what they could, they improved on it all and gave us quite a bit more.
Right on.
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But that's what I like about AmigaOS, instead of, as Linux did, copying Unix directly, TripOS took the major concepts of that day and improved on them. Instead of anally sticking to what was, they took a step forward and improved it all.
Of course, that to me is what makes Amiga "Amiga." They didn't give us what they could, they improved on it all and gave us quite a bit more.
Actually, they did only give us what they could.
"As most of you know, AmigaDOS was not the first choice for the top-level OS/DOS on the Amiga computer. What we now call AmigaDOS was really the backup DOS, based on an already existing OS known as Tripos"
"Once in a while, someone suggests that the original DOS be written according to the original specs. This was even proposed by some members of the Amiga team, but Amiga management decided that it wouldn't be possible to complete the DOS and still launch the Amiga on time, especially since the software guys had already given up weekends at home. And going home. And sleeping."
"CAOS stands for the Commodore Amiga Operating System"
"CAOS was contracted out, for the most part, to a company that felt Unix was a better choice and didn't buy into my design. They became history when they started using their Sun development systems for other projects, not the Amiga higher level OS functions."
So we know that before Commodore came along, there was nothing resembling dos.library. They found a cheap 68000 compatible operating system that was similar to what they wanted, even though there were a lot of things that it didn't do that were spec'd for CAOS.
They appear to only have done the bare minimum of work, to integrate TRIPOS with exec and make it callable from C. They should have done something about BPTR, so that when BCPL was removed it wouldn't have left an annoying legacy.
CAOS actually has some limitations that weren't in TRIPOS, like a 1mb maximum file size, which would have had to be removed for it to have achieved similar success.
Some of the concepts in CAOS were similar to unix though, like /dev for devices and access to operating system structures using special files in /exec
What made it an Amiga is that they took an old unheard of OS (TRIPOS had been around since 1978), written in an old forgotten language (BCPL came out in 1966). The hardware also wasn't revolutionary, it was an evolution of the Atari 8 bit.
Microsoft and Apple got caught with inferior products, but their business skills allowed them to survive long enough to catch up.
Atari pretty much followed the same path as Amiga, but went cheaper on everything (CPM/GEM/graphics chip/sound chip).
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just imagine where it could have gone if it *was* based on UNIX... we might have had a superb desktop with a UNIX underneath... and not KDE/Gnome/foo/bar/etc .... (at least MacOS got it right these days; no flames please, concentrate on the Amiga bit)
Tom UK
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just imagine where it could have gone if it *was* based on UNIX...
It wouldn't have survived, unix is too bloated for the hardware available at the time. I believe what they did was really the best compromise for performance against functionality. Anything they had done differently is likely to have made things worse.
WindowsNT has more in common with AmigaOS than unix does.
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But there was UNIX for the Amiga, that was sold with some A3000s, but requires an MMU so wouldn't have worked on the original 68k machines.
Plus X Windows is terrible even today.
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This conversation reminds me of how much I want to see Haiku succeed. ;)
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This conversation reminds me of how much I want to see Haiku succeed. ;)
Hear, hear. Not that it's all that similar to Amiga OS, either, but it's probably the closest thing being actively developed right now in terms of being designed as an integrated, user-focused desktop OS...
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I wonder if something like Microsoft's Singularity OS could work on Amiga, it wouldn't need an MMU.
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Theoretically, but what would you gain from it? Singularity has no software and runs on a VM, which is never good for performance. The only really interesting thing about it is its eschewing memory protection for some kind of static analysis that prevents access of out-of-process memory at the code level, which is incompatible with Amiga-style message-passing anyway.
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But there was UNIX for the Amiga, that was sold with some A3000s, but requires an MMU so wouldn't have worked on the original 68k machines.
It didn't sell many though, it's unlikely that commodore would have survived as long as they did with just that.
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Unix. Linux was designed by a bunch of geeks that speak an entirely new, difficult language
Which I believe would be a fair description of the guys who designed the Amiga.
And a lot of other tech out there..
For me, there are some definite and obvious similarities...
The way that the GUI and the shell complement each other was something I liked about Linux.
You got your best use out of the system when you understood both and where each was valuable.
The goal of the GUI isn't to replace the shell, it's just to do what makes sense in a GUI.
Scripting is not your enemy...
With Windows, you script when you have to... When I write scripts in Windows, people are always talking about what GUI tools we can look at to eventually "fix" that. In Windows there is (or was, power shell is helping a bit here) a feeling that if you have to use a script, it's because something isn't finished.
In AmigaDOS and Linux, you use the tool that most makes sense...
Are they the same, no...
Are there some similarities, of course...
I think that's why I preferred Windows to the early Mac OS.
At least Windows has DOS and config files and things to tweak.
The Macs goal seemed to be that you, as a user, should NEVER see that.
I'm not saying that's bad, there's a lot that makes sense in that; but it's not what appeals to me...
So jumping from Amiga to Linux was fairly easy for me..
And the early versions of X/Windows were easily as (more?) painful as the early versions of Workbench.. ;-) :-)
Of course, there is a big difference..
When I first started using the Amiga, I believed (still do) that it was the best OS out there at the time. It had the best combination of power and ease of use and configuration and flexibility...
I felt that this was something that was better than anything out there...
I love Linux, and it's great at certain things, but I can't honestly say that I always think it's better than anything else out there...
When I set up my first filtering WEB proxy on Slackware (back when it was standard to install Linux from floppies.. ;-), it was cost effective and it worked. But when there was budget for another product (BESS? Can't remember, it's been awhile), we did that..
So, an Amiga feel? In some ways.. Yes.. But it's not totally the same..
For me..
desiv
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Modern Linux has the option to both. Use the CLI, or pretty much anything can be done in the menu.
The ability to customize is about the only thing it has in common with AmigaOS.
I would imagine a fully loaded Amiga would be a pain to fix if anything goes wrong. Unless you just go for a reinstall. Linux is just as complicated.
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Gentlemen!!
Amiga OS and Linux are both off shoots of Unix, no they aren't exactly the same, but underneath in the hardware they use the same principles, they give instructions to the hardware to do certain stuff while the processor only comes into use when the hardware is over run with instructions. You have to remember back in the old days Unix was the only OS that was multi tasking and it did that by instructing the hardware to handle functions like video and sound. Other systems that said that they were multi tasking actually were time sharing where the cpu gave out the instructions or commands and time shared between programs. This is what made windows so slow at first compared to the smoothness of the Amiga.
Don't know if I really explained that right, I am tired from working on a roof all day putting up a TV antenna, yep out with the new (cable) and in with the old ( Airwave) I came down to the point where I got sick and tired of paying for commercials and infomercials when I receive better movies and shows on antenna TV.
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My friend gave me a rope on the weekend and i'm having a blast with it. It's black and static and it's all mine.
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smerf, you are in rare form today: wrong on absolutely every single count.
For one thing, as previously discussed, Amiga OS is not an offshoot of Unix; if they do share similarities, it's from Amiga OS being based on TriPOS, which spawned in the same pools of primordial mainframe ooze that Unix did. The notion that the processor (on either Unix systems or Amigas) only does things when the peripheral hardware is too busy is patently ridiculous because A. they have distinct and only partly overlapping sets of capabilities, and B. the entire point of the processor is to run software. "Time-sharing" is multitasking (often preemptive) and multiple mainframe OSes implemented it years before Unix even existed.
You have no idea what you're talking about...
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smerf, you are in rare form today: wrong on absolutely every single count.
For one thing, as previously discussed, Amiga OS is not an offshoot of Unix; if they do share similarities, it's from Amiga OS being based on TriPOS, which spawned in the same pools of primordial mainframe ooze that Unix did. The notion that the processor (on either Unix systems or Amigas) only does things when the peripheral hardware is too busy is patently ridiculous because A. they have distinct and only partly overlapping sets of capabilities, and B. the entire point of the processor is to run software. "Time-sharing" is multitasking (often preemptive) and multiple mainframe OSes implemented it years before Unix even existed.
You have no idea what you're talking about...
Uh, OK, there Commodorejohn, the only thing I ask is please don't get into running computers with the united states satellite division, where we run Xenix, Unix, Windows, CPM, DOS and at NASA even used AmigaOS to recieve pictures from outer space.
And you are right sir, I have no idea what I am talking about, since we have been loading up hardware with buffered instructions since we did not have the memory or hardware when we first started out using computers, the first computer that we had had about 40 cards in it, with magnetic memory modules, we used a system called mini code (4 bit instructions) with a type of Unix to run the systems. We could run 4 different systems by time sharing with the unix type mincode to give instructions to the buffered hardware so that it would not slow down (remember hardware takes more time than electronic signals).
Oh btw I still have my original BCPL books from the start date of the Amiga, somewhere up in the attic.
In order to make brash statements, first you have to define Unix, since most of you are to young to remember what the original Unix was about, and even if you did you couldn't afford it, since my copy cost around $43,000 at that time (gov't purchased). Today we have switched over to a new language that is more of a control and easier language to program.
Tell me ever play with cobal, turbo pascal, pascal, or mini code.
Oh by the way I spent about 2 years programming the Amiga's for those NASA space shots, I did work for Commodore you know, but I was really better at sales. Not as much hard work as programming.
and btw, I never said that the Amiga was Unix, I said it was an off shoot of Unix, which means that it has multi tasking features, and the reason the Amiga is so good at multi tasking is because you can give the hardware sound and video chips buffered instructions to decrease the CPU from givning all the commands (remember cpu's can only initiate one command at a time) but by buffering the chips (or hardware) with several instructions, as the instructions are being used the CPU rests, until the hardware tells it I am done with your last instructions waiting for more.
OK
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Look, not to be rude, but all the job experience in the world does not keep you from being verifiably, factually wrong here. You're right that the Amiga does have a well-designed architecture that allows the CPU and chipset to work tightly in concert; that does not mean that (as you claim) the CPU does nothing when the chipset isn't overtaxed, because the chipset doesn't even come close to covering the full functionality of the CPU (nor is it intended to.) That would be absurd and a waste of a perfectly good CPU, for one. Even with absolutely no other threads running (which is basically never going to happen outside of empty, static loading screens,) the CPU still runs the Exec scheduler and responds to interrupts. You are also wrong in claiming that Unix was the only multitasking OS back in the day; there were multiple time-sharing systems that were preemptive. Finally, you are wrong about Amiga OS being a Unix offshoot; it is not, it shares no fundamental system architecture with Unix, and this will still be the case no matter how often you insist it's otherwise. Seriously; this is stuff you can look up.
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Why don't we have 24 hours where nobody mentions the word "unix"?
It's a bit disturbing when an Amiga discussion gets ruined by the mention of the word u... shhh.
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It's a bit difficult to not draw comparisons/contrasts between the Amiga and Unixoid systems in a thread devoted to exactly that...
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In the early 90s when I had to abandon Amiga I was always looking to find a replacement OS that was Amiga-like (I was using DOS, and it was painful). DOS felt nothing like Amiga. Mac felt nothing like Amiga. The windows 3.1/DOS schism felt nothing like Amiga.
My early dabblings with Unix/Minix/Linux/whatever did feel much more Amiga like in that they supported proper multi-tasking, but in particular the shell felt like a cohesive well thought out powerful thing that reminded me of Amiga's CLI. I was a big CLI user on Amiga and it always seemed pretty well though out.
The Unix/Linux thing didn't seem super practical way back then though so the first OS that did feel like a decent replacement for Amiga was OS/2. Then Windows 95 felt like more Amiga-like as well. However, somehow Linux still feels a bit more Amiga-like to me, just because the shell seems more comparable to Amiga CLI than the OS/2 / Windows command lines.
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But there was UNIX for the Amiga, that was sold with some A3000s, but requires an MMU so wouldn't have worked on the original 68k machines.
Plus X Windows is terrible even today.
This is an amazing thread!
I recently bought an A1200 from someone who had studied and used UNIX on an A3000. He told me that UNIX wouldn't run on an A4000. Is this correct? If so, then why? Did the A3000 come with an MMU, but the A4000 didn't? I later exchanged a few SMS messages with him, but he just said he'd programmed in ARexx, then I couldn't get any more out of him.
Of course, Amicygnix as used on AmigaOS 4.1 is a type of X Windows.
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and btw, I never said that the Amiga was Unix, I said it was an off shoot of Unix, which means that it has multi tasking features
As does modern versions of Windows, which is descended from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS
The granddaddy of them all is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPS-10. The follow up was called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPS-20, which started as TENEX (ten extended) because DEC didn't want to add virtual memory to their hardware and after creating an add on they needed an OS to drive it. TENEX was developed for use in projects funded by DARPA and was used to build the Internet.
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Gentlemen!!
Amiga OS and Linux are both off shoots of Unix, no they aren't exactly the same, but underneath in the hardware they use the same principles, they give instructions to the hardware to do certain stuff while the processor only comes into use when the hardware is over run with instructions. You have to remember back in the old days Unix was the only OS that was multi tasking and it did that by instructing the hardware to handle functions like video and sound. Other systems that said that they were multi tasking actually were time sharing where the cpu gave out the instructions or commands and time shared between programs. This is what made windows so slow at first compared to the smoothness of the Amiga.
Don't know if I really explained that right, I am tired from working on a roof all day putting up a TV antenna, yep out with the new (cable) and in with the old ( Airwave) I came down to the point where I got sick and tired of paying for commercials and infomercials when I receive better movies and shows on antenna TV.
That sounds interesting! AmigaOS and Linux are both offshoots of UNIX. That's what I thought.
As for your TV viewing, I wonder what channels you can get with your new old setup? How about a listing? I recently found this video about accessing TV on demand services not usually accessible where you live using a Smart TV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho5HQKr54Tg . This is about how to access BBC iPlayer and ITV Player in Germany, but the principle should be the same anywhere. The video does say the Smart TVs sold in North America may have hardware issues, but I have heard that at least one US satellite TV package uses the European broadcast standard DVB instead of digital NTSC. I also found a USB dongle on eBay called "TV Anywhere", which is described mainly as giving access to UK TV streaming services around the World, but if you look closely near the bottom it says it can also access TV from other countries http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/CATCH-UP-TV-AND-MANY-MORE-FROM-ANYWHERE-IN-THE-WORLD-ITV-PLAYER-BBC-iPLAYER-/390617014404?pt=UK_Home_Garden_CD_DVDStorage_SM&hash=item5af296a084 . This is mainstream TV, not thousands of channels that not many people want to watch.
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The way that the GUI and the shell complement each other was something I liked about Linux.
You got your best use out of the system when you understood both and where each was valuable.
This perfectly describes AmigaOS. It is absolutly wrong regarding any *nix variant!
One of the most brain dead concepts is the separation (or read: non-integration) of user interfaces (GUI, command line) in those *nix stuff. In principle it's more or less Windows 3.1 style by hammering a more or less unintended GUI over a working, multitasking, multiuser command line operating system.
Man, I had fun by using shell commands to completely bork the desktop environment of really, really expensive *nix systems, 'cos those dump X window stuff didn't even notice that I had done it it's back. Not that easy nowadays, but on the other hand they had to do a lot of magic and code to achieve a (semi-)coherence that is an inbuild feature of AmigaOS.
And just for the record: AmigaOS has no and never had any *nix roots. Thank god (or Jay, or Tim or whomever).
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This is an amazing thread! I'm going to have to do some research into the other operating systems mentioned here, such as UNIX, DEC, and VAX. What hardware would I need to run any of them, though?
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This is an amazing thread! I'm going to have to do some research into the other operating systems mentioned here, such as UNIX, DEC, and VAX. What hardware would I need to run any of them, though?
Some of them can be emulated.
A lot of the hardware either doesn't exist anymore, or are in museums.
There are plenty of photo's online though.
http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/PDP-6
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Maybe earlier Linux deployments in the GUI/Shell sense. But not much more than that. The Amiga also had a sense of being revolutionary, leading edge. No such feeling on Linux.
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Some of them can be emulated.
A lot of the hardware either doesn't exist anymore, or are in museums.
There are plenty of photo's online though.
http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/PDP-6
I think it's obvious that UNIX is my best bet. This could be AMIX, Free BSD, or Open BSD. I've got an A1200 which I'll fit an IDE CF adaptor and 4Gb CF card to in a few days time. Would I need a RAM upgrade as well? I think I could run Free BSD or Open BSD on my Toshiba Satellite C660D laptop, with an AMD E350 CPU, 2Gb RAM, and 320Gb hard drive which at this moment is divided equally between Ubuntu Linux 13.04 and Windows 7. This is because the installer didn't tell me which partition was which! I suppose I could just resize the Windows partition.
I hope someone on here can tell me the advantages of UNIX compared with Linux. I recently helped to tidy up someone's flat, which was too full of stuff, such as furniture, but also housed a huge collection of UNIX, Linux, Mac, and Windows books which has been kept, not thrown out. I even found two Amiga books there. Unfortunately, someone told me the tenant who owns this collection only accumulated it because "he thought it was cool". I can't help wondering if he was involved with UNIX in the early days. He had had a breakdown or a stroke and I hardly got a word out of him when I last saw him in December, which was before I found out about this collection. The only computer there was a PC with specs that looked several years old and a few old Linux distros installed. These distros were roughly the version numbers mentioned in the book titles, but I think the content of these books would still work in current distros. I couldn't boot it up. Sometimes the monitor said it couldn't display the screen mode.
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Maybe earlier Linux deployments in the GUI/Shell sense. But not much more than that. The Amiga also had a sense of being revolutionary, leading edge. No such feeling on Linux.
Seriously ? I cannot think of a single operating system that epitomized a revolution than Linux. Without it and the open source ecosystem that blossoms from its very roots , the internet, the mobile space, even the desktop space would be a very different place indeed. Companies like google - if they even existed at all would be very different to what we see today.
you need to read this book
http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Rebel_Code.html?id=kIU1scm4w6QC
Im not trying to start an OS war here - but I cant stand by and read a comment like yours without responding.
As much as i love the Amiga - Im not so dumb as to make suggestions that Linux does not feel like a revolutionary OS. That really just shows that you've never taken the time to understand its roots or even use it for any great length of time. The amiga OS was great in its time , but its time is in the past.
I cannot comment on os 4.x - But by todays standards classic amiga OS does not cut the mustard against most modern operating systems. I chose to use Linux as my primary OS many many moons ago and my initial thoughts were that it reminded me of AmigaOS - things have changed since then - but Id rather not be hold to either Microsoft OR Apple - and that sentiment has not changed much since then. (I had leanings towards Mac when OSX hit the scene but when i realised they were taking a lot from the community and not giving back it didnt help matters)
N
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I have used Linux for server, desktop/notebook, and embedded systems since the late '90s and until this very day. Unfortunately AmigaOS never got the chance to develop to a point where it would be used in all these domains but if it did, I know it would not have caused the amount of frustration I have had and continue to have with Linux.
Don't get me wrong, when Linux works it works brilliantly, it's the getting it to do the thing you want that can be quite the challenge. Like just the other day I attempted to load ownCloud on Centos 6.3. You know how on AmigaOS when a piece of software informs you that some_specific.library is needed, you download it, copy it to LIBS and voila the software works, not so with Linux.
And Linux may have sparked a revolution, but I have to agree with gertsy, there is nothing revolutionary about Linux in its architecture, in fact all of the major OSs in the market today are evolutionary, some more so than others but they all just have too much '80s and '90s odour about them. I just wish AmigaOS got the same chance at continuous evolution over the past 20 years.
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That sounds interesting! AmigaOS and Linux are both offshoots of UNIX. That's what I thought.
Except for the part where it isn't, at all.
This is an amazing thread! I'm going to have to do some research into the other operating systems mentioned here, such as UNIX, DEC, and VAX. What hardware would I need to run any of them, though?
Unix comes in a wide variety of vendor-specific flavors - you can of course get free clones (FreeBSD or Linux) that run on any PC, or you could dig up an SGI, Sun, or whatever Unix workstation from the '90s for fairly cheap. DEC wasn't an OS, it was a company; they made multiple lines of computers, and operating systems for them. VMS ran on their VAX hardware; you can sometimes nab a VAXStation for cheap if you're lucky, (or, as psxphill notes, you can run an emulator like SIMH,) and HP (who currently owns VMS) runs the OpenVMS Hobbyist Program, from which you can get a license to install it on whatever you get. It's interesting stuff.
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Theoretically, but what would you gain from it? Singularity has no software and runs on a VM, which is never good for performance. The only really interesting thing about it is its eschewing memory protection for some kind of static analysis that prevents access of out-of-process memory at the code level, which is incompatible with Amiga-style message-passing anyway.
Just a thought experiment, not a practical suggestion. If we are going to talk about OS concepts that the Amiga could have had, I said something "like" Singularity, not actually Singularity of course. The point is it is intended to have modern levels of security but achieves this in a single address space, this latter being one of the principles of TripOS. Switching address spaces has a big overhead, as well as requiring MMU which the first Amigas didn't have. So yes. "The only really interesting thing about it" is precisely what I was calling attention to.
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Unix comes in a wide variety of vendor-specific flavors - you can of course get free clones (FreeBSD or Linux) that run on any PC...
Talk of Unix "clones" is a bit misplaced since Unix isn't really an OS so much as a standard. It's not a proprietary product as such and an OS doesn't need to be source-code descended from any older Unix in order to be considered Unix.
FreeBSD and Linux are described as "Unix-like" because they adhere to the standards but don't pay for the Unix certification so aren't actually allowed to call themselves Unix. Apple OS X however is significantly based on FreeBSD, but they DO pay for certification, so they can call it Unix.
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Seriously ? I cannot think of a single operating system that epitomized a revolution than Linux. Without it and the open source ecosystem that blossoms from its very roots , the internet, the mobile space, even the desktop space would be a very different place indeed. Companies like google - if they even existed at all would be very different to what we see today.
you need to read this book
http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Rebel_Code.html?id=kIU1scm4w6QC
Im not trying to start an OS war here - but I cant stand by and read a comment like yours without responding.
As much as i love the Amiga - Im not so dumb as to make suggestions that Linux does not feel like a revolutionary OS. That really just shows that you've never taken the time to understand its roots or even use it for any great length of time. The amiga OS was great in its time , but its time is in the past.
I cannot comment on os 4.x - But by todays standards classic amiga OS does not cut the mustard against most modern operating systems. I chose to use Linux as my primary OS many many moons ago and my initial thoughts were that it reminded me of AmigaOS - things have changed since then - but Id rather not be hold to either Microsoft OR Apple - and that sentiment has not changed much since then. (I had leanings towards Mac when OSX hit the scene but when i realised they were taking a lot from the community and not giving back it didnt help matters)
N
Much as I despise the whole hipster culture associated with Apple products, their corporate greed and their patent war BS, I have to correct your last comment.
All of the Open and Free code that Apple takes is improved and contributed back, even the stuff they don't have to keep open due to the permissive BSD licence is available for anyone to download.
What they don't give the source away for is some of their own in-house developed proprietary stuff like the Cocoa Framework and Logic Pro etc.
http://opensource.apple.com
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Seriously ? I cannot think of a single operating system that epitomized a revolution than Linux. Without it and the open source ecosystem that blossoms from its very roots , the internet, the mobile space, even the desktop space would be a very different place indeed. Companies like google - if they even existed at all would be very different to what we see today.
I think you've over-estimated Linux's role in all of that.
I've used various operating systems, including Linux & I never got indoctrinated into any of the cults.
The way you talk suggests you have an unhealthy relationship with Linux. Like people who thought that Amiga was viable in the mid 1990's. I still had an A1200 as my main machine at home until 1999, but I was increasingly doing personal stuff on my work PC after hours.
Linux also jumped the gun, GNU provide most of the software stack and were working on their own kernel. Linus took an old monolithic kernel based OS and cloned it.
But if you enjoy living your life like that then go ahead.
Talk of Unix "clones" is a bit misplaced since Unix isn't really an OS so much as a standard. It's not a proprietary product as such and an OS doesn't need to be source-code descended from any older Unix in order to be considered Unix.
Actually Unix is a product, you can find the real descendent of Unix for sale here http://www.xinuos.com/ (http://www.xinuos.com/)
You can read about it here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_OpenServer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_OpenServer)
POSIX is the name of the standard.
The point is it is intended to have modern levels of security but achieves this in a single address space, this latter being one of the principles of TripOS. Switching address spaces has a big overhead, as well as requiring MMU which the first Amigas didn't have.
Multiple address spaces implies an MMU, while a single address space can work without an MMU. However to achieve any security you either need to use an MMU, which will have the same overhead as using a multiple address space. Or you have to use a virtual machine, which means that any code you write will automatically check bounds on every access. This is also quite an overhead too. It would preclude running any legacy software as there is no way of knowing what the bounds should be. You could try sandboxing it, but shared libraries expect that they can write to different tasks memory and so compatibility is a problem (the same problems as trying to use an MMU for the same purpose).
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Talk of Unix "clones" is a bit misplaced since Unix isn't really an OS so much as a standard. It's not a proprietary product as such and an OS doesn't need to be source-code descended from any older Unix in order to be considered Unix.
Actually Unix is a product, you can find the real descendent of Unix for sale here http://www.xinuos.com/
You can read about it here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_OpenServer
POSIX is the name of the standard.
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Actually Unix is a product, you can find the real descendent of Unix for sale here http://www.xinuos.com/ (http://www.xinuos.com/)
You can read about it here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_OpenServer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_OpenServer)
POSIX is the name of the standard.
Being "descended" from the original Unix is not a requirement for registering to use the Unix trademark. Meeting the standard is. The standard is called the Single Unix Specification. There are Unixes that are products, of course, but no single one of them is exclusively "The Real Unix" no matter what its lineage.
...Or you have to use a virtual machine, which means that any code you write will automatically check bounds on every access. This is also quite an overhead too. It would preclude running any legacy software as there is no way of knowing what the bounds should be.
Well given that the thought experiment was about what OS the Amiga could have had, rather than what would be a practical replacement for it today, "legacy code" is really irrelevant since it only exists in the real world, not the hypothetical alternative reality.
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This perfectly describes AmigaOS. It is absolutly wrong regarding any *nix variant!
You aren't using Unix variants the same way I am then...
One of the most brain dead concepts is the separation (or read: non-integration) of user interfaces (GUI, command line) in those *nix stuff.
That's not what I was talking about..
It's kind of, sort of, in a way, maybe a related thought, but twisted..
I said they complemented each other...
That doesn't mean that they are integrated.... They aren't and I'd never say that. Been using Unix and Linux too long not to know that..
Way to jump to a conclusion tho.. ;-)
.. Not that easy nowadays,
Yes, it still is...
Wow.. People seem to have an issue with "similar" and "the same."
Now, whether Carl and the guys were inspired at all by some of the Unix variants at the time, not sure.. (Maybe not given Carl's early HP centric background)
Personally, it doesn't matter to me if it was "inspired by" Unix in any way or not. The question was about a "feel," not about actual genealogy of the OS. ;-)
To me, there was that feel. To others, not so much...
That's the thing about a "feel," it's not about right or wrong. If someone feels something is similar, then it feels similar to them.
desiv
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Except for the part where it isn't, at all.
Unix comes in a wide variety of vendor-specific flavors - you can of course get free clones (FreeBSD or Linux) that run on any PC, or you could dig up an SGI, Sun, or whatever Unix workstation from the '90s for fairly cheap. DEC wasn't an OS, it was a company; they made multiple lines of computers, and operating systems for them. VMS ran on their VAX hardware; you can sometimes nab a VAXStation for cheap if you're lucky, (or, as psxphill notes, you can run an emulator like SIMH,) and HP (who currently owns VMS) runs the OpenVMS Hobbyist Program, from which you can get a license to install it on whatever you get. It's interesting stuff.
Unfortunately, I have no real idea how old any of the Sun or Silicon Graphics workstation models are, I don't know how long it would take me to find out, or how they compare to a modern equivalent. Earlier tonight, I saw someone using a Sun computer in a news story about the NSA surveillance scandal, so this made me realise that people are still using them and possibly for very demanding purposes. Here's one on eBay, but I don't know how old it is, what kind of keyboard or mouse or anything else I'd need to go with it. Perhaps you can tell me. I know it's no good comparing the specs to a PC, because the CPU is probably more powerful than an Intel x86 CPU of the same speed and any software probably takes up only about 25% of the RAM it would take under Windoze. This is the situation with the classic Amiga.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sun-SPARCclassic-X-UNIX-Workstation-/290939712355?pt=UK_Computing_Other_Computing_Networking&hash=item43bd5bb363
As for Silicon Graphics workstations, I know they were designed mainly for doing graphics, and then sort of replaced the Amiga in this field for CGI effects. I don't know if they can do anything else apart from produce graphics, though. They may have been "fixed" to do graphics only, like with "dedicated" word processors.
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I think yes of course its similar, but amiga os is much simpler.
I love linux, but I can't stand some things. Like dependency nightmares.
You know what I like? install a program and it just runs.
Linux, as much as I love it has been over complicated by geeky developers.
I personally don't see the need for each distro to maintain a software repro. They should just standardize some things and save so many wasted resources having everyone use the same installs.
Besides that gaming is slowly coming to linux, which I'm real happy about.
Needs some good video and audio editing tools...
Otherwise, I'm very happy with linux as an alternative.
Linux kind of IS the new amiga. Back in the day, amiga was different... Now its windows or mac or linux. Sure there are some other OS systems out there but not many people actually using them.
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Unfortunately, I have no real idea how old any of the Sun or Silicon Graphics workstation models are, I don't know how long it would take me to find out, or how they compare to a modern equivalent. Earlier tonight, I saw someone using a Sun computer in a news story about the NSA surveillance scandal, so this made me realise that people are still using them and possibly for very demanding purposes. Here's one on eBay, but I don't know how old it is, what kind of keyboard or mouse or anything else I'd need to go with it. Perhaps you can tell me. I know it's no good comparing the specs to a PC, because the CPU is probably more powerful than an Intel x86 CPU of the same speed and any software probably takes up only about 25% of the RAM it would take under Windoze. This is the situation with the classic Amiga.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sun-SPARCclassic-X-UNIX-Workstation-/290939712355?pt=UK_Computing_Other_Computing_Networking&hash=item43bd5bb363
As for Silicon Graphics workstations, I know they were designed mainly for doing graphics, and then sort of replaced the Amiga in this field for CGI effects. I don't know if they can do anything else apart from produce graphics, though. They may have been "fixed" to do graphics only, like with "dedicated" word processors.
I can tell you that my Sun Ultra II (2x166MHz, 128MB RAM) is pretty responsive and at a guess I'd say it's faster than a comparable x86 system (disclaimer: I've never used a dual Pentium board, I'm just extrapolating from my experience with comarably-clocked single-processor systems.) The one you linked I'd expect to probably be a little zippier than my VAX, but not especially impressive.
Never used SGI anything myself, but they weren't fixed-function systems; they were full IRIX Unixoid workstations, and they still have a following today. If you really want to get into oldschool Unix workstations, I'd talk to the guys over at the Nekochan forums (http://forums.nekochan.net/); the site's specifically geared towards SGI, but the forums cover plenty of other high-end computing solutions of yesteryear.
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Being "descended" from the original Unix is not a requirement for registering to use the Unix trademark. Meeting the standard is. The standard is called the Single Unix Specification. There are Unixes that are products, of course, but no single one of them is exclusively "The Real Unix" no matter what its lineage.
Well that is POSIX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification
However, that just qualifies you as Unix compliant.
While there are Unix products available that actually use the Unix source code that descended from the Unix product from Bell labs (later AT&T).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
"Other companies began to offer commercial versions of the UNIX System for their own mini-computers and workstations. Many of these new Unix flavors were developed from the System V base under a license from AT&T; others were based on BSD. One of the leading developers of BSD, Bill Joy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy), went on to co-found Sun Microsystems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems) in 1982 and created SunOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS) for their workstation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workstation) computers. In 1980, Microsoft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft) announced its first Unix for 16-bit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16-bit) microcomputers called Xenix (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix), which the Santa Cruz Operation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation) (SCO) ported to the Intel 8086 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8086) processor in 1983, and eventually branched Xenix into SCO UNIX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_UNIX) in 1989."
fwiw Amiga Unix came from the AT&T source code, which is one of the reasons the source code has never surfaced.
Sun jumped between using Unix and BSD for their operating system and then back again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunos
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I can tell you that my Sun Ultra II (2x166MHz, 128MB RAM) is pretty responsive and at a guess I'd say it's faster than a comparable x86 system (disclaimer: I've never used a dual Pentium board, I'm just extrapolating from my experience with comarably-clocked single-processor systems.) The one you linked I'd expect to probably be a little zippier than my VAX, but not especially impressive.
Never used SGI anything myself, but they weren't fixed-function systems; they were full IRIX Unixoid workstations, and they still have a following today. If you really want to get into oldschool Unix workstations, I'd talk to the guys over at the Nekochan forums (http://forums.nekochan.net/); the site's specifically geared towards SGI, but the forums cover plenty of other high-end computing solutions of yesteryear.
So, based on what you say above, this one http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sun-Ultra-Enterprise-2-Workstation-UltraSPARC-II-296MHz-128MB-RAM-/230994413805?pt=UK_Computing_DesktopPCs&hash=item35c85708ed also looks "pretty responsive", but I still don't know how old it is or what I may need to go with it. I had a quick look at that forum, but I don't know how long it will take to find out what I need to know. Of course, I have got lots of other expenses. My social life is in ruins at the moment, so it would be a good idea for people on here to tell me why I don't really need to buy a Sun or Silicon graphics workstation.
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@commodorejohn,
OK, spent all day up in the attic and opening up over 20 boxes of old electronic parts and books, disks, magazines, etc.
the only thing I could find associating the Amiga with Unix or even the word Unix was in an old Amiga magazine that said that the Amiga had a exec that multi tasked just like Unix but only took up 256k of resources. I always thought that the Amiga was an off shoot of Unix, due to its multi tasking but wow, I am wrong twice in one year. Now I know that I have been tied up in learning Windows and Linux, but has my mind been that warped to have me forget the Amiga that bad.
Well any way, I found all my original Rom Kernal, OS, books, Intuition etc. I have the complete collection. Great stuff, first time I read them since oh probably 1989 or so.
Been completely engulfed in learning new languages at work during the past 8 years, but know that I am retired have time to get back to the Amiga, and other systems that I want to build and play with.
Hats off to you commodorejohn, you beat me this time, I will see to it that it doesn't happen again.
Hmmm the old brain is getting senile.
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I find Linux and Amiga OS (and its variants) to be similar only in the fact they are all operating systems. If you want to throw an Amiga knock-off skin on Linux and call it the second coming of Amiga OS for the modern age, go nuts. It's not.
I used Amiga OS for a lot of years solely. Nothing in my experiences with it I found *nix like in the least, and I've used Linux since early the early Redhat days.
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In answer to the original question, no, Linux in any flavor or varity I've tried doesn't in any way feel like an Amiga. This is purely subjective. The only OSes that have a feel like an Amiga that I've tried are OS/2 Warp 3, 4 and 4.5. Once again purely subjective but OS/2 used the Rexx scripting language which on the Amiga was ARexx. It also had really good multitasking which extended to DOS and Windows 3.1 applications that weren't designed to multitask.
Amiga OS isn't a direct derivative of UNIX but UNIX multitasking and a few other things had an influence on Amiga OS. UNIX and Linux have some serious multi user security features like file permissions that don't exist in Amiga OS. Classic Amiga OS has no user accounts. There's no logon. No file permissions. There is multitasking and a really good file system once you know how to use it. The GUI is a bit eccentric but very efficient. Compared to Linux, it is far simpler but it does what it was designed for very well.
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So, based on what you say above, this one http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sun-Ultra-Enterprise-2-Workstation-UltraSPARC-II-296MHz-128MB-RAM-/230994413805?pt=UK_Computing_DesktopPCs&hash=item35c85708ed also looks "pretty responsive", but I still don't know how old it is or what I may need to go with it. I had a quick look at that forum, but I don't know how long it will take to find out what I need to know. Of course, I have got lots of other expenses. My social life is in ruins at the moment, so it would be a good idea for people on here to tell me why I don't really need to buy a Sun or Silicon graphics workstation.
You want to hear why you shouldn't buy one? Because Unix is, more or less, Unix (except for AIX which I gather is like Unix as implemented by space aliens from mind-probes of Unix-hacker abductees, but I've never used it.) Solaris is about like Linux or FreeBSD when you get right down to it (though CDE is the only desktop environment/application suite I've encountered on Unixoids that I thought had been at all designed with a serious or professional eye towards a good user experience - but then, it's also a very very 1994-vintage user experience.)
If you do want to pursue this, though (and that Ultra II is a hell of a deal if it works, and not much of a risk if it doesn't,) you will need, at a minimum, a serial null-modem cable so you can run a terminal emulator for console access on your PC or Amiga or whatever. More ideal would be a Sun keyboard, mouse, and a 3W13-to-VGA adapter plus a 1280x1024 display (Sun's output seems to be pretty compatible with modern displays - I had to do some hunting to get one that supports sync-on-green for my VAX, though!) Those don't tend to be terribly expensive, but of course that all depends on just how tight your finances are. You could certainly use it serial-only until you can afford them. You may also need replacement install media if someone removed the OS; I don't know anything about that, you'd have to talk to the Nekochan guys.
Addendum: you'd probably need replacement install media period if the seller doesn't have the root password for the current install.
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Hats off to you commodorejohn, you beat me this time, I will see to it that it doesn't happen again.
Hmmm the old brain is getting senile.
Aw, take heart - my memory's no great shakes either, and I don't even have age as an excuse...
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You want to hear why you shouldn't buy one? Because Unix is, more or less, Unix (except for AIX which I gather is like Unix as implemented by space aliens from mind-probes of Unix-hacker abductees, but I've never used it.) Solaris is about like Linux or FreeBSD when you get right down to it (though CDE is the only desktop environment/application suite I've encountered on Unixoids that I thought had been at all designed with a serious or professional eye towards a good user experience - but then, it's also a very very 1994-vintage user experience.)
If you do want to pursue this, though (and that Ultra II is a hell of a deal if it works, and not much of a risk if it doesn't,) you will need, at a minimum, a serial null-modem cable so you can run a terminal emulator for console access on your PC or Amiga or whatever. More ideal would be a Sun keyboard, mouse, and a 3W13-to-VGA adapter plus a 1280x1024 display (Sun's output seems to be pretty compatible with modern displays - I had to do some hunting to get one that supports sync-on-green for my VAX, though!) Those don't tend to be terribly expensive, but of course that all depends on just how tight your finances are. You could certainly use it serial-only until you can afford them. You may also need replacement install media if someone removed the OS; I don't know anything about that, you'd have to talk to the Nekochan guys.
Addendum: you'd probably need replacement install media period if the seller doesn't have the root password for the current install.
What I really need is a detailed explanation of why anyone would want to use a Sun workstation instead of some other system. I also need to know all the differences between Linux and UNIX. There's also the Silicon Graphics workstations which don't just do graphics, but some graphics I've found are nice raytaced 3D graphics which remind me of Amiga raytracing. I never got around to or never managed to do any raytracing on the Amiga, even with free software on a cover disk. I plan to try again soon. Unfortunately, in the Nekochan forum they mention using some nasty software which put me off doing graphics when I switched to Windoze and Linux. By this I mean Photoshop and GIMP with their nasty, business like, totally user unfriendly interfaces and ways of doing things. Paint Shop Pro and Microsoft Paint are also crap! If I had to use those on a Silicon Graphics workstation, then there wouldn't be any point. Apart from this, I'm totally against using software such as Photoshop which costs more than the price of a new computer. I don't know what the software Maya or Blender is like, though.
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There is no real "why" to using an oldschool Unix workstation other than that you find the idea cool. As for software, I really have no idea; you'd have to ask on Nekochan. (But as for Photoshop's price tag, I imagine anything you'd be running on an old SGI would be, erm, "acquired secondhand.")
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except for AIX which I gather is like Unix as implemented by space aliens from mind-probes of Unix-hacker abductees, but I've never used it.
AIX is based on ATA&T's Unix System V R1/R2/R3.
Solaris is about like Linux or FreeBSD when you get right down to it
Solaris is based on AT&T's UNIX System V R4
They both include source code from BSD as well.
People use an old SGI or Sun for the same reason they use old Amiga's.
There is no real justification for it.
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Everything talked about here is yesterday's news. Sad state of affairs.
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Kind of funny that the only thing in this whole tread that is 'current' is Linux, AIX, and FreeBSD.
SunOS is now Solaris (owned by Oracle now :( ) and AIX is pretty much only available on fat IBM mainframes, which oddly are descended from PPC, so I guess they're After-Commodore Amiga-Like in hardware? :D
Hmmm, AmigaOS 4.x on a Power7+ processor would be... not sure I know if there is a word.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER7
One can dream, right? :D
slaapliedje
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Everything talked about here is yesterday's news.
Hmmm.. Imagine that...
:laugh1:
desiv
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... AIX is pretty much only available on fat IBM mainframes, ...e
Negative. AIX is available for iSeries, pSeries, and of course zSeries. So, not just on mainframes.
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There is no real "why" to using an oldschool Unix workstation other than that you find the idea cool. As for software, I really have no idea; you'd have to ask on Nekochan. (But as for Photoshop's price tag, I imagine anything you'd be running on an old SGI would be, erm, "acquired secondhand.")
I only understand that I used to hear about these expensive Sun and Silicon graphics workstations and I wondered why anyone used them and what they did with them, but it was too expensive to find out. Now it's not too expensive to find out, but I don't know how old any of the hardware on eBay is because these systems aren't familiar to me. As for being "oldschool" I've recently seen videos of Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations with their nice, custom GUIs and they don't look old school to me. I don't know what the difference is between this and totally up to date Sun or Silicon Graphics workstations. Here's a video I watched yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ3eKYXk9EI
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I only understand that I used to hear about these expensive Sun and Silicon graphics workstations and I wondered why anyone used them and what they did with them, but it was too expensive to find out. Now it's not too expensive to find out, but I don't know how old any of the hardware on eBay is because these systems aren't familiar to me. As for being "oldschool" I've recently seen videos of Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations with their nice, custom GUIs and they don't look old school to me. I don't know what the difference is between this and totally up to date Sun or Silicon Graphics workstations. Here's a video I watched yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ3eKYXk9EI
if you have a spare PC floating around or one that you are willing to partition- you could always try OpenSolaris http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/index.html
and avoid having to purchase the hardware in the first place.
N
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Or just run Open Solaris in a VM. The college of engineering where I work used to be a Sun shop. As Sun went through it's death spiral the slowly abandoned Solais, even the switch to X86 seemed to help the decline.
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Negative. AIX is available for iSeries, pSeries, and of course zSeries. So, not just on mainframes.
All this talk of IBM Big Iron has triggered off latent memories of AS/400 development in the late-90's/early-00's. Not all of them pleasant either! :lol:
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All this talk of IBM Big Iron has triggered off latent memories of AS/400 development in the late-90's/early-00's.
"Latent" memories... Hmmmm..
OK, they call it the System i now, but it'll always be an AS/400 to me.. ;-)
desiv
(as an aside on the Unixy side, I preferred Apollo Workstations... ;-)
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"Latent" memories... Hmmmm..
OK, they call it the System i now, but it'll always be an AS/400 to me.. ;-)
desiv
Methinks the marketing drone that thought up the System I moniker was on crack! :)
Synon 2E was something I never touched, Magic was the competing "post-4GL" I specialised in.
http://devnet.magicsoftware.com/en/library?book=en/uniPaaS/&page=uniPaaS_for_iSeries_Guide.htm
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I only understand that I used to hear about these expensive Sun and Silicon graphics workstations and I wondered why anyone used them and what they did with them, but it was too expensive to find out. Now it's not too expensive to find out, but I don't know how old any of the hardware on eBay is because these systems aren't familiar to me. As for being "oldschool" I've recently seen videos of Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations with their nice, custom GUIs and they don't look old school to me. I don't know what the difference is between this and totally up to date Sun or Silicon Graphics workstations. Here's a video I watched yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ3eKYXk9EI
Rather than buy some old outdated Sun workstation you could try the Solaris fork Open Indiana on any old PC or VM.
http://openindiana.org
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I guess my answer to this question would be a resounding no.
I demoed a few systems in college(1998) running System V underneath CDE with motif, as they seemed similar to my dad's 3000 running MUI, but did not "feel" like an Amiga.
I use Linux now, and like it(no stones please) but only because I don't have the hardware for running AOS. It is Linux and not UNIX, but they are really very similar. I actually think that Linux has been made to be much more approachable by the community that develops it.
I hope that the Amiga OS goes to a more Open format and adopts a similar strategy of making it more accessible. I miss it.
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if you have a spare PC floating around or one that you are willing to partition- you could always try OpenSolaris http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/index.html
and avoid having to purchase the hardware in the first place.
N
Great! I'd never heard of OpenSolaris before. I've got a laptop with a 320Gb hard drive and a desktop PC with an 80Gb hard drive, but could fit another hard drive to it. I hope I can install Opensolaris on one of them.
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Rather than buy some old outdated Sun workstation you could try the Solaris fork Open Indiana on any old PC or VM.
http://openindiana.org
Thanks a lot for this! I didn't know that Sun had closed and this has saved me lots of money now. I can also stop looking for Sun workstations on eBay.
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For me, Linux was the natural way to go when Amiga started losing speed. I use both today of course.
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No, Linux is different, and use a desktop with icons because it to copy a Windows its natural foe.
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fwiw:
http://xwinman.org/amiwm.php
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I voted no, but really its not as cut and dry as that.
What exactly is an amiga system and how is it setup?
What exactly is a Linux system and how is it setup?
The above is rhetorical of course, but the point being that both are hugely customisable and neither can be said to work a particular way. That's all down to the user. Having said this though a person has to know the systems for this to be true, but at the end of the day both can be built ontop of a very small foundation. It's entirely possible to make either behave similarly, even if theyre typically somewhat different.
So in short, no, but it's ultimately down to the user.
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As with most OSes, Linux is not just one thing. It's not just the kernel. It's the system, the interface, the license, the repository, the platform, the community, the philosophy. And no, it does not have an Amiga feel. For the time & effort that has been put on Linux by everybody it has been a complete failure in the desktop and workstation (embedded systems, thin clients, servers, etc is another story). Too much legacy code, no pattern, no consistency, many stubborn or clueless developers with no intuitive ideas or HCI skills. Lack of marketing, not centralised management, forking, openess is NOT the problem with Linux as Micro$oft and Apple insist it is. Strict adherence to the rules and legacy code which leads to stagnation of ideas is.
Hopefully that will change in the future as more young developers have no prior experience on lame L&Fs that forces them to copycat bad ideas from Micro$oft/Apple. Still, there are some key fundamentals in Linux are flawed and need rethinking and redesigning from scratch.
Anyway, we had our chance to do it right when BeOS, QNX, Elate (Java) were around but we didn't. Instead of joining forces with MorphOS people and move forward we turned into a personal vendetta. Instead of retaining the pirate and underground spirit we tried in vain to figure out legislation and IPs for too many years. We now have to accept that a AmigaNG with a rich API and capable of a smooth transition from legacy AmigaOS is not going to happen. We concentrate on emulation for running 20years old software, on recreating limited AOS3.x in order to run it on boring x86 hardware, on doing boring software ports for underpowered and expensive AmigaOS4 hardware. The userbase and the community is shrinking. And it's not always about money or hardware. We need richer APIs and more developers. And we need to decide if it's only retro we want to go or we want something more. I don't get it why FFPGAs should be used strictly for emulation reasons and we shouldn't try to build a non-linux transition path from AmigaOS3/4/MorphOS/AROS to AmigaNG on that hardware.
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I have a feeling Linux may get another chance at the desktop. Microsoft
fired their pc software manager and they are now all under the Windows phone division.
Thanks, I'll have a 27inch videophone instead of a computer.
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@ElPolloDiabl
Who care about the desktop? Look at the post PC market, both Android and OS X are UNIX based and they control over 90% of the market.
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I have a feeling Linux may get another chance at the desktop. Microsoft fired their pc software manager and they are now all under the Windows phone division. Thanks, I'll have a 27inch videophone instead of a computer.
The Windows 8 debacle is an open invitation for a good alternative OS, alright - but so was the Windows Me debacle, and the Windows Vista debacle, and Linux isn't really any better-suited to fill that gap now than it was then, because the guiding forces behind Linux still don't get usability or simplicity of design.
These are people who, faced with the problem of a complex and arcane directory structure in which any one application might conceivably have files spread across child folders of half the root-level directories in the system and installation and uninstallation is consequently a nightmare for less technical users, come up with complex package managers to automate it instead of working towards a less cryptic directory structure. Their response to needless complexity is not to simplify it, but merely to hide it behind an automated interface, because as toRus says, they're slavishly devoted to crufty legacy standards from the days when Unix was driving serial terminals on PDP-11s. Hell, they're only just now starting to move away from xserver.
These are people for whom "user-friendly" is the same thing as "idiot-oriented;" the kind of people who give the world things like Gnome 3. They don't get usability, they don't get ordinary users, and Linux is never going to get anywhere in the desktop market until they do.
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Who care about the desktop? Look at the post PC market, both Android and OS X are UNIX based and they control over 90% of the market.
Keep repeating "post-PC" to yourself, man. Maybe one of these days the power of belief will make it true!
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These are people for whom "user-friendly" is the same thing as "idiot-oriented;" the kind of people who give the world things like Gnome 3. They don't get usability, they don't get ordinary users, and Linux is never going to get anywhere in the desktop market until they do.
Here here.
Back in the day I used to run Slackware with Fluxbox windows manager, because it ran nicely on my low-spec PC. But it had its shortcomings in the user experience department, so taking up the Open Source spirit I thought I'd delve into it and fix some things myself. And nobody was interested. I added something so simple as a button on the toolbar to return to the desktop, and nobody saw the point of it because there is a keyboard shortcut for that already, why would you want to use the mouse? The word "shortcut" ought to imply that it's supposed to be the alternative way to do things. I had people seriously tell me that since Fluxbox was intended to be lightweight, making it user-friendly was missing the point somehow, and if I wanted usability why don't I just use Gnome or KDE?
So, frankly, as for the "fix it yourself" mentality, well I can do that but if that's the response then screw it. I don't want to spend weeks staring at somebody else's poorly-documented code trying to work out where to put a single line fix that would have taken the maintainers five minutes, only to be told I shouldn't even have bothered.
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Here here.
Back in the day I used to run Slackware with Fluxbox windows manager, because it ran nicely on my low-spec PC. But it had its shortcomings in the user experience department, so taking up the Open Source spirit I thought I'd delve into it and fix some things myself. And nobody was interested. I added something so simple as a button on the toolbar to return to the desktop, and nobody saw the point of it because there is a keyboard shortcut for that already, why would you want to use the mouse? The word "shortcut" ought to imply that it's supposed to be the alternative way to do things. I had people seriously tell me that since Fluxbox was intended to be lightweight, making it user-friendly was missing the point somehow, and if I wanted usability why don't I just use Gnome or KDE?
So, frankly, as for the "fix it yourself" mentality, well I can do that but if that's the response then screw it. I don't want to spend weeks staring at somebody else's poorly-documented code trying to work out where to put a single line fix that would have taken the maintainers five minutes, only to be told I shouldn't even have bothered.
Feature!=Fix ;)
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I voted no. I've experienced several versions of Ubuntu as well as other distros going back to Slackware. But having said that, I just remembered Aeros which is actually a Linux/AROS hybrid.
http://www.aeros-os.org/
AROS is a re-implementation of AmigaDOS3.1 therefore has a real Amiga feel. What Aeros does is use the Linux kernal for its wealth of drivers and access to its library of applications and puts the AROS UI on top of it. Pretty cool trick. I tried it when it first came out. Was a bit buggy, but should be more stable now. It is based on the Broadway distro of AROS. I prefer the Icaros distro myself. But it's definitely worth a look. It will work with most x86 or x64 machine including laptops. There is also a version for the Raspberry PI which just came out.
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If we are going down that route then I change my vote to yes because of Amithlon.
Did someone say ARIX? ;)
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If we are going down that route then I change my vote to yes because of Amithlon.
Did someone say ARIX? ;)
Almost forgot about that. Strange animal the likes of which we may never see again. It doesn't just have the Amiga feel. It is an Amiga. It uses a combination of modified Amiga side calls and Linux hardware drivers to deliver incredible performance. It was like having a super 68040, with RTG and AHI machine using an old PIII, 512MB machine that could barely run Windows XP. Still have that machine somewhere around.
Big difference between Aeros and Amithlon. One is Amiga-Like, the other is an Amiga. Amithlon was much lower level than Aeros which makes it more efficient but also much more difficult to implement. It's almost like its talking to the Linux drivers (graphic, sound, usb, etc...) directly from AmigaDOS without going thru any HAL. Aeros feels like there's more layers in between.
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Almost forgot about that. Strange animal the likes of which we may never see again.
My lips are sealed.......
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I'd googled around and it seems ARIX is somehow alive :P
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I'd googled around and it seems ARIX is somehow alive :P
Will this be closer in spirit to the Amithlon or to Aeros?
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Hi,
the idea behind AEROS is to have "enough" linux under the hood to run Linux apps. It is easy to remove "those" extra layers. Since i started with 40MB of Linux i must say "it is easier to run just AROS on top".
My version of Amithlon would be Arithlon and would allow, like AEROS, to run Linux apps but it would have 68k JIT accelerated AROS in front. I have it on my todo list.
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The sales figures do a quite adequate job of showing the decline of the desktop. Really except for us computer archaeologists the appeal of a desktop at home is very limited.
(http://www.fixmypcfree.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/post-pc-era.jpg)
The personal computer's role changes, becoming one of many contextual devices rather than the central hub connecting them.
Keep repeating "post-PC" to yourself, man. Maybe one of these days the power of belief will make it true!
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And yet they're still being made, and absolutely nobody in the OS market except head-up-its-ass Microsoft is even trying to downplay the importance of real computers running real computer operating systems (and even MS aren't dumb enough to cut desktop functionality altogether.) News flash: the decline in PC sales reflects nothing more than the fact that we're currently in the middle of a plateau where the needs of PC users are, largely, served just as well by equipment they already have or can acquire cheaply used as by new, high-end computers.
Also, claiming that PCs are dying because people aren't watching as much video on them is like saying that cars are obsolete because more people are having sex on beds.
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The Windows 8 debacle is an open invitation for a good alternative OS, alright - but so was the Windows Me debacle, and the Windows Vista debacle, and Linux isn't really any better-suited to fill that gap now than it was then, because the guiding forces behind Linux still don't get usability or simplicity of design.
Linux had a golden opportunity during the netbook craze. Only time I've seen linux pre-installed on hardware in general electronics/TV/ stores like JB Hifi.
And people returned them once they realised what they'd bought!
....These are people for whom "user-friendly" is the same thing as "idiot-oriented;" the kind of people who give the world things like Gnome 3. They don't get usability, they don't get ordinary users, and Linux is never going to get anywhere in the desktop market until they do.
Thats the gist of it all really.
Linux fanatics always blame the user for not being "smart enough", not accepting of linux's "differences", not willing to learn etc. Whereas what the user is saying is that there is a better way to do it, and they've seen it elsewhere.
To which the reply invariably is: " If you don't like like it, make it better yourself, or leave".
The user, invariably chooses the latter option.
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It's more a realignment, than an actual death. The PC was the core of the computer world, everything you had fed off it. Now it's just one device of many that serves those needs. It's just one of many choices. There is no one device that everyone must have, it's all context driven, what you need to do determines the device(s) you need. Nobody needs a PC to do facebook and youtube, but in the past they would buy a PC because it was the only choice, now it's not. PCs are a declining percentage of smart devices.
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The sales figures do a quite adequate job of showing the decline of the desktop. Really except for us computer archaeologists the appeal of a desktop at home is very limited.
(http://www.fixmypcfree.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/post-pc-era.jpg)
The personal computer's role changes, becoming one of many contextual devices rather than the central hub connecting them.
That is a really misleading statistic. By volume more video on other devices huh? That simply means that more people are watching netflix, hulu, and other services are being streamed to PS3s, XBoxes, and other media direct devices. That just tells me that people stopped watching movies on their laptops/desktops as streamed from the internet and moved from the office to their living room. They are more so qualifying their place in the market than making a statement to move to a tablet or other device.
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It's more a realignment, than an actual death. The PC was the core of the computer world, everything you had fed off it. Now it's just one device of many that serves those needs. It's just one of many choices. There is no one device that everyone must have, it's all context driven, what you need to do determines the device(s) you need. Nobody needs a PC to do facebook and youtube, but in the past they would buy a PC because it was the only choice, now it's not. PCs are a declining percentage of smart devices.
First off, you're blatantly changing your position here, I guess because you finally realized that the one you were taking was nonsense. "Ooh, ooh, it's not an actual death! Despite the fact that I've been crowing about the 'death of the PC' at every opportunity for two or three years!"
In any case, A. I've still seen no reason to believe that the number of people in this fabled "Facebook mall-rat" demographic, who only use a computer for yammering about their pets on Facebook and watching funny cat videos on YouTube, and therefore have no use for a real computer once they get a Facebook slab, is anywhere near as huge as tablet evangelists think it is, and B. claiming that PCs are "a declining percentage" of gadgets because of declining sales is still completely baseless, given that there are countless machines out in the field that already meet or exceed the requirements for many people, and no evidence whatsoever that they aren't being used.
(Additionally, these figures never bother to take into account people who build their own PCs rather than buy from an OEM, but hey! When you want to make the numbers turn out your way, I guess you gotta leave data out somewhere.)
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Your TV does internet, XBOX, PlayStation, Wii do internet, phones do internet, tablets do internet, zeus knows what else will do internet. The PC age, where the desktop was dominant is no more, devices other than PCs form the majority of smart devices. The market is proving it as we speak. Who needs a desktop? Those who do serious work such as developing apps for other smart devices. Who doesn't need them? Most everybody else. The PC is just one device amongst a host of devices. This is what Apple and others have meant by post-pc. Apple continues to develop desktops too, so if they meant what you believed them to mean they'd be kicking a dead horse.
Speaking of horses, no one would argue that we are in the post-horse transport era, yet I can still ride a horse if I want to.
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Your TV does internet, XBOX, PlayStation, Wii do internet, phones do internet, tablets do internet, zeus knows what else will do internet.
Yes, an assload of devices can now "do Internet" (apparently we're borrowing phrasing from a seventy-year-old grandma, doing the Internet with the Bookface and the VideoTube and the whatsits?) None of them do it as well as a PC or laptop; of those, only tablets even come close. A smartphone is definitely easier to carry in your pocket than a laptop, and it's a perfectly fine thing for keeping a grocery list or checking email on the road; for actual web browsing, it's heavily constrained by screen size, with the experience being anywhere from "tolerable but not great" on sites with "phone" versions to downright comically bad on sites designed for a full-sized screen.
The PC age, where the desktop was dominant is no more, devices other than PCs form the majority of smart devices. The market is proving it as we speak.
The market is proving nothing of the kind, unless you've got some figures on actual usage you're not sharing. Once again: sales figures only convey information about what people are buying, not what they are using and in which contexts they are using it. There is absolutely no reason to assume that everybody who buys an iPhone goes and throws out their desktop, unless you're desperately trying to make things sound like you want them to sound using data that doesn't actually support that assertion.
Who needs a desktop? Those who do serious work such as developing apps for other smart devices. Who doesn't need them? Most everybody else.
Who needs a desktop or laptop? Anybody who does any kind of meaningful work on a computer, anybody who enjoys creative pursuits using the mass of good creative software for PCs, anybody who doesn't like touchscreens or shıtty rubber Bluetooth keyboards in floppy fold-out "poor man's laptop" cases, anybody who enjoys games that aren't the Bejeweled crap flooding the iOS or Android markets or watered-down console garbage, anybody who wants cost-effective mass storage, etcetera, etcetera.
Who doesn't need them? Slackjaws for whom the computer is a glorified TV, who spend their entire free time watching Jenna farkin' Marbles and desperately trying to get her to "like" them on Facebook, and for whom the closest they ever get to any kind of creative pursuit is spinning wild tales about the "post-PC era" at the slightest provocation. Yeah, those people probably don't need a real computer; they might hurt themselves on its non-patented square corners. They should be much safer with a smooth, featureless 6oz. slab.
The PC is just one device amongst a host of devices. This is what Apple and others have meant by post-pc. Apple continues to develop desktops too, so if they meant what you believed them to mean they'd be kicking a dead horse.
The fact that Apple's business arm has a great deal more sense than its marketing arm (which is probably just repeating "post-PC" in an attempt to get people to believe it, and buy more iPads) does not change the meaning of the words "post-PC era," because those words actually mean set things and combine in regular ways, and insisting that they mean something different together is poor communication. If they really are only trying to say that people use other things than PCs for some tasks, I have news for you: people have always used things other than PCs for some tasks. Did the microwave bring about the "post-oven era?"
Speaking of horses, no one would argue that we are in the post-horse transport era, yet I can still ride a horse if I want to.
This would be a meaningful analogy if horses were actually better at a wide variety of tasks than cars and more comfortable for long-term use. It's actually the opposite, so working from your logic, I look forward to the upcoming post-tablet era.
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John, may I ask you what you use for a cellular phone, what you use for a day to day PC, etc? Have you used an iPad, Android tablet, larger form factor smart phone?
Most people have zero problems browsing the web in a fully functional manner on any smartphone that was made in the last few years. We're talking "free with a contract" run of the mill Android fare.
It's not 2002. The vast majority of popular websites do have mobile versions that work just great. Most people aren't using Palm Treo's. In fact, A.org is the ONLY website I visit on a regular basis that doesn't have an auto detecting mobile version.
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I like how they thought: "Everyone must want thin PC's. We have to make thin PC's." (With the rare under 7mm hard drives. Plus no room for any expansions).
Personally my next purchase might be a touchscreen, all in one, kiosk type computer. I could sit it somewhere and use it like an appliance. I'd use it for google searches and casual games.
Other than that I am slowly adding to my desktop box.
The big companies are hooked on the idea of renting things to you. I bet the old fashioned way of: have product... a sale... upgrade the product... another sale... product breaks... customer buys a replacement... That must result in more money than renting.
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John, may I ask you what you use for a cellular phone, what you use for a day to day PC, etc? Have you used an iPad, Android tablet, larger form factor smart phone?
Most people have zero problems browsing the web in a fully functional manner on any smartphone that was made in the last few years. We're talking "free with a contract" run of the mill Android fare.
It's not 2002. The vast majority of popular websites do have mobile versions that work just great. Most people aren't using Palm Treo's. In fact, A.org is the ONLY website I visit on a regular basis that doesn't have an auto detecting mobile version.
You may. I have some cheap imitation Blackberry thing that was the cheapest thing Verizon supported last time I upgraded, because all I personally do with a phone is place and receive calls. (I would've gone for a no-frills flip-phone, but counterintuitively they wanted more for that!) Day-to-day computing is mostly on my laptop, a 12" HP Core 2 Duo affair, with gaming and some various pursuits that require stationary equipment (MIDI sequencing, f'rexample) on my desktop system, a significantly faster Core 2 Duo with a halfway decent GPU.
I have, however, used my brother's iPad and iPhone enough to get a feel for them. The web browsing experience on the iPad is basically okay except for the touchscreen keyboard (the Bluetooth keyboard makes it better, but it's still nowhere near as good as even a half-travel laptop keyboard.) Yes, Safari's technical functionality is perfectly satisfactory; it's not like the dark days of Opera Mobile on Blackberries. And yes, more sites support mobile browsers than used to (though I think it's not by as much as you think, but eh.) It's still not a good experience, because it's just too damn cramped.
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I really prefer my laptop than any tablet that I've used. In fact, I've bought two tablets in twelve months, and they were both for my 9 year old daughter. She spends more time using them to watch One Direction videos or play Minecraft.
I've been using a Dell laptop from 6 years ago which still works fine and I have zero need for upgrade. I suppose that's why my next purchase is an A1200, I have no need to purchase new PC hardware.
And no, Linux still does not feel like an Amiga ;)
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True, Windows 8 doesn't provide much for old Windows 7 users. Especially on the failure of the Microsoft Store on Windows 8 apps. I personally have a desktop, but it gets far less use than my iPad or MacBook Air.
What percentage of people do things other than facebook and email? Back in the '80s people had a computer to program and tinker with. But nowadays few program and even fewer tinker. Windows users don't want to do anything that doesn't involve a GUI, true Mac users can and do drop into a terminal and use a command line but even Mac users rely fairly heavily on the GUI.
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What percentage of people do things other than facebook and email?
Good question! Do you know? Because if you don't have some evidence that the answer is "not many," I can't see how this line of inquiry helps your point.
Back in the '80s people had a computer to program and tinker with. But nowadays few program and even fewer tinker.
Even assuming this is true, there is a vast swath of things that can be done with a computer in between "programming and hardware hacking" and "Facebook and email."
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Take something like Excel. You are going to be using keyboard shortcuts more than the mouse. I've yet to use MS office (or the open version) on a touchscreen computer. It should be fun?
The disappointing part is that you can no longer customise things. There are a set number of 'themes'. Everything runs off a menu interface, no more desktop.
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Windows users don't want to do anything that doesn't involve a GUI, true Mac users can and do drop into a terminal and use a command line
No. It's the other way around.
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No. It's the other way around.
Yeah, I would have said more people use command prompt on windows than open a shell on MacOS.
(http://media.operatingdev.com/sites/2/2013/01/mac-pc-linux.png)
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Yeah, I would have said more people use command prompt on windows than open a shell on MacOS.
(http://media.operatingdev.com/sites/2/2013/01/mac-pc-linux.png)
Rightly so. Smash that ginger tosser!
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The big companies are hooked on the idea of renting things to you. I bet the old fashioned way of: have product... a sale... upgrade the product... another sale... product breaks... customer buys a replacement... That must result in more money than renting.
I don't think so. If you're renting they effectively force you to upgrade even if you don't really need to. Well they say "free upgrade!" but guess who's paying for it anyway.
I think the industry would like to move everyone over to tablets etc, they imagine the public never aspire to do anything creative and will buy any sparkly gadget you throw at them, I don't think they're finding it quite that easy though. There's been a resurgence in tinkering lately in the form of the "makers movement". Maybe it's testament to the fact that hobbying all but died out 20 years ago, that the next generation had to invent another name for it.
When we had computers in the '80s we used them for programming and all sorts of stuff, because development was simple and cheap and anyone could do it if they were willing to read a book. Then it became big business and nobody imagined doing it anymore except if you got a degree in it and god a job in the industry. Now in the era of smart device proliferation, anyone can program again. Every web browser has Javascript. You can get Android dev kits for free. There are abstracted high-level languages for everything. And kids are realising, once again, that "hey you can actually do all sorts of cool stuff with computers!" Because you really can, even with a lowly 800MHz Arm, which has more power than was imaginable when we were kids. Hence the Raspberry Pi.
But the fact is, I think, that nobody needs the very expensive top-of-the-range desktop PCs anymore, not just for facebook &c, but for doing cool stuff too. I use a desktop PC myself out of personal preference (it's what I'm used to), it's quite old and it was "entry level" when I got it (I always hated that euphemism for low-spec, I'm hardly a computer novice I'm just aware of how little power I need) but more and more people grew up with laptops, and are used to them. I don't think PCs are anywhere near dead yet, but the days of needing an ominous full tower system under your desk that sounds like a vacuum cleaner are over. Thank goodness.
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I think the industry would like to move everyone over to tablets etc, they imagine the public never aspire to do anything creative and will buy any sparkly gadget you throw at them, I don't think they're finding it quite that easy though. There's been a resurgence in tinkering lately in the form of the "makers movement". Maybe it's testament to the fact that hobbying all but died out 20 years ago, that the next generation had to invent another name for it.
Right on.
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People keep saying that people don't need desktop pc's anymore.
This is entirely not the case. Anyone who creates or manipulates digital data,
graphics, sound, video needs a desktop, and the more powerful the better.
I don't see that changing anytime soon. Content consumers (people who watch videos, listen to music, look at pics) sure, they can use a low spec device to consume that content, but people making content still need a desktop.
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No, no, see, creative people don't count, haywire, because nobody is creative anymore! The only creative activity in the modern world is the province of some tiny elite cadre of Designated Content Producers who are elevated beyond the station of mere mortals, and all the rest of the world is made up of glassy-eyed couch potatoes who simply are Not Creative and only exist to sit passively consuming content and mooing approval! This is obviously true because, well, it's obviously true!
Christ. It's kind of amazing that I of all people have more faith in the human race than tablet evangelists.
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I totally agree. Seems like "they" are trying to take all digital power away from average people, so its reserved for those who sell the content.
I feel exactly the same way about "cloud computing" - Here, you just need a terminal and you can pay us monthly to use our storage and processing power.
I want the power and my own content in my own hands, not some phantom corporation who will charge me a monthly fee, but it seems thats the way the "industry" is going.
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Well socialism proper is when The People own the means of production, either co-operatively or individually, the Status Quo kind of in a panic now, trying to subvert the inevitable, now they must surely realise that anyone at all can, with the right skills, produce any of the things that they have held a monopoly over in the last few decades.
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In the '80s maybe 5% of people had computers, you bought the computer to do creative things, now with everyone having a computer you may still have that 5% being creative, but that leaves the vast majority of computer owners just doing facebook and watching youtube. There never was a time when everyone wanted to program. Many people will be quite happy with using their TV to surf the web.
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Again, do you have any basis at all for these claims, or are you just pulling numbers out of your ass? And once again, programming is not the only non-FaceTube activity computers are useful for.
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Well socialism proper is when The People own the means of production, either co-operatively or individually, the Status Quo kind of in a panic now, trying to subvert the inevitable, now they must surely realise that anyone at all can, with the right skills, produce any of the things that they have held a monopoly over in the last few decades.
+1 to that! :)
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No ! Sacrilege.
Amiga was based on TripOS - a mainframe supercomputer. Amiga is supposed to be different, super optimized, efficient, multitasking, state of the art technology and concepts to blow competition away for years.
What we need is a chipset or virtual chipset with RTG, hardware accelerated direct to GFX card. Let people 'bang the metal' using the AVC (Amiga Virtual Chipset) using standardized API for GFX, media encode/decode MP4/AVI/7.1 surround s and a Virtual Processor Assembly codebase with plugin support.
Yes, we need a Virtual Cross Platform Assembler, Cross Amiga Assembler + script support. With this, users can create addons to extend the language for every area and never worry about efficiency or compatibility. The code will just compile like AMOS 'just works' Magic.
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No ! Sacrilege.
Amiga was based on TripOS - a mainframe supercomputer. Amiga is supposed to be different, super optimized, efficient, multitasking, state of the art technology and concepts to blow competition away for years.
What we need is a chipset or virtual chipset with RTG, hardware accelerated direct to GFX card. Let people 'bang the metal' using the AVC (Amiga Virtual Chipset) using standardized API for GFX, media encode/decode MP4/AVI/7.1 surround s and a Virtual Processor Assembly codebase with plugin support.
Yes, we need a Virtual Cross Platform Assembler, Cross Amiga Assembler + script support. With this, users can create addons to extend the language for every area and never worry about efficiency or compatibility. The code will just compile like AMOS 'just works' Magic.
http://www.amiga.com/about/history/?t=anywhere ;)
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In the '80s maybe 5% of people had computers, you bought the computer to do creative things, now with everyone having a computer you may still have that 5% being creative, but that leaves the vast majority of computer owners just doing facebook and watching youtube. There never was a time when everyone wanted to program. Many people will be quite happy with using their TV to surf the web.
In the '80s 5% of people bought computers to do creative things.
In the '90s 5% of people bought computers to do creative things and 10% of people bought computers to play Quake
In the ''00s 5% of people bought computers to do creative things and 10% of people bought computers to go on facebook
In the '10s 5% of people bought computers to do creative things and 10% of people bought computers to play Skyrim and 10% buy computers to go on facebook.
There will always be that 5%*(citation needed) of people who aren't idiots.
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PCs are appliances, like toasters or dishwashers. People don't buy a dishwasher to be creative, they buy it to wash the dishes. Most people want to go on Facebook not write HTML5. In the '80s you were dealing with a self selected audience, in the '10s you are dealing with virtually everybody. The cost of entry was very high US$1300 well over AU$2000 for an Amiga 2000 when average wages were AU$400 per week. Now an iPad costs US$499/AU$579 and average wages are AU$1400 per week. It's no longer a major investment.
Take cars, when only the few had them everyone who owned them could tear them apart and rebuild them, now everyone has a car and only a small percentage actually work on them on their own. It's not an adventure in discovery to own a car, it's a necessity. People no even vaguely interested in how an internal combustion engine works own them. But that percentage, that tinker with cars, as a part of the total population, has remained constant.
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PCs are appliances, like toasters or dishwashers. People don't buy a dishwasher to be creative, they buy it to wash the dishes. Most people want to go on Facebook not write HTML5. In the '80s you were dealing with a self selected audience, in the '10s you are dealing with virtually everybody.
You are correct that the market for computers is much broader than it was in the '80s. Yes, it contains many more non-programmers than it used to. However, you are still completely ignoring the question: how do you even know that most people only want to "go on Facebook" and not do any of the hundreds of other, non-technical, non-programming things that PCs are useful for? You keep making this blanket assertion and you have absolutely nothing to back it up with aside from the truly shocking revelation that more people watch video on devices that are specifically geared towards watching video.
The cost of entry was very high US$1300 well over AU$2000 for an Amiga 2000 when average wages were AU$400 per week. Now an iPad costs US$499/AU$579 and average wages are AU$1400 per week. It's no longer a major investment.
And an entry-level computer in either desktop or laptop form factor can be had for less than half that, if you even buy it new from an OEM; and it can run a far broader range of much more useful software. Your point?
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I don't like the vague estimates.
Things people might do on a computer:
Edit photos/store photos.
Logon to bank and pay bills.
A lot of online shopping.
Write a resume.
Google stuff.
The above mentioned drones who seem to be estimated at 95% (put me down for 50%) are people who have a device or computer to access the internet. I imagine there day consists: Google restaraunt. Google map to get to restaraunt.
Check emails while in restaraunt. Google what a 'Linux' is. etc.
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You are correct that the market for computers is much broader than it was in the '80s. Yes, it contains many more non-programmers than it used to. However, you are still completely ignoring the question: how do you even know that most people only want to "go on Facebook" and not do any of the hundreds of other, non-technical, non-programming things that PCs are useful for? You keep making this blanket assertion and you have absolutely nothing to back it up with aside from the truly shocking revelation that more people watch video on devices that are specifically geared towards watching video.
I suppose it is anecdotal evidence.
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I suppose it is anecdotal evidence.
I'll let persia answer for himself, assuming he actually ever will answer, but if it's anecdotal, I can provide plenty of counter-examples.
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PCs are appliances, like toasters or dishwashers. People don't buy a dishwasher to be creative, they buy it to wash the dishes. Most people want to go on Facebook not write HTML5.
What an odd thing to say. You couldn't write HTML5 on a dishwasher even if you wanted.
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I'll let persia answer for himself, assuming he actually ever will answer, but if it's anecdotal, I can provide plenty of counter-examples.
I thought you were both writing roughly the same thing.
The majority of people only use facetwitmytube, they only need a simple appliance. He is making the distinction of people using facebook or html5, but that is just for comparison of user types. Not because facebook and html5 are the only thing you can use a computer for. There are plenty of ways you can consume and plenty of ways you can create. In the UK they are talking about teaching programming in schools again (they only teach you how to use things like word, excel, some form of database right now).
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I thought you were both writing roughly the same thing.
Not remotely...
The majority of people only use facetwitmytube, they only need a simple appliance.
I have my doubts about that assertion (they really don't use a computer for anything else?) and I certainly don't buy his 95% figure, unless he can come up with some data to back it and isn't just pulling it out of his ass.
He is making the distinction of people using facebook or html5, but that is just for comparison of user types.
Unless I misunderstand, when he mentions HTML5 he's talking about web authoring using HTML5, not browsing HTML5 sites.
There are plenty of ways you can consume and plenty of ways you can create.
There are indeed, but he (along with pretty much every other tablet zealot) is claiming that the majority (95%, according to him) of people just aren't creative and only exist to be media-consuming couch potatoes, and therefore the creative potential of a platform is irrelevant and nobody needs a real computer.
In the UK they are talking about teaching programming in schools again (they only teach you how to use things like word, excel, some form of database right now).
And it's high friggin' time.
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Surely you mean in secondary education, they must still teach programming at the tertiary level.
I thought you were both writing roughly the same thing.
The majority of people only use facetwitmytube, they only need a simple appliance. He is making the distinction of people using facebook or html5, but that is just for comparison of user types. Not because facebook and html5 are the only thing you can use a computer for. There are plenty of ways you can consume and plenty of ways you can create. In the UK they are talking about teaching programming in schools again (they only teach you how to use things like word, excel, some form of database right now).
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And what is creative? There are video, audio and image editing apps on iOS, surely this is being creative.
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And an entry-level computer in either desktop or laptop form factor can be had for less than half that, if you even buy it new from an OEM; and it can run a far broader range of much more useful software. Your point?
My entry level desktop PC cost $99.00 brand new in 2004 from a respectable retailer. The next year I went back bought another one for $99.00.
It came in a case with a power supply all put together. A normal retail computer. It came with a PS/2 mouse and a PS/2 keyboard. It came with 4 USB ports, 1 VGA port, 1 Ethernet 100Mbps port, 1 floppy drive, 1 40GB hard drive, 512MB of RAM (expandable to 2GB but I only expanded it to 1GB), PCI slots and an AGP gfx card slot. It had a 1.5Ghz AMD Sempron 2200 processor. It came with an onboard gfx chip that did various resolutions up to and including 1280x1024x16.7 Million colors @ 60 hz. It also came with a CD-ROM drive and some empty drive bays so I could expand it, which I did later add a DVD-Burner for $49.00 and a 500GB drive for $119.00
I am pretty sure that a $99.00 PC in 2004 beats a $500.00 ipad in 2013 price-wise and reliability-wise.
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Surely you mean in secondary education, they must still teach programming at the tertiary level.
Higher education isn't called a school in the UK. Even people with degrees barely know how to program these days.
And what is creative? There are video, audio and image editing apps on iOS, surely this is being creative.
Probably something you could make money from. Editing your selfies doesn't really count.
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And what is creative? There are video, audio and image editing apps on iOS, surely this is being creative.
There are; they're not as good as PC software for the equivalent tasks, both because of the inherent limitations of the platform (image editing by dragging your fingers all over the very image you're trying to work on? No thanks!) and because Apple's design standards emphasize simplicity over capability because otherwise the poor dear users might get confused or something.
Probably something you could make money from. Editing your selfies doesn't really count.
I wouldn't restrict it that much; plenty of people do creative stuff as a hobby. But yes, editing selfies and noodling on a crappy touch-piano is nothing like real digital painting or arranging music in a home studio.
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@commodorejohn
Actually I've been meaning to challenge something that you have been implying, that less people are programming when the evidence clearly points to more people programming than ever. Just look at the App store or Google Play.
I also find it ironic that you as an Amiga fan would talk about limited apps, iOS has apps far more sophisticated than Deluxe Paint or the video toaster software, so if using 'limited" apps is an issue why do you still use an Amiga?
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Your original message does not contain the word "school." It contains the word "teach" something they do in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions.
Higher education isn't called a school in the UK. Even people with degrees barely know how to program these days.
Probably something you could make money from. Editing your selfies doesn't really count.
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Actually I've been meaning to challenge something that you have been implying, that less people are programming when the evidence clearly points to more people programming than ever. Just look at the App store or Google Play.
I never implied any such thing. You've been the one maintaining that 95% of people (a figure that you still have yet to back up in any way) don't program or do any other creative pursuits on PCs and only need Facebook and email and that's why nobody needs PCs anymore. (Don't pretend this isn't what you were saying. I'll go back and grab the quotes if you want.)
I also find it ironic that you as an Amiga fan would talk about limited apps, iOS has apps far more sophisticated than Deluxe Paint or the video toaster software, so if using 'limited" apps is an issue why do you still use an Amiga?
"More sophisticated" in terms of overall horsepower applied to a task? Sure; even the original iPhone beats out an Amiga for that. And some iOS software does manage to ignore Apple's "don't do anything that might confuse the computer-illiterate" guidelines, and is more capable for it. The platform as a whole, however, is still geared away from productivity and towards passive consumption. That makes it simply not a good platform for creative pursuits. All this you have yourself admitted multiple times in this very thread.
Whereas - say what you will about the Amiga - it never had that problem, because, like classic Windows and classic Mac OS, it dates from the days before the industry started this push towards computer-as-glorified-TV. In the Amiga's heyday, it was expected that if you bought a computer, you were either going to do work on it or engage in creative pursuits, not just fart around on Facebook and watch YouTube. Consequently, the Amiga has a full complement of quality creative software which doesn't try to compromise on delivering a full-fledged desktop creative workstation experience - and I don't really care whether you think they're "ew, primitive," I'd take an Amiga with a handful of quality programs over iOS shovelware any day.
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Your original message does not contain the word "school." It contains the word "teach" something they do in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions.
It did
I thought you were both writing roughly the same thing.
The majority of people only use facetwitmytube, they only need a simple appliance. He is making the distinction of people using facebook or html5, but that is just for comparison of user types. Not because facebook and html5 are the only thing you can use a computer for. There are plenty of ways you can consume and plenty of ways you can create. In the UK they are talking about teaching programming in schools again (they only teach you how to use things like word, excel, some form of database right now).
I also find it ironic that you as an Amiga fan would talk about limited apps, iOS has apps far more sophisticated than Deluxe Paint (http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?toolid=10029&campid=CAMPAIGNID&customid=CUSTOMID&catId=58058&type=2&ext=181168472211&item=181168472211) or the video toaster software, so if using 'limited" apps is an issue why do you still use an Amiga?
I would say that nostalgia was the main reason. I question whether iOS has anything that could do what a toaster does. Not sure about deluxe paint, are there any pixel art packages on iOS?
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Its funny how people bring up software that even the classic amiga user/fan considers to be *very* basic and simplistic as some sort of example of amiga software. Even in the Amiga's heyday stuff like Dpaint5 was very basic. The only time this wasnt the case was in the mid to late 80's.
ImageFX, Lightwave, Art Effect, Cinema4d, Photogenics, and dozens of others are what I think of when it comes to amiga graphics software. All nicely intertwined together with AREXX scripts and so.
Yes the raw grunt is missing, but Id take this sort of stuff over what's available on the toy type platforms (ios platforms) anyday when doing creative stuff.
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No not realy the only way Linux is comparable to any Amiga is the safe and easy way to use it, its a friendly OS just like Amiga OS.
Amiga first, Linux Second and Windows no where in sight. (however Windows 7 is not to bad)
Mike.
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No not realy the only way Linux is comparable to any Amiga is the safe and easy way to use it, its a friendly OS just like Amiga OS.
Amiga first, Linux Second and Windows no where in sight. (however Windows 7 is not to bad)
Mike.
Not that I have anything against Linux (typing this on Debian), but how is it easier to use than Windows? Installing a new graphics driver in Windows is unlikely to blow anything up. The same can't be said about Linux, where seemingly marginal tasks can lead to much grief.
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No not realy the only way Linux is comparable to any Amiga is the safe and easy way to use it, its a friendly OS just like Amiga OS.
Amiga first, Linux Second and Windows no where in sight. (however Windows 7 is not to bad)
Mike.
Im with Blinx there. Windows is much friendlier than Linux. In fact AmigaOS shares more in common with Windows than linux when it comes to user land space. Granted what a person is used to is what they'll find easier, but Linux is hardly "friendly". Some distros are easier to use than others, but that doesnt stop it being convoluted under the hood.
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Im with Blinx there. Windows is much friendlier than Linux. In fact AmigaOS shares more in common with Windows than linux when it comes to user land space. Granted what a person is used to is what they'll find easier, but Linux is hardly "friendly". Some distros are easier to use than others, but that doesnt stop it being convoluted under the hood.
Yea. Amiga OS is definitely more like Windows.
It's not always a good thing, since stuff like torrent software or unpackers are easier to get for Linux and are already included with most distros, while Windows/AmigaOS are pretty barebones and leave you with a sense of not knowing what to do.
Windows/AmigaOS are definitely easier to use and way harder to break though. I would probably have to spend 5 hours and 10 pints of beer to screw things up inside Window's registry the way I did for Linux with one silly command.
MacOSX is probably the weirdest of the bunch, btw. It's kind of a blend between the geeky Unix world and what made Windows famous.
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Windows/AmigaOS are definitely easier to use and way harder to break though. I would probably have to spend 5 hours and 10 pints of beer to screw things up inside Window's registry the way I did for Linux with one silly command.
And then you'd at least have ten pints in you to soften the blow!
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And then you'd at least have ten pints in you to soften the blow!
Haha. Yea.
Which reminds me. I should probably get me some pints in order to soften the blow of screwing up my Linux build :(
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Yea. Amiga OS is definitely more like Windows.
It's not always a good thing, since stuff like torrent software or unpackers are easier to get for Linux and are already included with most distros, while Windows/AmigaOS are pretty barebones and leave you with a sense of not knowing what to do.
If you don't know what you're doing then I can't imagine there is any difference between finding utorrent online and installing it than finding where a torrent client is pre-installed on Linux.
The only difference is that you have to be more careful when installing Windows software so you don't install hidden extras. If Linux had any meaningful user base then people would be bundling crapware on that too.
Linux is ok if you like a challenge & want to "be different".
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If you don't know what you're doing then I can't imagine there is any difference between finding utorrent online and installing it than finding where a torrent client is pre-installed on Linux.
The only difference is that you have to be more careful when installing Windows software so you don't install hidden extras. If Linux had any meaningful user base then people would be bundling crapware on that too.
Linux is ok if you like a challenge & want to "be different".
I think that the crapware challenge with Linux is that there is no true conglomerate backing with marketing schemes wrapped into installers. If that was the case, the community would sniff it out and develop an alternative. An example of this is the beta Steam client(when it was briefly beta). It didn't take long to find out that an alternative was found to installing the full featured version with little extra effort at the command line.
Also, I disagree with the wanting to be different but more so to have options. A big sell for me to Linux was the ability to customize the environment, choose my window managers easily, and dispense with the constant need for virus protection. I like the option to use older hardware with a modern OS. Granted there have been some challenges, but not enough so to deter me from continuing on with using it.
Besides, what computer hasn't given anyone a challenge here or there...
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Besides, what computer hasn't given anyone a challenge here or there...
Plenty of systems have given me a challenge. Only Linux has ever made me want to slit my wrists.
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Plenty of systems have given me a challenge. Only Linux has ever made me want to slit my wrists.
That was MS-DOS for me, but I was still a kid fresh off the 64 at the time I attempted to "use" it.
Linux has great online documentation and support, it hasn't brought me to the point of cutting myself...yet. ;)
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and dispense with the constant need for virus protection.
You need virus protection on Linux, there just isn't any.
When someone can be bothered to target you then you'll be stuffed.
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Plenty of systems have given me a challenge. Only Linux has ever made me want to slit my wrists.
Don't feel bad..
Computers are confusing.. But keep at it... You'll get it... ;-) :roflmao:
I've been using computers for quite a while also...
No system has ever gotten me that frustrated...
Every system has it's moments / quirks..
But they are all pretty similar, even if they don't admit it... ;-)
I find that most of the people I work with who can't stand a particular system had a bad experience with that system early on, and then they just "shut down" for that system.
No amount of tweaks or fixes or improvements will matter.. They've decided, and that's OK. There are plenty of options...
I have systems I prefer.. I have systems I'm not a huge fan of...
But, at the end of the day, they are all computers.. Even the midrange systems... ;-)
(I remember getting our AS400 (at the time) admin mad at a meeting when we were discussing importance of systems and I told him that they were all important, and his AS400 was just another node on my network.. ;-)
desiv
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You need virus protection on Linux, there just isn't any.
Yes there are.. Several options in fact..
When I was doing Linux work at our datacenter, we installed and configured ClamAV on all of our servers for scheduled scans...
Need to watch out for those Windows viruses when they plop onto a Linux server.. ;-)
(and we needed to watch out for bad linux programs too (rootkits mostly it seems), they are out there...)
desiv
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Don't feel bad..
Computers are confusing.. But keep at it... You'll get it... ;-) :roflmao:
I've been using computers for quite a while also...
No system has ever gotten me that frustrated...
Every system has it's moments / quirks..
But they are all pretty similar, even if they don't admit it... ;-)
I find that most of the people I work with who can't stand a particular system had a bad experience with that system early on, and then they just "shut down" for that system.
No amount of tweaks or fixes or improvements will matter.. They've decided, and that's OK. There are plenty of options...
I have systems I prefer.. I have systems I'm not a huge fan of...
But, at the end of the day, they are all computers.. Even the midrange systems... ;-)
(I remember getting our AS400 (at the time) admin mad at a meeting when we were discussing importance of systems and I told him that they were all important, and his AS400 was just another node on my network.. ;-)
desiv
Ha ha, I bet that went down like a lead balloon.
On reading some of the posts in this thread I'm reminded of the old clichés "A good workman never blames his tools" and "Use the right tool for each job".
There are no absolute truths in computing and everything is subjective. Just use the tools you are most productive with or the tools you get paid to use that you have no choice over.
Here endeth the sermon. ;)
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You need virus protection on Linux, there just isn't any.
When someone can be bothered to target you then you'll be stuffed.
If I write a new virus today tell me how your anti-virus will protect you against it.
No matter what the OS is the proper solution against viruses is the prompt installation of a patch for the security hole the virus exploits.
Once the OS vendor patches said hole, why would there be any need for an anti-virus program? It can't protect you against a new virus and there is no need for it to protect against holes that have been patched.
Anti-virus software is just snake-oil.
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If I write a new virus today tell me how your anti-virus will protect you against it.
No matter what the OS is the proper solution against viruses is the prompt installation of a patch for the security hole the virus exploits.
Once the OS vendor patches said hole, why would there be any need for an anti-virus program? It can't protect you against a new virus and there is no need for it to protect against holes that have been patched.
Anti-virus software is just snake-oil.
Exactly this, security against malicious software should properly be the OS's responsibility. Of course that wasn't an option in the bygone age before updates were instantly available from the Internet but there's no excuse for it now.
Sometimes Linux does have its vulnerabilities though, we left our house server without updating it for a while and someone got in and messed it up through a flaw in its particular old version of SSH.
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No matter what the OS is the proper solution against viruses is the prompt installation of a patch for the security hole the virus exploits.
Once the OS vendor patches said hole, why would there be any need for an anti-virus program? It can't protect you against a new virus and there is no need for it to protect against holes that have been patched.
Which kinds of operating systems are likely to get "prompt" security patches? Open Source ones or Closed Source ones coming from a single vendor?
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Anti-virus software is just snake-oil.
Yes and no...
You have to look at it politically also..
If you get hit by a virus/trojan and you are fully patched (which happens) AND you don't have AV installed, try telling your management or business partners that AV is useless 99% of the time and is just bad for performance...
That 1% can get you in the paper.. ;-)
I'm not saying it's a good idea or not.. Just something to consider...
We were hit by a zero day and made the paper..
Luckily, we were patched and running AV.
Having AV didn't stop the trojan, but it did make the meetings about it much easier.. ;-)
desiv
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Which kinds of operating systems are likely to get "prompt" security patches? Open Source ones or Closed Source ones coming from a single vendor?
Historically, they both do well, although I've found the closed source ones seem to be a bit better for quick turnaround...
I'm a big fan of open source, but depending on your vendor, I've found some of the closed source AV vendors are generally really quick..
When it comes to patching apps, it gets trickier... If you use a server vendor for Opensource (like a SuSE or ?), your turnaround for patched apps (like Apache) is generally much slower as they have to test/vet the patch internally...
If you need QUICK turnaround for those (i.e. you have a publice facing Apache reverse proxy), you will probably want to build that from source, so you can deploy security patches quicker...
desiv
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If I write a new virus today tell me how your anti-virus will protect you against it.
Nowadays, most decent AV packages have firewall and proactive features that not only look for particular viruses, but virus-like activity as well. So, it's very possible that an existing AV package will catch a previously unknown virus before infection.
Of course some of the better viruses are written and tested to ensure they circumvent most major AV packages, so sometimes your particular AV will not help.
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Don't feel bad..
Computers are confusing.. But keep at it... You'll get it... ;-) :roflmao:
And this attitude would be Why People Do Not Like the Linux User Culture.
Jackass.
I find that most of the people I work with who can't stand a particular system had a bad experience with that system early on, and then they just "shut down" for that system.
No amount of tweaks or fixes or improvements will matter.. They've decided, and that's OK. There are plenty of options...
I spent about eight years making multiple attempts to get into Linux. I've tried at least half a dozen distros, in multiple versions. I took a course on it when I was in college. And ultimately, I realized that I was putting more work into trying to force myself to acclimate to a badly-designed system for the sake of ideology than I'd spent learning every other OS I've used put together, and concluded that it just wasn't worth the pain.
But no, you go ahead and keep insisting that I just haven't tried.
On reading some of the posts in this thread I'm reminded of the old clichés "A good workman never blames his tools"
Which is an awfully convenient loophole for crappy toolmakers.
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And this attitude would be Why People Do Not Like the Linux User Culture.
Jackass.
I spent about eight years making multiple attempts to get into Linux. I've tried at least half a dozen distros, in multiple versions. I took a course on it when I was in college. And ultimately, I realized that I was putting more work into trying to force myself to acclimate to a badly-designed system for the sake of ideology than I'd spent learning every other OS I've used put together, and concluded that it just wasn't worth the pain.
But no, you go ahead and keep insisting that I just haven't tried.
Which is an awfully convenient loophole for crappy toolmakers.
See sig.
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But they are all pretty similar, even if they don't admit it... ;-)
I think, from a user's point of view, that's kind of true - at least of the last 10-20 years or so. Back in the 90's it was less clear (as Windows 3.1 was way behind most of the competition).
Believe me, though, from a developer's point of view, different OSes are completely different. You've got different kernels, different multitasking paradigms, different methods of UI, all sorts of things. Programming AmigaOS is a pleasure - it's all nice and simple, logical and well thought out. Programming Linux depends on which toolkit you use, and to be fair I've not looked very hard at it (but the X system is awful) - and then there's the monstrosity that is Windows. The words "WM_PAINT" still strike fear into my heart now, as do the initials "MFC".
When you get under the hood, you realise that the different OSes can be very different... it's just hidden from the average user to make them all look the same.
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See sig.
Does anyone have the context for this quote? I'd be interested to know exactly what he meant by it, because there's several ways to read it, some of which agree with you, and some of which agree with me.
In any case, while I respect Mr. Ritchie greatly, A. the standards for OS design in 1970 were very different from the standards of OS design in 1985 or the standards of OS design today, and B. Unix cruft is only one of the reasons that Linux is a terrible user experience.
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I think, from a user's point of view, that's kind of true - at least of the last 10-20 years or so. Back in the 90's it was less clear (as Windows 3.1 was way behind most of the competition).
Believe me, though, from a developer's point of view, different OSes are completely different. You've got different kernels, different multitasking paradigms, different methods of UI, all sorts of things. Programming AmigaOS is a pleasure - it's all nice and simple, logical and well thought out. Programming Linux depends on which toolkit you use, and to be fair I've not looked very hard at it (but the X system is awful) - and then there's the monstrosity that is Windows. The words "WM_PAINT" still strike fear into my heart now, as do the initials "MFC".
When you get under the hood, you realise that the different OSes can be very different... it's just hidden from the average user to make them all look the same.
That's why some people are programmers and other people are users :D I really need to start programming, but yeah even trying to choose toolkits / language, etc can be a pain. I think i've decided on either Qt with Python, or Qt with C++. But I want to be able to port applications to the Amiga easily, and Python is out of date, C++ will work, but Qt hasn't been ported to it, and I'd rather use something more native anyhow.
slaapliedje
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And this attitude would be Why People Do Not Like the Linux User Culture.
Jackass.
How in the world did you miss the smiley and the ROTFL animation????
How???? Really???
In the VERY NEXT SENTENCE, I said "I've been using computers for quite a while also..." stating that I realize you have experience..
Perhaps you need to switch to decaf???? ;) ( <----- That's a joke btw!!!)
I spent about eight years making multiple attempts to get into Linux. .....
But no, you go ahead and keep insisting that I just haven't tried.
I said "most people". (and I never said I thought you hadn't tried) That doesn't necessarily mean you... As I was obviously (I thought) joking in the part above, I was just making a comment about some general experiences I have had...
Perhaps you are getting too invested in this thread..
As I said, there are lots of choices for people, which is a good thing, as some people don't like some tools... That should be fine..
I'm not a Linux zealot. I like things about Linux and have used it for a long time.
But I can say the same thing about Microsoft, Mac, various Unix releases, OS/400, Cisco IOS, etc...
I have no problems seeing issues with Linux. It has problems. As do all OSes.
Have a good one...
desiv
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Believe me, though, from a developer's point of view, different OSes are completely different. You've got different kernels, different multitasking paradigms, different methods of UI, all sorts of things..
Oh, come on now!!!
We ALL know that Java fixed all that...
..
:rofl::rofl::rofl:
desiv
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How in the world did you miss the smiley and the ROTFL animation????
My apologies. Unfortunately, sarcasm can be difficult to convey/detect over the 'net, and I missed it. (Doesn't help that plenty of actual zealots use "ha ha, just kidding! ;) (You idiot!)" fake-geniality as a twee affectation.) But if that's not what you intended and I misread, I'm sorry.
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(Doesn't help that plenty of actual zealots use "ha ha, just kidding! ;) (You idiot!)" fake-geniality as a twee affectation.)
Oh man, I hate that... You're right about that..
Yep, not my intention...
While I might not agree with some specifics, there's respect for your perspective...
desiv
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Red Hat Linux before Fedora Core was an Amiga like OS to me.
Maybe it was Anaconda Installer that made it feel that way.
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Kinda off-topic, but I just tried AEROS (AROS on i386 Linux host).
Didn't feel as good as it could have. Having to deal with two filesystems (the standard Linux one as well as the virtual AROS one) is plain irritating. Wish they had spent the additional time needed to abstract the Linux filesystem away.
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I spent about eight years making multiple attempts to get into Linux. I've tried at least half a dozen distros, in multiple versions. I took a course on it when I was in college. And ultimately, I realized that I was putting more work into trying to force myself to acclimate to a badly-designed system for the sake of ideology than I'd spent learning every other OS I've used put together, and concluded that it just wasn't worth the pain.
But no, you go ahead and keep insisting that I just haven't tried.
Who the what now? GNU/Linux is an extremely well designed OS, actually.
If you call that a "badly-designed system" then where the heck does Windows end up in that equation?
There are some major bulletin-points for Linux (or any other POSIX compliant Unix clone, for that matter) and against Windows.
1. Performance
2. Ease of use (once you've figured everything out, it's easier to fix basically everything. Including situations in which Windows would just throw nonsensical walls of text at you).
3. An independent set of tools (no need to install or update stuff you'll never even use. Windows is still plain silly, in comparison. Just today, I was required to update Internet Explorer because someone thought it was smart to base his online client on calls specific to this monstrosity).
4. Customizability of both, the user interface and the kernel.
5. A helpful community of people who know exactly what they're doing.
6. A very compatible toolchain for software developers.
7. Non-proprietary APIs like OpenGL/OpenGL ES (most Windows software developers use Direct3D nowadays, which make it unnecessarily harder to port applications to other platforms).
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Who the what now? GNU/Linux is an extremely well designed OS, actually.
If you call that a "badly-designed system" then where the heck does Windows end up in that equation?
There are some major bulletin-points for Linux (or any other POSIX compliant Unix clone, for that matter) and against Windows.
1. Performance
2. Ease of use (once you've figured everything out, it's easier to fix basically everything. Including situations in which Windows would just throw nonsensical walls of text at you).
3. An independent set of tools (no need to install or update stuff you'll never even use. Windows is still plain silly, in comparison. Just today, I was required to update Internet Explorer because someone thought it was smart to base his online client on calls specific to this monstrosity).
4. Customizability of both, the user interface and the kernel.
5. A helpful community of people who know exactly what they're doing.
6. A very compatible toolchain for software developers.
7. Non-proprietary APIs like OpenGL/OpenGL ES (most Windows software developers use Direct3D nowadays, which make it unnecessarily harder to port applications to other platforms).
EDIT: I set up a nice XFCE desktop for my mom today and she got most of the intricacies within the hour. This just goes to show that GNU/Linux needn't necessarily be complicated. It's not like they force you to make do with twm and two to three terminal windows.
EDIT2: Darn. I'm overworked. Accidently hit quote when I wanted to hit edit.
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If you call that a "badly-designed system" then where the heck does Windows end up in that equation?
Honestly? People who are still flogging the "LOL WinBlow$ BSOD LOL Micro$shaft!" mantra haven't done any serious reevaluation since the days of 95 or Me. 2000 and XP are perfectly reasonable, stable systems with a coherent, modern design that's carefully relegated legacy DOS scariness to emulated support. Vista had plenty of problems, but 7 is even more generally well-regarded than XP (though I prefer XP myself.)
Whereas Linux piles framework after framework after framework onto the system in an attempt to build a modern desktop OS out of an architecture designed to drive VT-100s from PDP-11s...
There are some major bulletin-points for Linux (or any other POSIX compliant Unix clone, for that matter) and against Windows.
1. Performance
Every system I've used Linux on has been either only as fast as or noticeably slower than an appropriately-configured Windows/OSX install. Of course, zealots will bleat about this being the fault of proprietary drivers and how it's your problem for not using open hardware and conveniently ignore how they told you that Linux will make sweet wizardly love to all of your hardware no matter how old or obscure...
2. Ease of use (once you've figured everything out, it's easier to fix basically everything. Including situations in which Windows would just throw nonsensical walls of text at you).
This is true if, by "once you've figured everything out," we mean "once you've memorized The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System" or something equivalent. In any other case: Bull. Shıt. Fixing Linux involves anything from posting on forums asking for help from the much-lauded and oh-so-helpful Linux user community (standard answers: "works for me," "you don't need this broken feature," "this bug was already logged in 1996, please add relevant details to the ticket and wait for a fix," or the ever-popular "you have the source, fix it yourself!") to chasing includes from one /etc shell script to the next looking for any string even vaguely related to the error.
3. An independent set of tools (no need to install or update stuff you'll never even use. Windows is still plain silly, in comparison. Just today, I was required to update Internet Explorer because someone thought it was smart to base his online client on calls specific to this monstrosity).
No need to install or update stuff you'll never even use! You know, like DBus, or PulseAudio, or grandomcryptonerdwanklibrary-effthensa or any of the zillion other packages that are required to install basically any Linux software, from text editors to web browsers, that's been around long enough to attract a dozen developers who each pile on every feature they think the software should have, no matter how esoteric.
4. Customizability of both, the user interface and the kernel.
Yes, because what I really want to do on a computer I just want to be able to do stuff on is rebuild the damn kernel.
UI customization, on the other hand, would be great - if it were in any way consistent across any set of programs outside of the megalithic KDE-type desktop application suites (and those, of course, are the absolute worse offenders on point #3.)
5. A helpful community of people who know exactly what they're doing.
A community of people who can't be assed to post meaningful information, suggest you "RTFM" no matter what your problem is, and make fun of you for not having memorized the source code. Yes, very very helpful folks.
6. A very compatible toolchain for software developers.
A very compatible toolchain, unless of course you want to do something crazy like run a GCC 2-built binary on an OS that expects binaries built with GCC 4. That's just crazy talk, man!
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@ commodorejohn
I've had some brutal BSOD experiences under Win XP.
So no, the NT kernel didn't solve that.
While I am not a big Apple fan, I don't think I've ever seen OSX crash.
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@ CommodoreJohn
I have a 1.6GHz dual core laptop. Windows XP runs perfect. Windows 7, there is a 1 second pause from lag every 30 seconds.
Also I agree Windows 7 has a great UI and hardly ever crashes. Why it needs a 10GB install and 40 processes running in the background, it is only an OS?
On the same laptop (1.6ghz dual core) Linux KDE with a lot of features is fast except when I run Firefox. Now a web browser is the source of bloat. :(
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I've had some brutal BSOD experiences under Win XP.
So no, the NT kernel didn't solve that.
While I am not a big Apple fan, I don't think I've ever seen OSX crash.
I'm not going to claim Windows is flawless; I've never had BSODs on XP that weren't driver-related, but it definitely still has issues. What I will have no truck with is this notion that Linux is some godly feat of tech wizardry that is, "by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error." Instead of, you know, a mainframe OS from the '70s that's been progressively kludged into something resembling modernity but mostly on the surface.
(Also, I've had BSOD-analogue crashes on OSX, more often than I have on XP, and I use XP a lot more than I use OSX. But it's still pretty solid. Anyway, OSX is based on BSD and not Linux, and uses its own custom userland, just like Android, the other successful, well-regarded consumer-level Unixoid...)
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I'm not going to claim Windows is flawless; I've never had BSODs on XP that weren't driver-related, but it definitely still has issues. What I will have no truck with is this notion that Linux is some godly feat of tech wizardry that is, "by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error." Instead of, you know, a mainframe OS from the '70s that's been progressively kludged into something resembling modernity but mostly on the surface.
(Also, I've had BSOD-analogue crashes on OSX, more often than I have on XP, and I use XP a lot more than I use OSX. But it's still pretty solid. Anyway, OSX is based on BSD and not Linux, and uses its own custom userland, just like Android, the other successful, well-regarded consumer-level Unixoid...)
Actually John, I really agree with you about Linux. I've never found a version I'm completely comfortable with. And personally, I don't really regard Linus Torvalds as being the genius so many think he is.
First of all, all he's really done is create a kernel that essentially just clones the core of UNIX.
And second, he's issued this rather asinine comment downplaying micro kernal OS' that completely disregards the fact that there are many good OS' using this approach (MorphoS being one of them).
Linux has proven the when completely open sourced, the lack of focus defeats any intent to establish direction.
Basically, Linux, is it done yet?
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Fixing Linux involves anything from posting on forums asking for help from the much-lauded and oh-so-helpful Linux user community (standard answers: "works for me," "you don't need this broken feature," "this bug was already logged in 1996, please add relevant details to the ticket and wait for a fix," or the ever-popular "you have the source, fix it yourself!") to chasing includes from one /etc shell script to the next looking for any string even vaguely related to the error.
At least you can fix it. Whenever I tried to fix my old XP install I invariably had to resort to re-installing it. The Windows Registry is the work of the devil. Give me human-readable text config files any day. Well I wouldn't call manually editing config files in a text editor "easy" compared to just putting a CD in but it's definitely preferable if you're technically minded enough to feel comfortable doing it, especially since XP didn't seem able to reinstall without deleting everything in Documents and Settings.
Oh and when I had the audacity to upgrade my hard drive. They don't expect you to do that. They expect you to upgrade your entire computer. There is a feature to migrate your files to a new PC, if you happen to have both of them working at once. Migrate from one drive to another in the same PC, sorry never heard of it.
Windows is only easy if you only want to do the things they specifically designed it for.
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I've actually had quite a lot of luck using cloning utilities to copy hard drives under Windows.
But you are right, the Registry IS the work of the devil.
Has anyone examined Bill Gates head for any numeric looking birthmarks?
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Oh FFS John, give it a rest you whiny old queen.
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Honestly? People who are still flogging the "LOL WinBlow$ BSOD LOL Micro$shaft!" mantra haven't done any serious reevaluation since the days of 95 or Me. 2000 and XP are perfectly reasonable, stable systems with a coherent, modern design that's carefully relegated legacy DOS scariness to emulated support. Vista had plenty of problems, but 7 is even more generally well-regarded than XP (though I prefer XP myself.)
I'm not trying to bash Windows. But the file system is generally less well designed (as others have pointed out before).
Personally, I loath everything before or after Windows 7. Really used to like Windows XP, but now that I've to deal with dozens of systems still running Windows XP every day, I begin to see all the shortcomings and lack of userfriendliness. It just didn't age well.
Whereas Linux piles framework after framework after framework onto the system in an attempt to build a modern desktop OS out of an architecture designed to drive VT-100s from PDP-11s...
You do realize Windows is, essentially, framework driven? Sure, most of them are Microsoft products. But to say Linux piles up frameworks whereas Windows doesn't, is kind of silly.
Every system I've used Linux on has been either only as fast as or noticeably slower than an appropriately-configured Windows/OSX install. Of course, zealots will bleat about this being the fault of proprietary drivers and how it's your problem for not using open hardware and conveniently ignore how they told you that Linux will make sweet wizardly love to all of your hardware no matter how old or obscure...
Can't really follow you there. Linux runs great even on the smallest system. Of course, you shouldn't run stuff like Ubuntu or the likes.
This is true if, by "once you've figured everything out," we mean "once you've memorized The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System" or something equivalent. In any other case: Bull. Shıt. Fixing Linux involves anything from posting on forums asking for help from the much-lauded and oh-so-helpful Linux user community (standard answers: "works for me," "you don't need this broken feature," "this bug was already logged in 1996, please add relevant details to the ticket and wait for a fix," or the ever-popular "you have the source, fix it yourself!") to chasing includes from one /etc shell script to the next looking for any string even vaguely related to the error.
You have to know something? Tough luck! It was never touted to be a newbie OS.
Linux was, originally, developed for people using computers for the sake of using computers. It's only now that individuals/companies seek to change this. And while this approach isn't perfect yet, distros like Linux Mint or Ubuntu already show great progress.
No need to install or update stuff you'll never even use! You know, like DBus, or PulseAudio, or grandomcryptonerdwanklibrary-effthensa or any of the zillion other packages that are required to install basically any Linux software, from text editors to web browsers, that's been around long enough to attract a dozen developers who each pile on every feature they think the software should have, no matter how esoteric.
Distros != OS
GNU/Linux doesn't require any of that stuff. Only certain distros package stuff like Pulse Audio, while others (such as any lightweight XFCE based distro) use ALSA.
Yes, because what I really want to do on a computer I just want to be able to do stuff on is rebuild the damn kernel.
It's a learning experience. Nothing wrong with rebuilding a kernel.
UI customization, on the other hand, would be great - if it were in any way consistent across any set of programs outside of the megalithic KDE-type desktop application suites (and those, of course, are the absolute worse offenders on point #3.)
I currently run Ubuntu with Unity on my laptop (utilizing a MacOSX theme). Aside of Steam (which is build on top of Chromium and thus no real native application), every application I use is styled consistently.
A community of people who can't be assed to post meaningful information, suggest you "RTFM" no matter what your problem is, and make fun of you for not having memorized the source code. Yes, very very helpful folks.
Dunno which community you are referring to, but people in the newer, more streamlined usergroups generally offer valid support even to people new to Linux/Unix.
A very compatible toolchain, unless of course you want to do something crazy like run a GCC 2-built binary on an OS that expects binaries built with GCC 4. That's just crazy talk, man!
Have you ever actually looked inside Windows/MacOSX development? Plenty of 3rd party Windows applications ask for Net 2.0 when Net 4.5 is already installed. In order to develop MacOSX 10.7 applications that also run on 10.5, you even have to implement workarounds, since XCode 3 isn't really available on MacOSX Lion anymore.
@ElPolloDiabl
It's Mozilla Firefox' plugin-container that's at fault there. I think they fixed it for one of their earlier releases (Firefox 12, possibly), only to have it turn up just a few months later again.
I currently think about compiling my own, Webkit based, browser from scratch. Webkit offers genuinely better performance and stability.
@Mrs Beanbag
It's possible, actually. I don't remember whether Windows XP already offered the option to simply overwrite your existing installation and copy all your documents to a single folder, but with BartPE, it's definitely possible. I accidently did that when I had to re-install Windows XP for a client last Friday.
You basically boot into BartPE, forget about all the formating tools and head right into the Installer. It will then copy the installation files to your existing HDD partition, reboot and install Windows XP to and from that HDD. In the end, I ended up not only with a fresh Windows XP but all the files were still there.
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You do realize Windows is, essentially, framework driven? Sure, most of them are Microsoft products. But to say Linux piles up frameworks whereas Windows doesn't, is kind of silly.
Does Windows have additional frameworks? Yes. Are many of them somewhat unnecessary? Yes. (I hate the push to .NET for absolutely everything...) What it doesn't have is a userland made entirely out of separate, single-purpose frameworks tacked onto a core OS originally from 1970 that hasn't seen a serious architectural update since 1983. It doesn't have sound-architecture-du-jour. It doesn't have a massive, kludgy graphical environment.
Can't really follow you there. Linux runs great even on the smallest system. Of course, you shouldn't run stuff like Ubuntu or the likes.
"Linux runs great on everything! As long as you don't run the Linux that doesn't run great."
You have to know something? Tough luck! It was never touted to be a newbie OS.
You yourself were just lauding it as "easy to fix," dingbat.
Distros != OS
GNU/Linux doesn't require any of that stuff. Only certain distros package stuff like Pulse Audio, while others (such as any lightweight XFCE based distro) use ALSA.
If you're going to run with the tired old "it's only a kernel!" mantra, I want to know how you run any useful software on the facilities provided by the kernel.
And you missed my point. Plenty of distros don't install crapware like PulseAudio by default - the problem is all the software that requires eight different libraries to run. (And of course now you're going to bleat about how the problems with Linux software aren't problems with Linux - bull. The Linux developer culture is diseased, and that's why Linux software is as bloated as it is. And anyway I'd like to know what good an OS is if it doesn't have good software to run.)
I currently run Ubuntu with Unity on my laptop (utilizing a MacOSX theme). Aside of Steam (which is build on top of Chromium and thus no real native application), every application I use is styled consistently.
Tell me, when you say "styled," are you merely referring to the look? Because yes, you can get a window manager to consistently apply a look to windows. You can even get an application's controls to match that look (but you better have Qt, WxWidgets, FLTK, Tk, etcetera versions of your theme! And good freaking luck with Motif applications.) But good luck getting everything to behave consistently, outside of the mega-suites like GNOME and KDE.
Dunno which community you are referring to, but people in the newer, more streamlined usergroups generally offer valid support even to people new to Linux/Unix.
I'm referring to anywhere I've ever looked for help. You wanna point me to this wondrous fairyland of actually helpful Linux geeks?
Have you ever actually looked inside Windows/MacOSX development? Plenty of 3rd party Windows applications ask for Net 2.0 when Net 4.5 is already installed.
I'm not going to go to any great lengths to defend .NET because it's a scam to get developers stuck on Microsoft's own tools and I resent having to have it installed - but at least its stupid binary incompatibilities aren't integral to the build of the actual operating system.
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I'm not entirely following the Linux bashing that is preceding this post by several comments. It is a multi-purpose OS that has many different flavors giving the end user options. If you don't like what one offers, try another one. It took me six months to find the right distro for me.
I still don't understand where rebuilding the kernel came from either. I have yet to even attempt that, but LFS looks intriguing as a project.
If anyone looks to Linux for that "One" solution, you may be disappointed. Hell, I don't look to any OS to be "One" solution because none of them are perfect.
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I've grown to like using various Power PC linux distros, especially on the AmigaONE X1000 ;-) ... but it's certainly not the AmigaOS.
TrevorD
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I've grown to like using various Power PC linux distros, especially on the AmigaONE X1000 ;-) ... but it's certainly not the AmigaOS.
TrevorD
I've used them too.
Although many are no longer mainstream (like Ubuntu many have to be user supported).
And Flash support is still terrible (but as a MorphOS user I'm used to working around that).
BTW - I wish I could afford one of your systems Trevor.
They are only likely to appreciate in value with time.
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Have you ever actually looked inside Windows/MacOSX development? Plenty of 3rd party Windows applications ask for Net 2.0 when Net 4.5 is already installed.
Up until version 3 microsoft kept versions separate so they didn't have to worry about backward compatibility. I believe you can force the app to run on the latest version though, there is a good chance there will be issues though.
There are more complaints that they stopped doing this when they got to version 3 than there are about having to install multiple versions.
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As a newbie, I found the most intuitive OS to be......System 7. IMO if you just wanted to get the job done, it worked and worked well.
But as a semi newbie that liked tinker, Amiga is the best hands down. Very easy to access the system files, easy and logical names.
Linux? 90% of the time when I had to fix something I was cutting and pasting without a clue about what any of it did or meant or went.
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As a newbie, I found the most intuitive OS to be......System 7. IMO if you just wanted to get the job done, it worked and worked well.
But as a semi newbie that liked tinker, Amiga is the best hands down. Very easy to access the system files, easy and logical names.
Heh, indeed...System 7/7.5 was the most tinkerer-friendly Mac OS ever got, but even that doesn't hold a candle to the Amiga's customizability :)
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I'm not entirely following the Linux bashing that is preceding this post by several comments. It is a multi-purpose OS that has many different flavors giving the end user options. If you don't like what one offers, try another one. It took me six months to find the right distro for me.
I can agree that an OS can be built so it is more suited in a server environment, or for use in specific devices.
And searching for the right apps for us, yes, we all have to do that.
But if you are going to develop and promote an OS as a desktop OS, its not reasonable that a user should be searching to find the right OS flavour to meet their needs.
The fact it took you 6 MONTHS to find the right OS-if that doesn't scream:"Houston, we have a problem", then I don't know what does!
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Amithlon: Best Linux Distro Ever.
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Amithlon: Best Linux Distro at the moment.
Fixed that for you. ;)
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But if you are going to develop and promote an OS as a desktop OS, its not reasonable that a user should be searching to find the right OS flavour to meet their needs.
The fact it took you 6 MONTHS to find the right OS-if that doesn't scream:"Houston, we have a problem", then I don't know what does!
I think only Ubuntu is really going for that at the moment.
Mind you when people say to me "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" I roll my eyes because, well, whose desktop? I had to get a Windows 7 laptop for work lately and I absolutely hate its guts. It reboots itself without asking, even when the lid is shut! And I had apps open!
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I can agree that an OS can be built so it is more suited in a server environment, or for use in specific devices.
And searching for the right apps for us, yes, we all have to do that.
But if you are going to develop and promote an OS as a desktop OS, its not reasonable that a user should be searching to find the right OS flavour to meet their needs.
The fact it took you 6 MONTHS to find the right OS-if that doesn't scream:"Houston, we have a problem", then I don't know what does!
It took me 6 months to find the right distribution because there are many options to choose from. I don't think that choice is a bad thing at all. In fact, I think that it speaks volumes to the the kernel's flexibility of implementation. What is truly a downside, is the large amount of stuff that comes along with the kernel, making it well over 100mg at this point.
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Long-time lurker here. One of the things that people often don't take into account is that Mac OS and AmigaOS are both written to run on specific hardware, whereas people are trying to run Linux and Windows on a much wider selection of hardware. This isn't a problem so much for Windows due to its market dominance, but there is a lot of hardware that simply has no official support under Linux, and this leads to a lot of people searching for solutions that are sometimes quite complicated. Then desktop Linux gets blamed for a bad user experience because of this.
I am not going to tell you that Linux is perfect by any means. All OS's have their problems. For me it comes down to: which battles am I willing to fight? It's easy to be tribalistic, standing in one corner and exaggeratedly bashing the OS on the other side (Winblow$ BSODs, LAWLZ!... Linux?? So I'll have to recompile my kernel every two hours?, etc.) In the end, I made a decision based on what was the best fit for me. My OS doesn't have to be "the superior OS" for me to feel good about myself for my choice.
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Long-time lurker here. One of the things that people often don't take into account is that Mac OS and AmigaOS are both written to run on specific hardware, whereas people are trying to run Linux and Windows on a much wider selection of hardware. This isn't a problem so much for Windows due to its market dominance, but there is a lot of hardware that simply has no official support under Linux, and this leads to a lot of people searching for solutions that are sometimes quite complicated. Then desktop Linux gets blamed for a bad user experience because of this.
I am not going to tell you that Linux is perfect by any means. All OS's have their problems. For me it comes down to: which battles am I willing to fight? It's easy to be tribalistic, standing in one corner and exaggeratedly bashing the OS on the other side (Winblow$ BSODs, LAWLZ!... Linux?? So I'll have to recompile my kernel every two hours?, etc.) In the end, I made a decision based on what was the best fit for me. My OS doesn't have to be "the superior OS" for me to feel good about myself for my choice.
A rational choice of tools based on what fits your workflow best? How dare you come here with such reasonable thinking?!?!Eleventyone!!1! ;)
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It took me 6 months to find the right distribution because there are many options to choose from. I don't think that choice is a bad thing at all. In fact, I think that it speaks volumes to the the kernel's flexibility of implementation. What is truly a downside, is the large amount of stuff that comes along with the kernel, making it well over 100mg at this point.
I think that comment regarding the size of the kernel is a bit of an overgeneralisation. Im not sure where you get your figures - it might be useful to back that up!
(Im running raring ringtail and my kernel is 5.2mb [stock])
I also assume you are not referring to the size of the kernel source (which would contain support for a tonne of hardware , GPU , CPU / Architecture - this naturally wouldnt be included in a compiled kernel)
By and large most common distributions may well have kernels that could be considered larger than needs be - the reason behind this as distribution packagers often compile a kernel that includes a broad range of support for hardware. Some of this may be modules that are loaded at runtime and some maybe compiled into the kernel.
In the case of a fixed platform like the amiga a linux kernel compiled only to support known hardware configuration im sure would be pretty f**n tiny.
I just thought i would provide the bigger picture.
N.
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I think that comment regarding the size of the kernel is a bit of an overgeneralisation. Im not sure where you get your figures - it might be useful to back that up!
(Im running raring ringtail and my kernel is 5.2mb [stock])
I also assume you are not referring to the size of the kernel source (which would contain support for a tonne of hardware , GPU , CPU / Architecture - this naturally wouldnt be included in a compiled kernel)
By and large most common distributions may well have kernels that could be considered larger than needs be - the reason behind this as distribution packagers often compile a kernel that includes a broad range of support for hardware. Some of this may be modules that are loaded at runtime and some maybe compiled into the kernel.
In the case of a fixed platform like the amiga a linux kernel compiled only to support known hardware configuration im sure would be pretty f**n tiny.
I just thought i would provide the bigger picture.
N.
I am referring to the kernel source. I double checked, It is approximately 70 meg now(unmodified/non-optimized/not hardened). Sorry for the confusion.
PS I don't back things up because if it's on the internet, it must be true ;)
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@polyp2000
why not using a directory with drivers and leaving kernel as is? that way you could update easily your OS without worrying much about drivers. I have listened countless times ridiculous stuff like "I'm going to recompile the Linux kernel in order to use the TV*capture card" because hw didn't work even if you copied the damn driver to the driver directory.
I think that having a small kernel and a directories for drivers and libraries would be much more amiga-like, you could update the OS without requiring recompiling all the kernel&drivers. Updating Linux/Android phones could be easier too: you could have a partition named "hal_and_drivers" and all the specific hw stuff there and to upgrade your OS version you could leave that directory as is and simply copy the updated OS to the os/ directory. I don't think it's asking too much. But it seems it is since when you buy an Android phone you have to rely on goodwill of 3rd party kernel recompilers as Google and the phone producer will forget about you in 18 months, Android drivers are so badly planned that they had to change driver format and instead of adding functionality and allowing drivers to report the capabilities they have and allowing older but powerful phones to run latest version of the OS the agreed with phone companies to let their users rot. I hope Ubuntu OS for phones is better, at least I hope it won't require any JITted/interpretted language to work (bad idea for a mobile device IMHO).
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Well Crumb,
That argument has been going on for decades and even Linus Torvalds disagrees with us..
But I wholly agree. Nothing should be in the kernel except the core of the OS.
Anything else you should be able to dynamically load. (or unload).
This works really well for real time process control oriented OS'.
And I've found that this principle work good for general purpose OS' as well.
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There is something most people miss...
Linux can have whatever look and feel you want.
everything you see or interact with can be endlessly customized.
If you want it to look exactly like amiga, you can do that. Exactly like osx, you can do that, windows, beos, riscos, whatever you want.
I have always prefered to take things I like from many different systems and make my own customized desktop.
So if linux does not work or look how you prefer... Its your fault.
Distros are just supposed to be a starting point in my view. I have yet to ever see a distro and think yes this is the way I want things. Rather I pick one that I can customize my way.
I love linux, runs most windows progs fine, amiga programs with uae fine, dos programs with dosbox fine... And of course any linux apps.
I went from red hat to suse to vectorlinux to ubuntu and lately mint. Each time, some of my desktop was highly influenced by my old love : amiga.
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There is something most people miss...
Linux can have whatever look and feel you want.
Oh, not this crap again...
everything you see or interact with can be endlessly customized.
Only to the extent that it will let you customize it. (And don't trot out the "Use the Source!" mantra; if I wanted to rebuild every damn thing I use in order to make it what I want it to be, I'd just write my own damn operating system.)
If you want it to look exactly like amiga, you can do that. Exactly like osx, you can do that, windows, beos, riscos, whatever you want.
Yeah, yeah, you can throw any coat of paint imaginable over software that remains exactly the same regardless. Tell me, how do I customize the behavior to anywhere near this extent? How do I get all the software to use human-readable sort in directory listings instead of plain ASCII sort? How do I make Alt toggle me into and out of menu context without having to press a specific menu accelerator, as it works in Windows? How do I disable raise-on-focus in window manager Foo, if I want Amiga-style behavior? How do I apply any changes consistently when there are at least three major UI toolkits and any number of window managers and desktop environments?
The extent to which the Linux developer community has focused on mere graphical skinnability as a stand-in for real customization is symptomatic of the fact that they just don't get usability. If they did they would understand that making Linux look like something it doesn't act like is, simply, deception. (To be fair, it's self-deception in the case where the user is the one trying to pretend that throwing an Amiga coat of paint over things changes anything about the actual user experience, but in any case, it doesn't make Linux a different thing any more than putting on a slinky flesh-tone dress would make me Marilyn Monroe.)
So if linux does not work or look how you prefer... Its your fault.
Of course it's our fault. It's always our fault, always the fault of the user, because it's just impossible that it could ever be Linux at fault. Linux is pure, Linux is blameless. After all, if the user would just force themselves to believe that they're having a good experience, they wouldn't have anything to complain about!
And you wonder why desktop Linux hasn't even cracked Apple's level of market share. Maybe it's because every time anyone has a problem with it, you tell them thatit's their fault for not liking it.
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Relax...
To create any of the things you mentioned can be done completely without recompiling the kernel, or any programming at all...
With ui enhancements, patches, programs, there's a hot key program add on (or 10 of them) You, like many just got frustrated (I've been there) before finding the things to make it work the way you want.
Of course no system is perfect, I don't know anyone who just installed linux and was able to make it do everything they wanted. Takes time, learning, finding new progs and enhancements to facilitate the way you want it to work.
I heard someone say once, (and its very true) Linux is only free if your time is worthless. Its a tradeoff I guess. I kinda like modding my system. With puppy, I keep backups of my entire system, so if I try something and can't remove or fix it back to where I started, I go to the backups I make weekly.
With mint I just copy off my directories, my custom launchers and the like and can remake my usual desktop pretty quickly.
Linux can be extremely frustrating, for a long time it was for me. After awhile though, it gets more comfortable. To be honest I still hate the directory structure. And I especially hate not knowing where some things are or get copied... I hate how it copies various files in various directories when installing something instead of just one directory for each application. (but this is unix)
This can be minimized however if you know how.
To be honest, I wish someone would just use linux as an under the hood solution for drivers and such and simplified everything else, like beos or amigaos on top... AEROS just may be this... But I haven't given it serious time yet...
Still for a free system cobbled together, linux is pretty goddam good.
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How do I get all the software to use human-readable sort in directory listings instead of plain ASCII sort?
How do I do it on Amiga? I have lots of Amiga software that behaves this way.
How do I make Alt toggle me into and out of menu context without having to press a specific menu accelerator, as it works in Windows?
How do you do it on Amiga?
How do I disable raise-on-focus in window manager Foo, if I want Amiga-style behavior?
Actually this is an option in every window manager I've used. How do you do it in Windows?
How do I apply any changes consistently when there are at least three major UI toolkits and any number of window managers and desktop environments?
Well you only ever have one window manager running at once. But the Amiga always had that problem too. The widget types that come with Intuition are very basic and not very customisable, so people made MUI and ClassAct/ReAction, and NewIcons.
The extent to which the Linux developer community has focused on mere graphical skinnability as a stand-in for real customization is symptomatic of the fact that they just don't get usability. If they did they would understand that making Linux look like something it doesn't act like is, simply, deception.
This much is true. I think the average Linux developer doesn't even see the point of usability, let alone understand it. They think you just have to make it look more like Windows and it won't scare the average user off, then throw in more special effects, because "real" users just want to use the terminal anyway.
At least Linux has a decent terminal, which is more than you can say for Windows. And you can always fall back on old fashioned text mode if your X install breaks.
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At least Linux has a decent terminal, which is more than you can say for Windows. And you can always fall back on old fashioned text mode if your X install breaks.
Windows has a better shell than Linux.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell
I love linux, runs most windows progs fine, amiga programs with uae fine, dos programs with dosbox fine... And of course any linux app.
Windows has better compatibility with Windows software and can also run any Linux app. http://www.colinux.org/
All with industry wide driver support.
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Windows has a better shell than Linux.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell
Windows has better compatibility with Windows software and can also run any Linux app. http://www.colinux.org/
All with industry wide driver support.
Why? If you want an OS for an OSs sake than Linux is great, but you might as well use Amiga OS 3.9 in that case. If you want an OS to actually do stuff, you know productive stuff like video editing and music production you're looking at Mac or Windows. Then it's just a preference on the way you do stuff. I like to right click.
(An HP-UX and Solaris Unix admin for 5 years)
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To be honest, I wish someone would just use linux as an under the hood solution for drivers and such and simplified everything else, like beos or amigaos on top... AEROS just may be this... But I haven't given it serious time yet...
Its ironical that whilst linux's hardware support is often said to be limited, its wide hardware support is in fact its best asset. Maybe its only one.
I've said it before that one of the great tragedies of modern computing is that the open source movement chose to support Linux.
Still for a free system cobbled together, linux is pretty goddam good.
Yes in that context it is.
But for $30 i upgraded an old XP Tablet PC laptop to Windows 8 and it wipes the floor with previous Ubuntu 9.10 in terms of performance, installation time and 100% working hardware and a gazillion quality software options that a double click of the Install icon will achieve.
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Why? If you want an OS for an OSs sake than Linux is great, but you might as well use Amiga OS 3.9 in that case. If you want an OS to actually do stuff, you know productive stuff like video editing and music production you're looking at Mac or Windows. Then it's just a preference on the way you do stuff. I like to right click.
Just in case there is some Linux software that you need to run, that hasn't been ported to Windows. I'm not saying I have a need for it, just that you can.
But for $30 i upgraded an old XP Tablet PC laptop to Windows 8 and it wipes the floor with previous Ubuntu 9.10 in terms of performance, installation time and 100% working hardware and a gazillion quality software options that a double click of the Install icon will achieve.
And Windows 8.1 preview is currently free, in case anyone wants to try it on their hardware.
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If you want an OS to actually do stuff, you know productive stuff like video editing and music production you're looking at Mac or Windows.
So "actually do stuff" == "productive stuff like video editing and music production"? That's a ridiculously limited view. I've made my living for the last 17 years "actually doing stuff" almost exclusively on Linux machines. No, I don't do video editing or music production.
Put me in front of a Windows machine, and it feels like you've chopped off my hands. OS X is better, but for my needs I'd still rather have a recent version of Ubuntu any day.
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But for $30 i upgraded an old XP Tablet PC laptop to Windows 8 and it wipes the floor with previous Ubuntu 9.10 in terms of performance, installation time and 100% working hardware and a gazillion quality software options that a double click of the Install icon will achieve.
It is a bit ridiculous to compare the newest Windows with a 4 year old completely outdated version of Ubuntu.
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Windows has a better shell than Linux.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell
You can get object oriented shells for Unix-y OS's too. Nobody tends to use them because they are generally way too verbose to be worth it compared to the standard shells, so "better" is definitively debatable.
Notice how PowerShell syntax has gradually moved towards the brevity of Unix/Linux shells over time..
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It is a bit ridiculous to compare the newest Windows with a 4 year old completely outdated version of Ubuntu.
unfair or incongruous yes, but ridiculous? Probably not. But in reality 12's not gonna do much more for you than 9. Same legacy driver challenges will be there, or settling for NdiSwrapper madness. For me family time is more important now. Maybe when I retire. It's a good OS for Octogenarians, nice and steady and smells like moth balls. Will go nicely with my beige cardigan with the vinyl elbow patches.
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It is a bit ridiculous to compare the newest Windows with a 4 year old completely outdated version of Ubuntu.
True. Latest Ubuntu is probably even slower.
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How do I do it on Amiga? I have lots of Amiga software that behaves this way.
How do you do it on Amiga?
Well you only ever have one window manager running at once. But the Amiga always had that problem too. The widget types that come with Intuition are very basic and not very customisable, so people made MUI and ClassAct/ReAction, and NewIcons.
I'm not talking about the Amiga, because nobody is making the claim that the Amiga OS is so damn flawlessly customizable like haywirepc is claiming for Linux.
And anyway, I'll give an OS a hell of a lot more slack on failure to be consistent when it's an OS that's had to be hacked into even what modernity it approaches by outside developers hooking into system calls. Linux is open-source; what's its excuse?
This much is true. I think the average Linux developer doesn't even see the point of usability, let alone understand it. They think you just have to make it look more like Windows and it won't scare the average user off, then throw in more special effects, because "real" users just want to use the terminal anyway.
Precisely.
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And anyway, I'll give an OS a hell of a lot more slack on failure to be consistent when it's an OS that's had to be hacked into even what modernity it approaches by outside developers hooking into system calls. Linux is open-source; what's its excuse?
Pretty much the same thing, actually. It IS open source, but they're still tied to legacy stuff for the GUI like X Windows, which goes back to 1984. All the things you complain about (i.e. user interface stuff) run in user mode and have to go through that arcane monstrosity to do anything. It might not technically be "hacked" but if anything it's worse. These things don't have anything to do with the kernel.
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Again, a kernel is not an OS. Linux as an OS is much more than just the kernel. But I agree: basically every problem Linux has is down to being stuck on crufty, monstrous legacy frameworks for its userland. The difference is, it didn't have to be that way. It was created from scratch as a hobby project and opened up to community involvement, not hacked into its present state as a guerilla update to a closed-source OS that was effectively abandoned twenty years ago. There's no reason whatsoever that they couldn't have ditched the cruft, designed newer, better frameworks, and implemented compatibility layers to keep old software running. Even Windows could and did do that. The Linux developer community chose to make it what it is; the Amiga hackers didn't have that choice.
As stefcep2 says, it's a tragedy that twenty years of the time, energy, and zeal of the open-source movement have gone into recreating an assemblage of legacy cruft built around a system architecture from the 1970s. Imagine if that time had gone into a project along the lines of BeOS instead...
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It is a bit ridiculous to compare the newest Windows with a 4 year old completely outdated version of Ubuntu.
All linux versions are outdated, they all feel like a 70's OS compared to any AmigaOS flavour
@stefcep2:
I've said it before that one of the great tragedies of modern computing is that the open source movement chose to support Linux.
Indeed! All their efforts seem to be splitted between making a monolithic monster for servers and making horrible GUIs unconnected to the real OS that try to mimic badly the worst inventions of Microsoft & Apple
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In truth there have been many times I threw the towel in and just went back to windows for alot of my needs. Now I use linux for 90% of things though.
Linux can be awfully aggravating till you get the hang of it.
Still use windows for video editing, because the apps available are just better.
But In the end its about feeling comfortable. I think maybe if I put half the time into customizing windows as I have had with windows, I'd be just as happy. Somhow I've never done that in windows because I just don't like windows in general... But could be done.
Windowblinds, rocket launchbar and some other stuff can make it more appealing... But I don't know I just prefer linux, even with all of its trappings and downsides. Can't stand constantly running spyware sweepers and stuff like that in windows, makes me worry about my data alot.
None of that in linux and also...
I don't know I also just enjoy compiz too, yes I actually use it...
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unfair or incongruous yes, but ridiculous? Probably not. But in reality 12's not gonna do much more for you than 9. Same legacy driver challenges will be there, or settling for NdiSwrapper madness. For me family time is more important now. Maybe when I retire. It's a good OS for Octogenarians, nice and steady and smells like moth balls. Will go nicely with my beige cardigan with the vinyl elbow patches.
My experience with 12 is that I've had some problems with one obscure Chinese scanner, but on the other hand Ubuntu supports my printers right out of the box, while Windows requires a 250MB download to get one of them set up.
Drivers was a big deal 5-10 years ago, or if you pick up no-name unknown hardware from China or something released in the last week without checking if it's compatible first.
Other than that, driver support is often *better* than Windows these days, especially for older hardware.
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All linux versions are outdated, they all feel like a 70's OS compared to any AmigaOS flavour
Frankly, while there are still lots of things I love with AmigaOS and miss in Linux, this is a downright ridiculous statement to make. It takes a *huge* amount of tweaks to AmigaOS to get a system that is anywhere near as usable as most modern Linux distro's, and you'll still have huge holes.
Already in '89 or so while using AmigaOS extensively, my system was tweaked beyond recognition to get to the experience I enjoyed, and it was still in most ways substantially inferior to most modern Linux distros.
Invest the same effort in tweaking a Linux distribution now, and you end up with something vastly more polished. And if you like you could end up with something substantially closer to an Amiga experience.
Sure, there are still things modern mainstream OS's lack, or are just "reinventing" now (the parallel between workspaces and increasing use of fullscreen apps to screens for example, is quite amusing and satisfying; and Ubuntu's switch to a global menu bar likewise), but the pale in comparison to the features that are lacking, such as proper memory protection and full support for virtualization (I have a dozen or so lightweight virtual machines running on my home machine) or full fledged package management.
I'd love to be able to use a more Amiga-ish OS as my main OS, but before that can happen, either AROS or AmigaOS would need to take a lot *more* stuff from Unix/Linux, or more Amiga-like features would need to be ported to Linux; there's no way I'd be able to go give up all the things I've come to expect in an OS after using Linux.
(I say *more* stuff would need to be taken from Unix/Linux, because already with the first handful of Fish disks in the 80's we were getting a steady stream of Unix ports)
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Pretty much the same thing, actually. It IS open source, but they're still tied to legacy stuff for the GUI like X Windows, which goes back to 1984.
That is a rather comical complaint to see on an Amiga forum... It is also inaccurate at best - pretty much no modern X client software is able to run on an X server from 1984, or even from 2000 - there's very little in X of today that has much to do with X of 1984 other than the core protocol.
All the things you complain about (i.e. user interface stuff) run in user mode and have to go through that arcane monstrosity to do anything.
That "knowledge" is more than a decade out of date. In this paper from *2001*, Keith Packard on the XFree86 Core Team outlined a redesign of X that introduced the XRENDER extension:
http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/usenix2001/xrender/
As it happens, the X11 protocol is very simple. The complexity was in implementing the drawing model with good performance, which by 2001 was quite outdated. Incidentally much the same drawing model that AmigaOS provided, where the OS is called to draw primitives like rectangles etc., but with the added cost and complexity of doing it over a socket that could potentially be on the other end of a network and so needed to also carry things like all fonts etc.
XRENDER instead let the client render directly into buffers that is then composited. Combined with two shared memory (supported by virtually all X servers since long before XRENDER) and DRI where the client now pretty much renders directly into buffers that can be composited straight to the display buffer using hardware acceleration. All of the complexity of serializing resources over the socket, and of having the server keep up with whatever support the client would like to have to efficiently render went away.
Post XRENDER, and subsequent rounds of updates, pretty much no Linux + X setups have "gone through" any "arcane monstrosity" to do much of anything - X is largely used to negotiate the options that both client and server supports, and unless the client is ancient (pre 2001 or so), the result will be a much simplified stack. If the client *is* ancient, then the old rendering commands might end up getting used, but we're talking a few hundred KB of code at most to support those commands, and pretty much nobody runs that code (just like not much code targeting AmigaOS uses plain Intuition gadgets any more)
Compared to e.g. Windows, the legacy junk carried around for GUI's on most Linux systems is tiny.
Though X of today is vastly cleaner than "old X", these changes are some of the main drivers behind "Wayland" and "Mir" the two next generation display servers for Linux set to replace X entirely (you can run X on top of them, but most regular users rarely will, as the main toolkits are getting direct supports for them): There's not all that much left of X that is actually needed in a modern system, so creating display servers free of legacy stuff and layering X on top as an optional component has become "easy" and attractive as a way of cleaning up the systems further.
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"I'd love to be able to use a more Amiga-ish OS as my main OS, but before that can happen, either AROS or AmigaOS would need to take a lot *more* stuff from Unix/Linux, or more Amiga-like features would need to be ported to Linux; there's no way I'd be able to go give up all the things I've come to expect in an OS after using Linux."
I completely and totally agree. I've had an aros box off and on since you could first install and run icaros desktop. I had such high hopes of switching to it for my daily machine. Though, it gave a nice feeling of "coming home" it was and still is so lacking in apps and things I needed to do I quickly realized I could not use it for anything other than I suppose fun and puttering around with.
Once, I dumped all my old mods, s3ms and xm's to my aros box and with milky tracker tried to use the aros box to compose music again, but found myself wanting renoise fx and virtual instruments, wanting a decent sample editor and so on. I realized milky tracker was just a 90's era tech. 20+ years of better tools out there.
I could not work on videos, watch youtube videos, do decent graphics work, and so many other things. This is why amiga next gen is failing. Amiga next gen machine is a nice toy to put next to your main computer for fun stuff and nostalgia, but thats it.
Sure you can cripple yourself creatively and still do decent work, but better creative work can be done on osx, linux or windows...
And THAT is why amiga next gen machines are just novelties at this point.
But I still HOPE... :pint:
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Again, a kernel is not an OS. Linux as an OS is much more than just the kernel. But I agree: basically every problem Linux has is down to being stuck on crufty, monstrous legacy frameworks for its userland. The difference is, it didn't have to be that way. It was created from scratch as a hobby project and opened up to community involvement, not hacked into its present state as a guerilla update to a closed-source OS that was effectively abandoned twenty years ago.
It's the kernel plus some core drivers, commands and utilities. It isn't X-Windows or window managers or GUI toolkits or desktop environments. Those are extras that come bundled with distributions. You can install Linux with no GUI at all.
The decision to use X-Windows wasn't so strange back in 1991, since they were going for something Unix-like and it was an established standard, and it meant that they could run software on Unix servers remotely which was very cool then and is still very cool now. Remember Windows 3.1 came out in '92 and could do none of these things, and wasn't even fully multitasking. X Windows was one of the best GUI systems out there at the time.
The problem with X is not the speed or efficiency. The problem is the protocol transmits only visual, not semantic information. Or in other words, you don't say to the X server "I want a button here" you say "I want a grey box here with some shading and text on it, and tell me when the user clicks on it". Which means the appearance and behaviour is all the responsibility of the software at the other end of the connection. So if you are running some software natively, you can customise its look and feel, but then if you run something remotely it will run according to the settings on the remote machine. What you get is the Window Manager running locally (the X Server end), and the GUI toolkit running at the other end of the connection (the X Client end). So bye bye any hope of visual consistency, and you can forget accessibility (which nobody thought of until years later). X Windows doesn't know anything about what your on screen widgets actually do.
There's another peculiarity of X Windows that is rather limiting, and that is the way you tell it that a window should have a border. It seems almost like a hack, as if Window Managers weren't invented until later, but what you do is you just open your window with the root window as the parent, and then the Window Manager gets informed and it steals it, reparents it and puts the titlebars and whatnot on it. (I know this from my experiments modifying Fluxbox.) This means your application has no control whatsoever over where your window goes. You just have faith that the window manager knows what to do with it. Which isn't usually a problem. But it means it's impossible to do "nested windows" in client areas like Windows NT has. Well, you can make them yourself, and there are toolkits with this capability, but there's no way to get the window manager to manage them.
X has instead different workspaces to keep your windows separate and grouped, so your WM typically just opens every new window on whatever workspace you're currently on. (There is a feature in the protocol to set a window's group ID but it doesn't have any defined purpose or consequences so nobody uses it.) This is a bit like the Amiga's method of using multiple screens, except in X you can't make your own workspace and put your own windows in it. You just get four* of them. And that's it.
*Well you can change that number in your settings. Fluxbox, incidentally, has away to put your windows in preferred places, which involves identifying your windows by looking them up by title in a supplied list. Ugh.
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You can get object oriented shells for Unix-y OS's too. Nobody tends to use them because they are generally way too verbose to be worth it compared to the standard shells, so "better" is definitively debatable.
Notice how PowerShell syntax has gradually moved towards the brevity of Unix/Linux shells over time..
It's irrelevant whether they are unpopular on Unix-y OS or whether you think they are also taking features from Unixy shells.
To me it sounds like Microsoft are the first to produce a shell that has the best bits from all the different shells out there and are pushing to make it the default shell on windows. How is that not a good thing?
"I'd love to be able to use a more Amiga-ish OS as my main OS, but before that can happen, either AROS or AmigaOS would need to take a lot *more* stuff from Unix/Linux, or more Amiga-like features would need to be ported to Linux; there's no way I'd be able to go give up all the things I've come to expect in an OS after using Linux."
The irony is that Windows is that OS.
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So "actually do stuff" == "productive stuff like video editing and music production"? That's a ridiculously limited view. I've made my living for the last 17 years "actually doing stuff" almost exclusively on Linux machines.
Wow - thats pretty impressive stuff , and i thought i had been using it for a long time. What kind of stuff were you doing with linux back then? Linux had only just reached a v1 release. Im guessing you must be a kernel hacker or something .
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The decision to use X-Windows wasn't so strange back in 1991, since they were going for something Unix-like and it was an established standard, and it meant that they could run software on Unix servers remotely which was very cool then and is still very cool now. Remember Windows 3.1 came out in '92 and could do none of these things, and wasn't even fully multitasking.
But Workbench 2.0 came out in 1990, and System 7 came out in 1991. (And if I'm reading up correctly, Linux didn't even get X until XFree86 in 1994, by which time Windows 3.1 was well-established and 95 had been seeing betas released to preview customers since 1993.) There were already well-established lessons in good desktop design in every major corner of the personal-computer market, and known deficiencies of X that you point out yourself, like its presentation-centric model to UI (which had already led to the development of the Motif toolkit as an attempt at standardization.)
People did know better in 1991, or if they didn't they should've. Linux could have chosen to build something better. But they don't believe in that over there, they believe that "worse is better" and crappy designs are fine as long as you get them to a working beta faster. So instead they just reimplemented the flawed system instead of trying to fix the flaws - which basically sums up the whole project.
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People did know better in 1991, or if they didn't they should've. Linux could have chosen to build something better. But they don't believe in that over there, they believe that "worse is better" and crappy designs are fine as long as you get them to a working beta faster. So instead they just reimplemented the flawed system instead of trying to fix the flaws - which basically sums up the whole project.
Well I think back in 1991 and even in 1994, nobody imagined Linux as a desktop operating system for ordinary users as a direct competitor to Windows. It was intended as a Unix-substitute for enthusiasts to run on cheap consumer PCs. Using X Windows meant that existing Unix software could be ported very easily, and Motif goes back to the 1980s.
So yes, Linux could have chosen to put more emphasis on having a nice user experience for computer novices, but then it would have just been competing with Windows and would have met exactly the same fate as BeOS et al, in other words obscurity. It met a niche need, and was able to survive, and only later when it became established did this sort of thing become a concern, by which time there is already a legacy to deal with.
Wayland is long overdue in my opinion but only addresses one half of the problem. In fact, the less important half, the way I see it, they should be integrating the window manager with the toolkit, not the X server with the window manager. Also that should be a very easy thing to do. I might put it down for personal investigation, in fact. A modular toolkit system where you can add new widget types or use custom replacements, and that handles window decorations itself. Wrappers for existing toolkits to go through the new toolkit, then pull the window manager part out of Wayland, and bam, all the settings in one place.
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So yes, Linux could have chosen to put more emphasis on having a nice user experience for computer novices, but then it would have just been competing with Windows and would have met exactly the same fate as BeOS et al, in other words obscurity.
Well, first off, usability is not just about novices. A really good interface is a good interface for everybody, from novices to pros. The whole idea that "user-friendly is for newbs" ingrained into the developer culture is half the reason Linux UI sucks so bad today. The Mac didn't make that mistake, and as a result it had pretty much the best UI out there for years. The Amiga didn't make that mistake, and while it wasn't quite as beautifully intuitive as the Mac, it still got a hell of a lot closer than Linux did. Windows didn't make that mistake, and while its UI sucked at first, by Windows 3.0 it actually got pretty decent, and by 95 it set the template for pretty much all future desktop environments in one way or another. Even niche OSes like BeOS don't make that mistake; only the Unices do.
(And as for the idea of competing with Windows being doomed to fail: who cares? I'll take a good failure over a mediocre success any day. See also: Amiga.)
Anyway, you can make the argument that Linux was never intended to be a user-friendly desktop OS. Looking at it I'd be inclined to agree with you. (Certainly it's better as a server OS than it is as a desktop OS.) But if that's the case, they certainly shouldn't have promoted it as one. If that wasn't the intention, then every loudmouth zealot who ever pushed it as a good alternative to Windows is a liar fudging facts for the sake of promoting ideology.
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who ever pushed it as a good alternative to Windows is a liar fudging facts for the sake of promoting ideology.
Oh, yeah right and People who ever pushed Mac and Windows as a good alternative to Linux is a liar fudging facts for the sake of promoting ideology.
It is a excellent alternative to both Windows and Mac. Every OS has it strong, and less strong points, yes even Windows and Mac. For me, Linux is the natural choice after the Amiga, because it 's FUN to tinker with ,adjustable and not mainstream boring. It's an excellent developer platform.
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How is it not "mainstream boring?" It's a million infinitesimally-different Unix clones in addition to the dozen actual, official Unices that already existed. (And the other, non-Linux Unix clones...) In terms of number of similar OSes (as opposed to actual systems in service) it's by far the most mainstream OS in history (especially now that Mac OS is another damn Unix clone.)
It's just that, you know, it's not a very good one.
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It's just that, you know, it's not a very good one.
What is it that you don't like with Linux?
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I've detailed it quite thoroughly over the course of this thread. If you want the shortlist of my posts in it, thread search (http://amiga.org/forums/search.php?searchid=2396506) will do ya.
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One more thing that reminds me of Amiga when using Linux is the philosophy of sharing code, just like the Fred Fish-days.
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Frankly, while there are still lots of things I love with AmigaOS and miss in Linux, this is a downright ridiculous statement to make. It takes a *huge* amount of tweaks to AmigaOS to get a system that is anywhere near as usable as most modern Linux distro's, and you'll still have huge holes.
Linux with its monolithic kernel seems to be the past. It's nowhere as extensible as AmigaOS was in its first day. Any BSD seems much more evolved and advanced than Linux, at least in extensibility.
The rest of the OS (GNU) is not my cup of tea, starting from the lack of coherence between its parts (core and GUI) and all the heterogeneous and badly integrated apps.
Already in '89 or so while using AmigaOS extensively, my system was tweaked beyond recognition to get to the experience I enjoyed, and it was still in most ways substantially inferior to most modern Linux distros.
Linux is slow, no matter what you do. Any AmigaOS flavour runs rings in terms of speed.
All the rest of OSes: OSX, Windows, BeOS... are far more integrated, intuitive and usually faster.
Invest the same effort in tweaking a Linux distribution now, and you end up with something vastly more polished. And if you like you could end up with something substantially closer to an Amiga experience.
AmigaOS flavours are already enjoyable out of the box, these are already fast, no need to waste hours tweaking them like Linux.
Amigans enjoy tweaking their systems but it's not mandatory at all.
the pale in comparison to the features that are lacking, such as proper memory protection and full support for virtualization (I have a dozen or so lightweight virtual machines running on my home machine) or full fledged package management.
Android apps suddenly die and leave your phone frozen and you have to reboot it. It's funny because Android devices are the perfect example of Linux: these require incredible high amounts of resources to do stuff that would work much better on AmigaOS. And memory protected or not Android apps crash and slow down your phone so much that you have to reboot it. I have to reboot phones with "memory protection" much more often than I have to reboot AmigaOS flavours just for the simple fact that Linux is coded like memory was infinite and never exhausted.
I'd love to be able to use a more Amiga-ish OS as my main OS, but before that can happen, either AROS or AmigaOS would need to take a lot *more* stuff from Unix/Linux, or more Amiga-like features would need to be ported to Linux; there's no way I'd be able to go give up all the things I've come to expect in an OS after using Linux.
Most of stuff that comes with these OSes that take gigabytes of space is rubbish or are 14 outdated GUIs for a cli tool that got recently updated and crashes and burns.
All in all: when Linux crashes and burns you always end up having to edit weird config files located at random paths, instead of having a GUI emergency boot that boots with basic VGA modes and 640x480 I guess it's much more intuitive for these bearded kernel hackers.
(I say *more* stuff would need to be taken from Unix/Linux, because already with the first handful of Fish disks in the 80's we were getting a steady stream of Unix ports)
If I wanted to run all that GNU apps I would run them on a unix environment (but a more modern one that use microkernel, not a monolithicly obsolete one like Linux).
Monolithic kernels are so 70s...
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There is agreement. Linux is the bloated, hard to customise free alternative.
There is one thing, I have never gotten WINE (windows compatibilty) to work. Actually I last downloaded the beta version by accident. Not one of the PC programs I tried worked. Not interested in trying again.
I'm afraid no option is a satisfactory replacement from where OS3.1 left off. There are no paid/full-time programmers to make AmigaOS a lean, snappy, plus optional features, plus modern programs OS. It's a case of 2nd best for the moment.
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That is a rather comical complaint to see on an Amiga forum... It is also inaccurate at best - pretty much no modern X client software is able to run on an X server from 1984, or even from 2000 - there's very little in X of today that has much to do with X of 1984 other than the core protocol.
The core protocol is kind of significant though.
From the Wayland FAQ:
The problem with X is that... it's X. When you're an X server there's a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this. For example, core fonts; this is the original font model that was how your got text on the screen for the many first years of X11. This includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs (seriously, XLFDs!). Also, the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives. For many things we've been able to keep the X.org server modern by adding extensions such as XRandR, XRender and COMPOSITE and to some extent phase out less useful extensions. But we can't ever get rid of the core rendering API and much other complexity that is rarely used in a modern desktop.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_6
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Anyway, you can make the argument that Linux was never intended to be a user-friendly desktop OS. Looking at it I'd be inclined to agree with you. (Certainly it's better as a server OS than it is as a desktop OS.) But if that's the case, they certainly shouldn't have promoted it as one.
I don't know who "they" refers to in this case. I'm not aware of anyone touting "Linux" as a user-friendly desktop OS. That's what Ubuntu and its variants try to aim for, but that's just the aim of that particular (relatively new) distribution.
Windows aimed for that explicitly in the first case, so things that came so naturally to Linux with its Unix roots, such as the multi-user network based environment, in Windows seems kind of tacked on as an afterthought. Which of course it is. Although they've got it tacked on quite well now. It's nice at the front end but if you're an advanced level user you can tell it's a bit of a mess underneath, which is kind of the polar opposite of Linux. Linux is neat underneath and a mess on the top, which is why it's so good at being a server.
One day someone will make a modern OS that is neat at both ends, that nobody can find anything to complain about, and the Universe will end.
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One day someone will make a modern OS that is neat at both ends, that nobody can find anything to complain about, and the Universe will end.
Even if someone did - there would still be zealots and those not open to change that would still claim their OS du jour is superior for a bunch of reasons that will change depending on the context. We all have reasons for our choices and mine are based on what i feel comfortable with and what my needs are.
Somewhere in this thread someone noted that Android was "well regarded" yet later on claimed that Linux was no good due to various desktop / user interface issues. On one hand accepting that Linux is just a kernel and on the other citing Linux is both kernel and userland stuff - depending on which argument it serves most best at the time. Its hard to take those kind of arguments seriously. Someone else was complaining about the size of the source code but conveniently forgot that that source code supports a huge range of architectures and hardware configurations and bears no reflection on the size of a kernel.
This thread has turned into a real flame bait situation and i think its about time it was put to bed as the discussion is going no-where.
Whatever your operating system preference is - be happy that you have found something that suits your needs. Its ok to see the negative side of things but never forget that your own preference probably has its negatives to someone else. And most of all be happy!
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So if you are running some software natively, you can customise its look and feel, but then if you run something remotely it will run according to the settings on the remote machine. What you get is the Window Manager running locally (the X Server end), and the GUI toolkit running at the other end of the connection (the X Client end). So bye bye any hope of visual consistency, and you can forget accessibility (which nobody thought of until years later). X Windows doesn't know anything about what your on screen widgets actually do.
This is inaccurate. The window manager can, and usually *does*, run exactly where your other client software runs. It is extremely rare to run the window manager tied to the X server - that most commonly happens on "second class" X environments like rootless servers Windows or similar. And the X server has very minimal control over the visuals of the clients (if it behaves according to spec anyway).
It is in any case moot, as other than really advanced users, most users will tend to run the X server, window manager and clients on the same machine, under control of a desktop environment that controls the settings.
And in anything resembling a "modern" X based stack, X acts as a resource arbitration and compositing mechanism and the desktop environment running on top takes care of the rest - you're attacking X as if it's the whole stack, when in reality, almost no Linux desktop has been "just X + window manager" for a decade or more.
This means your application has no control whatsoever over where your window goes. You just have faith that the window manager knows what to do with it. Which isn't usually a problem. But it means it's impossible to do "nested windows" in client areas like Windows NT has.
Thank heavens. There's a *reason* why most people who have experienced it hates that with a passion.
It'd not be difficult at all to create an X extension to allow X window managers to reparent lower level windows on request of the clients, but thankfully very few people would be insane enough to try.
X has instead different workspaces to keep your windows separate and grouped, so your WM typically just opens every new window on whatever workspace you're currently on. (There is a feature in the protocol to set a window's group ID but it doesn't have any defined purpose or consequences so nobody uses it.)
I think you have cause and effect backwards here. There are tools to do this, but they're largely not very user friendly because most users don't use workspaces much - it's an "advanced user" feature that is rarely enough requested that there's not been much push to simplify it.
As much as I love screens on the Amiga, it's also pretty clear that until recently "regular users" haven't been very understanding of why this would be a good idea, and the tools that do exist are good enough for advanced users.
This is a bit like the Amiga's method of using multiple screens, except in X you can't make your own workspace and put your own windows in it. You just get four* of them. And that's it.
Of course you can make your own. Generally *applications* won't do that as it's not considered the applications place to do it, and there's no *standardized* API across window managers to do it as far as I know, and that's one thing I do miss from the Amiga. But adding more workspaces is a couple of button presses away on most Linux distro's.
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I don't know who "they" refers to in this case. I'm not aware of anyone touting "Linux" as a user-friendly desktop OS.
As the old quip goes: "Unix is user friendly. It is just picky about who its friends are". Same with Linux on the desktop. My current Ubuntu setup is for me the most user friendly OS I've had. It's by no means perfect, but it's still a great step in the right direction.
It's not by coincidence that it's also the closest any mainstream OS has gotten to an "AmigaOS feel". Including a global menu (of course OS X has had that for ages), and good support for running apps in full screen modes that feels sort of like screens.
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And THAT is why amiga next gen machines are just novelties at this point.
But I still HOPE... :pint:
The problem is attracting developers to plug all those holes... For my part I contributed some console improvement for AROS two years ago or so, but I just haven't had time since, and that's still lagging behind and that's just one tiny area. Hoping to finally do some hacking again, and now I at least have AROS running side by side with X so even if AROS is insufficient for me as a main OS, I'm only a keypress away, and I'm hoping that'll give me an incentive to try to fix some of the things keeping me from spending more time on it.
I think running AROS "on the side" like that, plus things like AEROS with support for spawning Linux apps from AROS or vice versa, is the only viable way for quite some time. Of course there'll be some people that can do just fine with what is available, but meanwhile hybrid approaches offers some way of spending more time in Amiga-like environments than we otherwise would (I have my Minimig and intend to get a FPGA Replay board etc. too, and when finances improve I still want an X1000, but having to switch machines still creates a much bigger barrier to regular usage)
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It's irrelevant whether they are unpopular on Unix-y OS or whether you think they are also taking features from Unixy shells.
To me it sounds like Microsoft are the first to produce a shell that has the best bits from all the different shells out there and are pushing to make it the default shell on windows. How is that not a good thing?
It can't possibly be worse than their old shell, and it certainly is an *improvement*, but to a large extent they have missed the point. There's been *numerous* attempts of doing similar shells with types streams and rich meta-data embedded on the Unix side, and all of them have stranded on a few very important things:
* Simplicity. The Unix shells are successful because you can whip up trivial scripts down to "one liners" that can parse and produce data that can be pipelined trivially with other applications. Whenever typed streams have been tried so far, it's failed over this.
* Power of the combined ecosystem: A Unix shell is only a tiny part of the package. The bigger deal is the dozens of Unix commands with several decades of history that people know how to interact with. And not specialised tools like large applications, but fundamental composable components that acts as "power multipliers". There are probably hundreds of "standard" invocations of sets of Unix utilities that I use regularly yet don't bother to script because they are short and simple. E.g. "uniq -c | sort -n" to count the number of unique input strings and sort them by number of occurrences; prefix "grep" to get the number of occurrences of strings matching (or not matching) a specific pattern. And so on.
The experience from that is 40 years worth of experience about what manipulation people need to do manually often, and a toolchain that behaves accordingly, and even more importantly: A toolchain where the basic subset is available "everywhere", ranging from my Android phone, to my OS X box at work, to my home Linux laptop, to my home server, to the hundred+ work VM's, to super computers, to my WDTV set-top box, to the router my cable TV provider sent me... to, infact, Windows if you install Cygwin or alternatives.
If people don't need to do manually, it doesn't need to be done from a shell, and so while much of the PowerShell functionality might be neat in a scripting language, it is then no better off than the dozens of object oriented languages out there.
* Failing to distinguish between the terminal application and the shell. In the Windows world this is frequent. In the Unix world, like on the Amiga, a shell and a terminal/console are two different things, provided by different pieces of code. One can be exchanged without exchanging the other. Unix users frequently switch shells because we want different command line handling or scripting, for example, while we may switch terminal apps because we want different window handling.
For most Unix/Linux users, the shell *must, must, must* be available "everywhere" - I access shells on about ~20 different machines, and 100+ VM's. I don't want to have to deal with different shells on remote machines than on my local machine, for example, so I want
If I want to be able to pass structured data between scripts, I output and consume JSON or similar, or I simply dip into "pry" - a Ruby "shell" and/or write scripts in Ruby or whatever other language is suitable for the specific problem.
Most dynamic languages have their own alternative to "pry" (Pry, like Ruby in general, steals a lot of ideas from LISP and SmallTalk, that took this to the extreme much more so than PowerShell even). But structured data bring with them different tradeoffs and complexities, and almost always ends up being more verbose because they need to support wider functionality (though people have tried to emulate Unix shell syntax in Ruby too, just like Microsoft have tried with recent versions of PowerShell).
The irony is that Windows is that OS.
Eww.. No, it really isn't. Whenever I have to use a Windows box, I am quickly reminded at how much I detest it and feel tied up and limited by the OS instead of empowered by what functionality it makes available to me, and you can still see the heritage of the abominations that were earlier versions of Windows. They can't make Windows into what I described without ripping out large parts of what makes it Windows.
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I wonder why Android guys decided to choose Linux... any other BSD would have allowed easier upgrading, at least drivers API is more or less standarized. I also wonder why they decided to choose Java since it devours cpu time and memory, causing battery drain. Everyone is using ARM and Google phases out mobile phones pretty fast anyway (due to not choosing a decent kernel for their OS).
The kernel has more or less wide driver support but being monolithic (and not having a proper standard for modular drivers) it's the worst kernel you could choose.The GNU part of the OS is also horrible, unusable outdated 70s style. It's like painting your old car with some modern patterns and claiming it's modern. Some eyecandy won't modernize it, just like some eyecandy suddenly won't modernize Linux 70's design.
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The core protocol is kind of significant though.
From the Wayland FAQ:
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_6
Well, yes, and no. They are confusing two issues for simplicity:
To be an *X server* you need to implement a ton of functionality, yet nothing that can't be implemented in a couple of hundred KB of executable, which is a rounding error in a modern system, and it is code that is already written. Most of this functionality can be implemented using libraries that are going to be on any Linux system anyway, so the impact is even smaller.
To speak the *X protocol* you can get away with implementing the core protocol, and just supporting the calls that are spoken by modern clients and return errors for everything else. This would break stuff like "xeyes" and old xterm and other decade+ old X software. I've written an implementation of the core protocol, and it's easily doable in a couple of days.
Much of the motivation for Wayland is exactly that modern clients use only this little subset of X, and so while they could just ditch the rest from the X server, call it X12 and be done with it, because the subset is so small and the two dominant GUI toolkits on Linux (Qt and GTK) both support different rendering backends (GTK can even render to HTML+JS so you can spin up a web browser and get to your applications that way - don't know about Qt), there's a golden opportunity for a clean slate.
So it's not so much that the core X protocol and the subset of calls that must be supported for modern clients is so bad, but that once you ditch the goal of being a fully compliant X server, what is left is so compact that there is little reason to be an X server at all vs. throwing out the legacy and taking the best pieces and lessons from it.
Wayland (and Mir) has become a realistic option (unlike, say, Berlin, Fresco, GGI, DirectFB or Y-Windows - various projects that hoped to unseat X over the last two decades or at least eat substantially into the user base) *because* the interface to X that is actually required has become narrower and narrower, and localised in fewer and fewer places (few client applications use Xlib directly any more, for example - a decade ago that wasn't true).
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I wonder why Android guys decided to choose Linux... any other BSD would have allowed easier upgrading, at least drivers API is more or less standarized.
Google has massive amounts of Linux experience *and* the number of people who know how to work with the Linux kernel is tens or hundreds of times larger than for BSD, for example. That's presumably important for them in order to keep development pace up.
The difference in driver API's is pretty much irrelevant - it's not the driver API's that are tricky, but how to interact with the hardware. Writing Linux drivers is easy enough. The "upgrade problem" does not have anything to do with difficulties updating the kernel.
I also wonder why they decided to choose Java since it devours cpu time and memory, causing battery drain. Everyone is using ARM and Google phases out mobile phones pretty fast anyway (due to not choosing a decent kernel for their OS).
I sort of agree with this question, as I dislike Java, but note that there are MIPS and x86 Android devices too, and Google (or Android - prior to being bought out) might have looked at it as a way of leveraging existing mobile development experience and keep their CPU options open in case they'd end up having to ditch ARM.
The kernel has more or less wide driver support but being monolithic (and not having a proper standard for modular drivers) it's the worst kernel you could choose.The GNU part of the OS is also horrible, unusable outdated 70s style. It's like painting your old car with some modern patterns and claiming it's modern. Some eyecandy won't modernize it, just like some eyecandy suddenly won't modernize Linux 70's design.
That "70's design" is what pretty much the entire internet runs on, for good reason: It works, is well tested, and people know how to deal with it. But that is irrelevant to Android as most Android applications don't see that interface at all, anyway. Google could switch to the Windows kernel or BSD or, hey, even AmigaOS and most Android applications wouldn't even notice.
The Linux underpinnings of Android are great for people who want to hack Android and/or root their devices (I have my home server log in to my phone regularly when it's connected to my wifi to do things like sync files automatically, for example), but it's not particularly visible in any other circumstances.
Android doesn't use a GNU userland (though you can install one) anyway. You might be thinking of POSIX aka "Unix style". The GNU tools are just one of many implementations.
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But Workbench 2.0 came out in 1990, and System 7 came out in 1991. (And if I'm reading up correctly, Linux didn't even get X until XFree86 in 1994, by which time Windows 3.1 was well-established and 95 had been seeing betas released to preview customers since 1993.) There were already well-established lessons in good desktop design in every major corner of the personal-computer market,
Have you actually *used* those systems you compare X to? In '95 I started an ISP. We had Amigas in the office (A3000's with Picasso's - yay), as well as a number of 486's running Linux with X, and one of my co-founders insisted on Windows and installed '95 immediately when it arrived. We also had to support MacOS and Windows 3.x, and a friend of ours frequently brought an OS/2 box over.
X compared just fine with all of them, and tacked on some functionality none of the others had. Very few people at the time with any computer experience would pick Windows over X if they got to spend any time with them side by side.
Sure, there were awful looking X apps, but there were also Windows 3.x style apps around for many years in most companies. Sure X could look awful, but it took about 30 minutes to get FVWM and various tweaks installed, and what mattered a lot to Linux users was that we could tweak it in every way possible - we even got "Amiga-style" screen dragging with Enlightenment a couple of years later. People who got to see what X was capable off were often stunned at the time.
At work we for example quickly got a 120MHz Pentium machine with 128MB RAM that 5 of us would run applications on at the same time, with the display on our 16MB 486's - with X that was trivial, and that functionality was a big deal for a lot of developers.
At university, similarly, I'd run applications on any of the machines available (or more than one at a time) and run my display on the sleek new Silicon Graphics Indy workstations (remember the 3D file manager in Jurassic Park? That's a real, though toy, file managers that shipped with Irix - SGI's Unix), and Windows had nothing in comparison.
What Windows had was applications, not a UI people badly wanted. It did have some features that people wanted to copy - like the start button. But it took on the order of *weeks* before window managers with support for Windows95 style start buttons arrived, and we got FVWM95 for those who wanted an easy way to get a Windows 95 look-alike (hey, there's an AmigaOS lookalike WM too).
System 7 was not something most people wanted to copy much at all. I remember thinking it looked dated and clumsy at the time in terms of UI.
There were certainly flaws in X, and most of them have been fixed in time. But most of what Linux *users* see as flaws in X follows directly from *functionality* (such as network independence) that were actually important *features* at the time. Low latency, for example was pointless - we did not have fast enough internet connections or fast enough machines to start streaming high quality live video on most machines until much later, and so "nobody" would want to ditch network support - which was extensively used - for a lower latency graphics path.
The choice of X also gave us access to a lot of Unix applications that could be easily ported - if a GUI had to be written from scratch, there might have been a GUI for Linux in '94, but with no applications it'd have been useless for several more years.
People did know better in 1991, or if they didn't they should've. Linux could have chosen to build something better.
You are confusing things. Who are "they"? There is not a single group here. A large number of the Linux kernel developers have little interest in Linux on the desktop, so for many of them, a GUI is not priority at all. And even for those who do like Linux on the desktop: The kernel is not the place for it.
The people who are working on GUI's for Linux have always been a separate set (though with some overlap) from the people working on the Linux kernel, or on other aspects of Linux distributions. Many of them have worked on different ideas of what a GUI for Linux *ought* to look like.
We have X today because X is what Linux users adopted.
Unlike Windows or OS X, no single authority gets to choose what we use. The Gnome project, for example, exists because a bunch of people didn't like what the KDE guys were doing, and built their own thing. XFCE exists because those guys didn't like either Gnome or KDE. As it is, there's at least half a dozen different desktop environments that see some degree of use, and hundred plus distributions with their own take on how things should be set up.
Many of these have conflicting goals, because different users wants different things.
What almost all of them have in common is that they don't want Windows or OS X.
But they don't believe in that over there, they believe that "worse is better"
"Worse is better" simply means that delivering 80% now is better than delivering 100% ten years from now. It isn't excuse for not delivering a good product eventually - it is a reason for not overdesigning a system so that you never ship anything until it's obsolete. More should learn from that, given the number of great projects that turn to vapour because people overreach (I'm as guilty as the next one..)
So instead they just reimplemented the flawed system instead of trying to fix the flaws - which basically sums up the whole project.
Again, who are "they"? Over the last twenty years, there's been probably a dozen or so different groups implementing alternative GUI's for Linux to make them better. Many of them were very interesting, with long lists of advanced features. I've used a few from time to time.
Yet X has continued to prevail until the last year or so. You know why? Because despite all the whining, X has kept providing a good enough foundation for most people that the competing alternatives have not been able to show compelling enough reasons to switch (though some, like DirectFB, have gotten decent levels of usage in various niches), and *have kept improving*. X of today is totally different from X of 1994, or X of 2000, as is the entire Linux desktop stack.
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This is inaccurate. The window manager can, and usually *does*, run exactly where your other client software runs. It is extremely rare to run the window manager tied to the X server - that most commonly happens on "second class" X environments like rootless servers Windows or similar.
I don't know what you are talking about here. I have absolutely NEVER heard of client software running through a client-side window manager. How would that even work? Every time you ran software on a different client you'd have to start another window manager on it. And then every window might look and behave differently, which would be insane!
Granted in normal desktop use the server and client are the same machine, but philosophically it's still unpleasant, and it means maintaining two different sets of settings. Having some other program on top that abstracts that process for you might make it seem neat and tidy, but it isn't.
And the X server has very minimal control over the visuals of the clients (if it behaves according to spec anyway).
That's precisely the problem. I note you didn't answer my points regarding accessibility.
And in anything resembling a "modern" X based stack, X acts as a resource arbitration and compositing mechanism and the desktop environment running on top takes care of the rest - you're attacking X as if it's the whole stack, when in reality, almost no Linux desktop has been "just X + window manager" for a decade or more.
I know this. Well let me bring another player onto the field as well if you want, wow a third completely independent set of settings, great.
Thank heavens. There's a *reason* why most people who have experienced it hates that with a passion.
Um no, there's a *reason* why most people who have experienced the GIMP hates it with a passion, it's because it opens several windows and they spill out all over the place, not being grouped together in any way. The usual answer from the Linux crown - that's what workspaces are for. Pretty much every Windows application I've ever used uses client areas to good effect. I have not heard anyone complain about it. Likewise everyone breathed a sigh of relief when it became normal for web browsers to have tabs, which is almost the same thing only more limited.
It'd not be difficult at all to create an X extension to allow X window managers to reparent lower level windows on request of the clients, but thankfully very few people would be insane enough to try.
Oh I know, I am that insane and I did it with Fluxbox, well I made it so I could nest the windows manually, creating an X extension is rather pointless without applications that use it. I suppose there aren't many people as insane as me, though.
Of course you can make your own. Generally *applications* won't do that as it's not considered the applications place to do it, and there's no *standardized* API across window managers to do it as far as I know, and that's one thing I do miss from the Amiga. But adding more workspaces is a couple of button presses away on most Linux distro's.
Precisely my point. If you want another workspace you have to make it yourself. "A couple of button presses away" is really "changing your window manager settings" which is not something I want to do every time I open another application. I have to go into Settings - System Settings - Workspace Behaviour - then change the number of rows or columns. Yuck.
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Linux with its monolithic kernel seems to be the past. It's nowhere as extensible as AmigaOS was in its first day. Any BSD seems much more evolved and advanced than Linux, at least in extensibility.
What part of Linux exactly is it you think is hard to extend?
The rest of the OS (GNU) is not my cup of tea, starting from the lack of coherence between its parts (core and GUI) and all the heterogeneous and badly integrated apps.
The lack of integration we can agree on - it's one of the things I miss from AmigaOS, as I see the same lack of integration on OS X and Windows.
Linux is slow, no matter what you do. Any AmigaOS flavour runs rings in terms of speed.
That's true, if you can run them on the same hardware. AmigaOS also does far less. Your comparison is like saying a Ferrari will outcompete a tank on speed. Of course it does - it has no armour to drag along, nor a heavy cannon, and it's not built to handle terrain. Great, until you're on a battlefield where someone fires shells at you. The problem is very few users and applications are consistently well behaved, unless you spend a lot of time teaching users by making their machine crash when they make mistakes, and selecting applications by rejecting anything that isn't close enough to perfect.
Users overwhelmingly opted for armour over raw speed and elegance back in the 90's.
It's also true that there are certainly aspects of Linux that could be made faster, or at least *more responsive to user input*. OS X and Windows have the same issues where the OS does not do nearly enough to favour user input and. Part of the problem is simply that hardware is "fast enough" to mask most of the effects, and secondly that Linux users and developers, like Windows and OS X users, have grown up expecting that this is what computers are like, and don't know any better.
All the rest of OSes: OSX, Windows, BeOS... are far more integrated, intuitive and usually faster.
I don't know where you get that idea. I use OS X at work. It regularly freezes up for me - I have to reboot at least once a week (vs "never" for my Linux laptop at home). It's slow. It's bloated. Whenever I have to use Windows, I cringe at how horribly it performs on hardware hundreds of times faster than hardware I used to comfortably use Linux on. The only machine I regularly use that performs well runs Ubuntu.
These days Linux sometimes even beat Windows on games performance, which has traditionally been a problem due to generally lagging in 3D driver support.
AmigaOS flavours are already enjoyable out of the box, these are already fast, no need to waste hours tweaking them like Linux.
Are you serious? I spent hundreds of hours tweaking my Amiga systems back in the day, and by modern standards what I ended up with was still primitive compared to what I get out of the box with Linux. I still love Amiga, and the overall feel is still great, but a bare bones AmigaOS system is extremely primitive.
Amigans enjoy tweaking their systems but it's not mandatory at all.
Perhaps not mandatory, but I would be unable to use one productively for more than five minutes without tweaking it.
Android apps suddenly die and leave your phone frozen and you have to reboot it. It's funny because Android devices are the perfect example of Linux: these require incredible high amounts of resources to do stuff that would work much better on AmigaOS. And memory protected or not Android apps crash and slow down your phone so much that you have to reboot it. I have to reboot phones with "memory protection" much more often than I have to reboot AmigaOS flavours just for the simple fact that Linux is coded like memory was infinite and never exhausted.
How often do you think what crashed was the Linux kernel as opposed to the Android framework on top? This is like complaining that application X crashed, so Windows is ****.
My bet is the crash is caused by the higher level frameworks 99.999% of the time, given that I have Linux boxes at work that regularly handle far more crap than any of us throw at our phones for 5+ *years* without crashing (or rebooting) a single time. With the right software you can even upgrade the running kernel without rebooting.
Linux is also not coded like memory is infinite and never exhausted, either. It offers fine grained control. You can choose whether or not to use swap (try that on OS X, and you'll see "fun" stuff happen - I tried recently and soon had the kernel use 100% CPU). You can switch off overcommit (in which case applications will get errors when trying to allocate too much, just like on AmigaOS). And if you don't, and the system runs out of memory, the kernel will kill processes for you to reclaim sufficient memory to ensure the system as a whole can keep running.
Regardless of these settings, the Linux *kernel* will not crash because you run out of memory. It will kill applications if necessary in order to keep as much as possible running, and it is very good at it. It may become unresponsive for ages if there's much swap space and applications are poorly written, but the kernel will survive and the system will pretty much always be able to recover even in the face of the most brutally abusively written application (in terms of memory allocations)
That said, I don't like the default choices (and I don't like them on Windows or OS X either), but the irony is that the reason I don't like them today is that I rarely run into memory limits, and so it is almost always a failure situation when I run out of memory to the extent that I now finally do prefer the Amiga-way of forcing applications to deal with failing memory allocations.
Most of stuff that comes with these OSes that take gigabytes of space is rubbish or are 14 outdated GUIs for a cli tool that got recently updated and crashes and burns.
None of which you *need* if you don't want to. If you don't want a wide selection built in, get a minimal distro and you get one that fits in a few MB. Most Linux users see this as a *feature*: Start the installer, pick the package subsets you want, and have almost every piece of software you want already installed when you're done. But you're not forced to do that. Conversely, I have built Linux installs for embedded devices with 4MB of total storage - it's not hard.
All in all: when Linux crashes and burns you always end up having to edit weird config files located at random paths, instead of having a GUI emergency boot that boots with basic VGA modes and 640x480 I guess it's much more intuitive for these bearded kernel hackers.
This is ca. a decade out of date for most situations. Or you've tried a distro aimed at hardcore users.
I don't even remember where the X config is on my Ubuntu machine, as I've never had a reason to look at it.
If I wanted to run all that GNU apps I would run them on a unix environment (but a more modern one that use microkernel, not a monolithicly obsolete one like Linux).
Monolithic kernels are so 70s...
Which "modern unix environment" is it you have in mind? If you're thinking OS X, think again. While Mach (that OS X's Darwin kernel is based on) did eventually evolve into a microkernel system, the Mach version OS X is based on is not.
You could run it on Hurd. Say Debian/Hurd (Debian is mainly a Linux distro, but they ship experimental versions using a Hurd kernel, as well as a FreeBSD version).
But as it stands, in almost every respect, Linux is the most modern unix environment out there, and most of the "real" Unix versions have pretty much died off as Linux has become pretty much the standard. For good reasons. The only real alternative with an actual Unix license is Solaris and derivatives (OpenSolaris, Illumos, SmartOS), but these are almost exclusively used on servers.
Or, I guess, you could run it on Linux/L4 - a Linux version that runs parts of the Linux kernel on top of the L4 nano-kernel. It's even more buzzwords compliant than a microkernel, and has some intriguing properties. In fact, using Linux to kickstart micro-, nano- and exo-kernel projects is pretty much its own research field these days, because Linux provides a huge array of device drivers and a lot of other useful code (like filesystems), so many microkernel (take it to include nano- and exo-kernels) projects use parts of Linux to bootstrap their systems, and so there's a number of solutions for "wrapping" various parts of the Linux kernel, such as network or filesystem drivers to let them run on foreign kernels, or simply run the entire Linux kernel on top of the research-kernel du jour.
It's also worth considering that while the Linux kernel is monolithic, it is not much more monolithic than AmigaOS is: That is, the entire kernel runs in the same address space, without kernel-threads being protected against each other. But at the same time, you can load and unload kernel models with the same ease as you can load libraries and device drivers on AmigaOS (or most other modern OS's). It is not monolithic in the "old" sense of a kernel built as a single unit. Linux has done that since the 90's. The core of the Linux kernel - the bits that absolutely must be built into a single unit - is tiny (it'd fit nicely in a later kickstart ROM...).
There are lots of things about the Linux kernel design I don't like, but it is also nothing like a 70's kernel. There are sources for both available - why don't you take a look.
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I don't know what you are talking about here. I have absolutely NEVER heard of client software running through a client-side window manager. How would that even work? Every time you ran software on a different client you'd have to start another window manager on it. And then every window might look and behave differently, which would be insane!
I am running out of the office now, so I can't reply to rest right now, but what you describe is simply not how X window managers work. X Window Managers connect to the X *Server* like another client, and use special commands. Clients connect to the X *Server* as well. Your client doesn't even need to know that a window manager is running.
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I am running out of the office now, so I can't reply to rest right now, but what you describe is simply not how X window managers work. X Window Managers connect to the X *Server* like another client, and use special commands. Clients connect to the X *Server* as well. Your client doesn't even need to know that a window manager is running.
That's exactly what I'm saying. The window manager connects to the X server. It doesn't communicate with the other clients (i.e. your applications) that use the GUI toolkits. So there is a barrier there between the toolkit and the window manager and there is no way to ensure consistency between them. Your client apps can't know anything about the window manager's settings and your window manager can't know anything about your GUI tookit's settings, unless they do happen to run on the same machine and have been programmed specially to get on with each other, but there is no guarantee of that. X windows makes no distinction regarding exactly where, physically, a client program is running, which is part of the beauty of it. The problem is that it does so in such a dumb way.
Wayland integrates the window manager with the X server. What I'm suggesting is really needed, is to integrate the toolkit with the window manager. Which currently would be very difficult to do, because X only has the concept of a top level window, and nothing else.
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I am running out of the office now, so I can't reply to rest right now...
vidarh I commend you on taking the time and effort to debunk so many of the misconceptions and assumptions regarding linux. I think we are all here because we have a love for the Amiga i cant help but feel that some of us are seeing things through rose coloured spectacles. Im honestly surprised at the animosity towards Linux here. When i first discovered it it seemed to be a natural fit with my amiga background. I wonder how things might have panned out should Amiga had continued with plans to adopt the linux kernel as the basis for a future amiga http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/linuxchoice.html (http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/linuxchoice.html).
All operating systems have their flaws - for me I think the Linux audio subsystem could do with an overhaul , or at least some of the userspace tools could do with improvement. JACK for example is a bit of an artform to get set up right. Still - that doesnt stop me using it for music production with Renoise. https://soundcloud.com/polyp (http://soundcloud.com/polyp) (Renoise is totally what Octamed / Soundstudio should have become ...).
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I don't know who "they" refers to in this case. I'm not aware of anyone touting "Linux" as a user-friendly desktop OS. That's what Ubuntu and its variants try to aim for, but that's just the aim of that particular (relatively new) distribution.
"They" are the advocates, the zealots, the people that insist on flogging what is a basically serviceable server OS with a tacked-on graphical environment and a bunch of software with shoddy UI design as the Cure for All Ills in modern computing and the One True Windows-Slayer.
(As for Ubuntu, it's a prime example of the "user-friendly = idiot-oriented" philosophy in dumbed-down UI, though I have seen worse offenders. But even Ubuntu still has that insane Linux complexity under the surface, just waiting for a chance to break out.)
Somewhere in this thread someone noted that Android was "well regarded" yet later on claimed that Linux was no good due to various desktop / user interface issues. On one hand accepting that Linux is just a kernel and on the other citing Linux is both kernel and userland stuff - depending on which argument it serves most best at the time.
Let me clarify: I acknowledge that the Linux kernel is a distinct entity, separate from the userland. The reason I don't accept this as an argument for Linux-the-OS is because a kernel is not an OS. It's the core component of an OS, but it isn't one all by itself. Linux-the-kernel may be excellent (though I tend to side with Crumb myself,) but Linux-the-kernel is not what Linux zealots are pushing. They're pushing Linux-the-OS, which adds to the kernel a userland made up of forty years worth of cruft and kludge that has accumulated in trying to build an OS made for timesharing to terminals on mainframes into a modern desktop OS, with stops on every point in between.
Which is basically the reason Android is well-regarded: it ditches that forty years of cruft pretty much altogether, and replaces it with something more modern (as they did with Java as the official language, keeping the reasonable language/syntax and ditching the monstrous Java library and bloated runtime.) That's why I don't accept "people like Android, therefore people like Linux": it may use Linux-the-kernel, but it is not Linux-the-OS.
(And when the best thing you can do to get people to like your OS is to throw out everything but the very core, I think that says something.)
It can't possibly be worse than their old shell, and it certainly is an *improvement*, but to a large extent they have missed the point. There's been *numerous* attempts of doing similar shells with types streams and rich meta-data embedded on the Unix side, and all of them have stranded on a few very important things:
I'm not an advocate for object-oriented shells, but I would note that the failure of them on Unix doesn't necessarily prove much other than that Unix isn't well-suited to an object-oriented approach - which isn't exactly a surprise. (Of course, neither is Windows, so there you go.) It would be more informative to try such things on a system whose architecture incorporates object-oriented philosophy in a meaningful way...
Have you actually *used* those systems you compare X to?
Yes.
Unlike Windows or OS X, no single authority gets to choose what we use. The Gnome project, for example, exists because a bunch of people didn't like what the KDE guys were doing, and built their own thing. XFCE exists because those guys didn't like either Gnome or KDE.
I know that. The fact that multiple organizations independently made a poor choice doesn't make it not a poor choice.
"Worse is better" simply means that delivering 80% now is better than delivering 100% ten years from now. It isn't excuse for not delivering a good product eventually - it is a reason for not overdesigning a system so that you never ship anything until it's obsolete. More should learn from that, given the number of great projects that turn to vapour because people overreach (I'm as guilty as the next one..)
It isn't supposed to be an excuse for not delivering a good product - but it often is used as one in spite of that.
Um no, there's a *reason* why most people who have experienced the GIMP hates it with a passion, it's because it opens several windows and they spill out all over the place, not being grouped together in any way. The usual answer from the Linux crown - that's what workspaces are for.
The irony, of course, being that the GIMP will just throw windows in whatever workspace you happen to be in, not just the workspace you launch it in.
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I wouldn't mind if this thread was locked, as it has become too boring.
The same argument is just repeating itself.
Yes lock the thread.
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I wouldn't mind if this thread was locked, as it has become too boring.
The same argument is just repeating itself.
Yes lock the thread.
Indeed yet another thread with boorish whiners insisting that their world view and their needs are the only valid view and needs, bullying others from the safety of their chair and keyboard who most likely wouldn't last 5 seconds in a real world confrontation before getting their nose broken.
Who would ever have thought it possible? :/
Autism or just plain old Delusions of Grandeur and arrogance? Short man syndrome perhaps?
Place your bets folks......
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What happened here? I tried to catch up on this thread, but decided to do this instead...rip my face off
edit: please make your point without linking to images like that. thanks.
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Eww.. No, it really isn't. Whenever I have to use a Windows box, I am quickly reminded at how much I detest it and feel tied up and limited by the OS instead of empowered by what functionality it makes available to me, and you can still see the heritage of the abominations that were earlier versions of Windows. They can't make Windows into what I described without ripping out large parts of what makes it Windows.
install mingw + msys, no ripping required.
Windows aimed for that explicitly in the first case, so things that came so naturally to Linux with its Unix roots, such as the multi-user network based environment, in Windows seems kind of tacked on as an afterthought. Which of course it is.
Windows NT was a new OS written from scratch with multi user networking, started in 1989 and released in 1993. It was never tacked onto anything. The Security in Windows and Active Directory is way better than anything designed for Linux.
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"People are saying things I don't like! Clearly this thread needs to be locked!"
Indeed yet another thread with boorish whiners insisting that their world view and their needs are the only valid view and needs, bullying others from the safety of their chair and keyboard who most likely wouldn't last 5 seconds in a real world confrontation before getting their nose broken.
I'd like to know what someone's capability in physical combat has to do with an argument over the merits of a particular operating system and/or its similarity to a different operating system. But you know what? I don't really care. You're welcome to come to my house and try beating me up. (PM me and I'll give you my address, Internet Tough Guy.) You'll probably even succeed, because hell, I've never claimed any kind of physical prowess. But it won't make a damn bit of difference. You might be fully capable of besting me physically, but you're still a thin-skinned thug who thinks that violence is an appropriate retort to a verbal disagreement.
Autism or just plain old Delusions of Grandeur and arrogance? Short man syndrome perhaps?
For someone who claims to be the father of an autistic child, you sure do like to throw around the 'tard label. Have some class, will you?
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I'd like to know what someone's capability in physical combat has to do with an argument over the merits of a particular operating system and/or its similarity to a different operating system. But you know what? I don't really care. You're welcome to come to my house and try beating me up. (PM me and I'll give you my address, Internet Tough Guy.) You'll probably even succeed, because hell, I've never claimed any kind of physical prowess. But it won't make a damn bit of difference. You might be fully capable of besting me physically, but you're still a thin-skinned thug who thinks that violence is an appropriate retort to a verbal disagreement.
Who said anything about beating you up? I merely stated that there are people posting in this thread who if they spoke like that and aggressively tried to force their views on others in the real world they would likely be met with violence at some point in their life.
It seems some people are unable to accept that the views and preferences of others are just as valid as their own and resort to insults and threatening behaviour.
The word for such people is 'bully' and bullies by their very nature are pathetic cowards.
For someone who claims to be the father of an autistic child, you sure do like to throw around the 'tard label. Have some class, will you?
If the people who are unable to accept others views as being just as valid as their own then they are either autistic and therefore their behaviour is understandable or they are just a tw@.
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@thread
things are getting a little heated. as a gentle reminder personal attacks are against the TOS of the site. if you feel the need to do that sort of thing, at least take to PM instead.
thread locked while folks cool off.
edit: thread now reopened. please keep it friendly or the thread will be locked for good. thanks. :)
-- eliyahu
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Smells like 4chan in here now....
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Who said anything about beating you up? I merely stated that there are people posting in this thread who if they spoke like that and aggressively tried to force their views on others in the real world they would likely be met with violence at some point in their life.
So arguing about a topic equals "trying to force [your] views on" someone? Come on. It's not like anybody's strapped anybody into a Clockwork Orange chair here.
If you can't stand people arguing so much, I'm not sure why you're even in this thread. What were you expecting to find?
It seems some people are unable to accept that the views and preferences of others are just as valid as their own and resort to insults and threatening behaviour.
The word for such people is 'bully' and bullies by their very nature are pathetic cowards.
First off, who has been threatening, or even insulting? You're the only person in this thread who's said anything that could be construed as a threat.
Second, are you seriously going to pull out the "everybody is right, nobody's opinion is invalid" claptrap? Seriously? For starters, it becomes literally impossible for everybody's opinion to be valid when people are holding opposing positions. Additionally, if that were true, there would be zero point in having a discussion about it, so again I'm not sure why you're even in this thread.
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"They" are the advocates, the zealots, the people that insist on flogging what is a basically serviceable server OS with a tacked-on graphical environment and a bunch of software with shoddy UI design as the Cure for All Ills in modern computing and the One True Windows-Slayer.
Seriously commodorejohn, in which century are you living ?
I use Linux as my main OS but don't feel the need to argue to other people they should switch to Linux; like all other Linux users I know. This time has long passed.
In this day and age the best place to find a zealot is in the world where everything starts with a 'i'.
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It seems some people are unable to accept that the views and preferences of others are just as valid as their own and resort to insults and threatening behaviour.
The word for such people is 'bully' and bullies by their very nature are pathetic cowards.
Yeah, I'm fed up with the Linux bullies.
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I use Linux as my main OS but don't feel the need to argue to other people they should switch to Linux;
Perhaps you don't, but trust me - there are plenty of Linux fanbois out there who don't understand how someone could actually run Windows and are very vocal about it.
As for the iFanbois, there is at least an equal number of Android-fanbois.
I guess the camp YOU'RE in is always the rational one.
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Seriously commodorejohn, in which century are you living ?
I use Linux as my main OS but don't feel the need to argue to other people they should switch to Linux; like all other Linux users I know. This time has long passed.
In this day and age the best place to find a zealot is in the world where everything starts with a 'i'.
If you don't, that's great. You are totally exempted from any statements about such people - and thank you for not being one of them.
Unfortunately, while they may be less numerous than they were ten years ago, when every neckbeard in the community college would talk your ear off about "GNU/Linux," they still definitely exist; you only have to look around at communities for other alternative OSes (Haiku, for example,) where they constantly argue that FooOS should be more like Linux (because, obviously, Linux is the perfect end-point on the Lamarckian evolutionary ladder of OS development, because reasons,) or that FooOS is pointless and everybody working on it should just devote all their efforts to Linux, or whatever.
It'd be pretty damn nice if their time really had passed, frankly.
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I don't believe you are on the Autistic Spectrum John as you don't demonstrate the associated cogntive abilities.
You appear to be an ill-mannered angry little boy who gives off the impression that he believes the world revolves around him. I'm not alone in observing this, I'm just the only one willing to say it in public because I have a loud mouth.
For the record I developed Windows software professionally for 15yrs, along with AS/400, HP-UX, Xenix, MS-DOS, Oracle RDBMS, MS/SQL, Informix, BTrieve and an Israeli post-4GL you've never heard of.
I hold a Post Graduate Certificate in Education that enables me to teach Computer Science at Degree Level, so what makes you believe that your opinions (that you repeatedly state as irrefutable fact) are more informed than mine or any of the other even more highly educated CS professionals that have posted in this thread?
You don't like Linux, the GNU userland nor X11 and its myriad window managers and toolkits, WE GET IT.
Now please give it a friggin rest.
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Now please give it a friggin rest.
i couldn't have said it better. guys, this thread has really started to head down hill, so let's cut our losses before we reach bottom. :griping:
thread locked.
-- eliyahu