Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: ciVic on June 29, 2014, 10:51:47 AM
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I find it hard to believe that really everyone wants this flat colorful GUI of modern OS, so I would like to ask everybody: What is your favorite GUI design?
I'm sorry that iOS, Android, MorphOS, etc is not listed but only 10 options are possible. So "Others" especially includes mobile OS.
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(http://www.1msry.com/wp-content/uploads/13.gif)
My vote is on Mac OS Classic, more specifically System 7. The simplicity and elegance of the GUI elements, along with the great bitmap fonts and icons made by Susan Kare are just perfect together. OS X is ugly by comparison.
Among Amiga systems my vote is on AmigaOS 3.x with MagicWB and MUI.
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From Amiga flavours I find MorphOS beautiful if you consider out of the box look. AmigaOS or AROS not so much but Birdie themed AmigaOS is very beautiful.
From other platforms OS X is cute. Windows 95 theme is functional but dated.
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(http://www.1msry.com/wp-content/uploads/13.gif)
My vote is on Mac OS Classic, more specifically System 7. The simplicity and elegance of the GUI elements, along with the great bitmap fonts and icons made by Susan Kare are just perfect together. OS X is ugly by comparison.
That background image doesnt fit with with MacOS Classic theme.
Among Amiga systems my vote is on AmigaOS 3.x with MagicWB and MUI.
Oh yes, 8 colour MagicWB/MUI is beautiful. But only in 8 colours. Add more colours and it does not work anymore.
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(http://www.1msry.com/wp-content/uploads/13.gif)
My vote is on Mac OS Classic, more specifically System 7. The simplicity and elegance of the GUI elements, along with the great bitmap fonts and icons made by Susan Kare are just perfect together. OS X is ugly by comparison.
Among Amiga systems my vote is on AmigaOS 3.x with MagicWB and MUI.
hard t decide but i think i would agree here on all points. even tough i dont like macs..
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Oh yes, 8 colour MagicWB/MUI is beautiful. But only in 8 colours. Add more colours and it does not work anymore.
Have you tried fullpalette? mine works just fine.
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I prefer the look of OS3.9 over Windows 8, can't comment on OS X as I haven't used a Mac since 7.5
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Ambient should have been offered as a choice as, in my opinion, its the best looking Amiga GUI.
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I've never been a fan of the MacOS Classic look, it's just too stripey. Having said that, I don't like the look of the old blue/orange Amiga Workbench either. AmigaOS4 or MorphOS on the other hand I like very much and our classic Amiga Workbench with a few tweaks (MUI, Budgie etc.) is customisable enough to get pretty much anyone something they can be happy with.... and I just love glow icons.
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I have three:
Windows 95
OS 3.1
LXDE
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btw you could group win7, vista and windows xp together they are quite similar.
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Bleh. Too many options for Windows.
I would have voted for OS4 but that's mainly because the default theme is so close to 3.9 but with gradients on and prettier icons. All of which can be achieved in 3 with a bit of effort. So I voted for 3.x.
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btw you could group win7, vista and windows xp together they are quite similar.
Would do that to be able to add Ambient since it seems more popular as I expected but editing is not possible.
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IRIX Magic Desktop for configurability and graphic effects.
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Have you tried fullpalette? mine works just fine.
What I mean is MagicWB is optimized for 8 colours. Add more colours, like 24-bit background image or toolbar icons, and it does not look right anymore.
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Heh, I can't believe how you can say OSX is beautiful :) I find it butt-ugly with it's 90s grey with dark grey gradients look. I always wonder how they can keep that default look on OSX even today... even when it's that "artistic" Mac :P I can admit that old Mac OS had something in it, but this new.. bleh.. like taking time machine to bulk OS design of 90s.
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Ok, so what is the best looking and most well layed-out OS GUI with customization options enough for everyone? Platform independent?
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Given that I've configured my MorphOS and OS4 systems to largely resemble the OS3.x GUI (and replaced my Windows 7 mouse pointers with OS3.x ones), I think I've got to go with OS3.x :)
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Ok, so what is the best looking and most well layed-out OS GUI with customization options enough for everyone? Platform independent?
Enlightenment is hella pretty.
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Few OS designs have ever come close to the beauty of OS 1.3
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Ok, so what is the best looking and most well layed-out OS GUI with customization options enough for everyone? Platform independent?
I guess MUI4 in MorphOS is quite hard to beat in customization... and usage features of MorphOS are pretty configureable too.
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Enlightenment would be the best looking but not very functional. AmigaOS 3.x with its flat look is appealing but that's more nostalgia.
3.9 with afaos/zune/rtg is amazing. Ambient I can't stand, OS4.1 update 6 gorgeous, feels and looks like a modern OS. 4.0 was terrible.
Windows 8.0/8.1 is good looking too, love the live tiles. Also like the theme updates in 8.1.
Windows Vista felt rushed and not complete. Just look at the half ass loading screen. Win 7 fantastic. Basically how Vista should have been.
I like windows XP in classic look but can't stand the fisher price theme.
Windows 95/98 not a big fan. 3.11 was amazing but that could be nostalgia kicking in again.
BEOS never liked the colors they used.
Of course non GUI wise I would have to rate Linuxs shell with color ansi the best.
There was also a program called gt ripple under Linux that would make the bottom of the screen appear like a pool/wave. Add that to enlightenment drool...
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...Ambient I can't stand, OS4.1 update 6 gorgeous, feels and looks like a modern OS...
WTF? Seriously?:roflmao:
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Many of these OS's have good points (except the Mac - (just don't like them at all) I like Amiga 3.5/3.9, but Window Vista, 7, &, 8 are not bad either.
I don't believe I would call any OS "beautiful" however. Obviously that's just my two cents.
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Enlightenment is hella pretty.
Another vote for Enlightenment! Looks very nice.
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I really like the Amiga classic look with MUI. However since different apps used different looks, workbench, MUI, classact, etc... you we're left with an inconsistent look that broke the feel of the system.
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Another vote for Enlightenment! Looks very nice.
Thanks. Look at IRIX Magic Desktop too - not as flashy, but well designed nonetheless.
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MorphOS with Clara skin.
Simple - elegant.
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MacOS 9 would have to be my favorite, though System 7 is good too. It's one of the few where you can tell they hired real graphic designers to do it up. Something went wrong once NeXT took over at Apple. Rhapsody, NeXT with OS9 window borders looked nice enough. Aqua forward is a real let down with the ugliest window scaling gadget ever made, which doesn't fit the rest of the window look. There are still pure NeXT bits still in there but the Aqua to brushed steel to whatever it is now has never really gel'd or ultimately felt like a cohesive design. It also, even more than modern Windows, wastes vast quantities of pixels on nothing but blank space. They're both the equivalent to those phones with giant number you buy for old people. Still, I like it better than Windows.
(http://jabolkoorg.s3.amazonaws.com/website/images/articles/1033/1033_01.jpg)
(Rhapsody, best of both worlds MacOS + NeXT)
Most Amiga interfaces are hampered by non-uniform scaling issues from wonky, legacy pixel aspect ratios. MorphOS is pretty nice looking and maybe one of the prettiest bitmap interfaces which gives it a throwback quality despite being a modern OS.
Most UNIX UIs, besides maybe Open Look, are just hideous and not terribly useful in any case, post-NEWS IRIX being one of the ugliest and clunkiest ever (NEWS, on pre-Indigo Irises was actually quite nice but the move to an X-Windows based UI killed performance while getting ugly at the same time) since Motif was just awful. UNIX/Linix desktop environments are usually ignored as desktops anyhow and mostly you're determining what sort of bars and gadgets you're going to have on your shell windows.
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Windows 8 has the worst interface of them all.
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Windows 8 has the worst interface of them all.
Post X-Windows IRIX would beg to differ. It was a pile while rendering machines that still had life left in them as useless. Besides their being hitched to a processor series that just couldn't compete for much longer, lack of a good desktop environment was likely a factor in their losing the workstation market in less than ten years.
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@Sean Cunningham
gotta agree with you on the classic mac os. pound for pound it was the most beautiful, well-designed GUI out there. i miss it.
-- eliyahu
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@Sean Cunningham
gotta agree with you on the classic mac os. pound for pound it was the most beautiful, well-designed GUI out there. i miss it.
-- eliyahu
I don't miss how it liked to crash at the drop of a hat but I miss the way it looked and felt. I recently booted up our old Cinewave-HD editor, a dual-1K Quicksilver G4 with OS9 on one of the boot partitions and it was neat seeing it for the first time in nearly ten years. It also showed me just how wasteful modern UIs are of screen real estate. It's so tight and compact.
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(http://www.1msry.com/wp-content/uploads/13.gif)
My vote is on Mac OS Classic, more specifically System 7. The simplicity and elegance of the GUI elements, along with the great bitmap fonts and icons made by Susan Kare are just perfect together. OS X is ugly by comparison.
This, so very very much. Original NEXTStep has a certain elegance to it as well, but classic Mac OS is the only operating system that is beautiful.
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I really like the Amiga classic look with MUI. However since different apps used different looks, workbench, MUI, classact, etc... you we're left with an inconsistent look that broke the feel of the system.
That was the main problem with OS 3.x. It really is a battle to maintain consistency.
I like Mac OS 8 with it brushed aluminium look for its simplicity and consistency.
Currently I run OS 3.9 with Boing Bag 4 and Ken's icons and the Peterk library in CGX:1280x1024:16 bit. Very nice, but I'm forever replacing application default icons with Ken's icons when I can get them
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Amazed that MOS and Ambient didn't make the poll.
MOS with a bare desktop and hidden toolbar is my favorite.... Like the nox skin.
I like MOS to look like MOS, my 3.9 desktop and my MOS desktop look nothing alike.
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Umm Sean Cunningham SGI IRIX was better under XSGI - they fixed what was wrong with X11 while maintaining a minimal compatibility level. I'd call that impressive. Plus its a lot like AmigaOS all in all - but im not gonna debate its merits. Too tired
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After using C=64's, Amigas, Macs, Win 3.1, I thought the NeXT OS was very attractive visually.
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@ Sean Cunningham
I have a few SGI machines laying around, you are right IRIX's GUI should have been improved.
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I remember BEOS being quite nice and consistent and able to imitate the look of MAC or Amiga and a few others right out of the box without hacks :)
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Umm Sean Cunningham SGI IRIX was better under XSGI - they fixed what was wrong with X11 while maintaining a minimal compatibility level. I'd call that impressive. Plus its a lot like AmigaOS all in all - but im not gonna debate its merits. Too tired
Under NeWS the Personal Iris 4D 35TG was perfectly usable in 1992. Simply "upgrading" it to the Motif based, non-Display Postscript GUI as well as additional bloat rendered these machines as doorstops (fuggetaboutit if you had a 4D25), using the same application software. That OS required upgrading to Indigo Elan hardware, at the very least, to feel like you hadn't taken two steps backwards. Their baseline Indigo graphics didn't even work properly with that initial release of the new OS (4.x).
SGI was only able to remain relevant for a few more years after this as a workstation vendor with both Intel and, for a period, DEC on their heals, catching up on speed and kicking their ass on price. It was a sad state of affairs when folks had faster systems on their desks at home than what the company was still likely paying for sitting on desks at work.
Don't even get me started on their garbage toolkit that not only performed bad but looked bad no matter the hardware you were running it on. It should come as no surprise no major applications used it, they mostly went straight at GL. Not from Wavefront, Alias, SESI, TDI, Discrete, etc. Maybe ASDG but their interface was a slug and their I/O even slower and it was tolerated simply because their shape warping was the best implementation that's ever been and once morphing had ceased to be vogue their software was still the best roto tool available for SGI, even though it was slow, because the roto splines in everything else were just that bad.
Under the hood, yeah, IRIX was a solid OS. The GUI sucked since they dumped NeWS though, sorry. Maybe folks in academics never noticed. In CG/VFX animation, it wasn't a pretty time.
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@ Sean Cunningham
I have a few SGI machines laying around, you are right IRIX's GUI should have been improved.
I would actually love, for a personal museum of sorts, to have an SGI 4D 35TG with the last version of IRIX they shipped with NeWS (v3.x) and the last version of Wavefront's The Advanced Visualizer along with SESI's Prisms and Photorealistic Renderman.
Prisms was the package that eventually became Houdini. Great bit of trivia, Mark Elendt was an avid Amiga user and chief architect for Prisms. He had a custom version of the then $20K+ software running on his personal Amiga.
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* 1st - AmigaOS 4
* 2nd - Maemo 5 (on Nokia N900)
* 3rd - Windows 7 (not Win 8 or Win XP)
* Forth place - Windows 2000 (WinXP classic look) and AmigaOS 2.1 with MagicWB
:hat:
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* 1st - AmigaOS 4
* 2nd - Maemo 5 (on Nokia N900)
* 3rd - Windows 7 (not Win 8 or Win XP)
* Forth place - Windows 2000 (WinXP classic look) and AmigaOS 2.1 with MagicWB
:hat:
Ah Maemo 5, the little golden child that was left as an orphan...
Still love my N900, even though I finally bit the bullet and went Android.
I'd have to throw my vote in with Enlightenment as well for the most 'beautiful' GUI. Though yes, the functionality, while solid for what it does have, is missing some key components that are part of what most consider a full desktop solution... then again, so does Windows. :D
As far as simplicity and functionality, my vote would be Gnome-Shell. It really does just stay out of the way and let you do what you want to. The latest versions haven't even had me want to change the default theme, where as the default theme in OSX drives me nuts.
slaapliedje
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MorphOS should be listed here.
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I have a poll to add after this one...
Which OS is more like AmigaOS?
1. BeOS
2. IRIX
3. AmigaOS
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I think my modern OS X desktop looks nicest. After that, in order:
2. MorphOS
3. AmigaOS 4
4. Linux Mint
5. Classic AmigaOS
Not touching any Windows with a 10-foot pole. :D
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I protest... No Microsoft BOB!
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It's a shame the Atari green os wasn't an option...
Anyway my fav experience with any os gui was using Ubuntu 10.10 so that would be gnome 2. I had mine setup with the Shiki colours theme. I was using a dark grey colour scheme with green stripes in the window/title borders. It was beautiful :)
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I have a poll to add after this one...
Which OS is more like AmigaOS?
1. BeOS
2. IRIX
3. AmigaOS
I never used BeOS, though I followed the early BeBox and considered getting one for a while. IRIX was nothing like AmigaOS though.
The Amiga's desktop was actually useful as a desktop environment. The "desktop" aspects of IRIX were mostly ignored and the the UI mostly a means to manage all the command shells you would generally have open. You did everything from command shells. Unlike the Amiga, or any flavor of Mac or Windows you could not actually "run" an IRIX machine from the GUI or really function in that environment. They might be there with the most mainstream "pop" distro of Linux but I seriously doubt you could fully utilize or configure or even adequately launch major third party applications strictly from the desktop without the aid of a "high priest" previously creating the illusion that it was functional in that way.
After adding BSD-like tools to my Amiga, a good shell (CSH/TCSH for me) and various text/shell networking and communications tools I started using my Amiga at home more like how I used my SGI at work, but that's bending AmigaOS to work like just about any AT&T + BSD system rather than the two being inherently alike in any way. It's essentially what I've done to just about every Windows system I've used since working with IRIX though you still have to contend with slashes going the wrong direction under Windows :angry:
At one point I think I even added a shell environment to MacOS 9 and was using some software for a while that made heavy use of TCL. With the change to OSX it meant I could do everything from the shell like I would generally work on an IRIX or Linux system but it, like the Amiga, had a functionally useful desktop environment too.
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I have a poll to add after this one...
Which OS is more like AmigaOS?
1. BeOS
2. IRIX
3. AmigaOS
BeOS is sort of like if you took Windows and UNIX and hybridized it between them. Its very pretty looking but I find the entire system lacking in expandability, the design choices are questionable such as using bash as the only UNIX shell ( I was never able to load ksh or zsh on it ) and generally it seems while its very overall efficient, it has cons in the areas of security and it just feels uncomfortable to use. Its a hard feeling to describe.
In contrast to Sean Cunningham's experiences, I find IRIX to be a good balance of console and GUI work. While I do most configuration from the commandline out of habit, its entirely possible to do from within the GUI. I find the Magic Desktop and CDE to be both well designed and I did not prefer NeWS at all, especially because when I used it was under SunOS on a friend's box with a monochrome monitor. It felt very broken but I guess lack of use on a colour monitor may have skewed my views. XSGI is SGI's proprietary implementation X11 which is multi-threaded and well optimized for the hardware. Out of all the proprietary X11 variants its the least broken and the most suitable for GUI use while retaining the benefits of X11 ( network transparency still works when I used it ). Plus I like Motif toolkit honestly then again my Fuel is a pretty fast SGI so on something slow like an Iris Indigo it may be totally different. In general I feel like I'm on a high end Amiga when I'm on my Fuel. Just no floppies or Guru Meditations to deal with.
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Slow like an Indigo, GTFO. You're comparing two different eras of SGI. The Fuel was introduced after SGI had already lost the workstation market, had been dying for years, a decade after the introduction of Motif and SGI's X-Windows based UI. You're talking about what it is on one of the fastest desktop implementations they eventually built. Assuming it would be possible, it's almost like a theoretical RTG high bit desktop on an A500 compared with a G5 FrankenAmiga.
My take is from actually living through the real implementation of this stuff as it happened, not through the rose colored glasses of vintage computing. I used these when these were contemporary workstations and necessary for real work. SGI 4D to Indigo to Indigo2 to Octane. I had to actually try to get work done during the transition between 3.x and 4.x and there was a marked difference in performance on the same exact hardware between the two, putting aside aesthetic issues. Using a post-21st Century model after multiple generations of proc revisions to pick up the slack and absorb the bloat isn't very convincing to me. I was using machines that worked and could get real work done and then could not, requiring a new, at that time $90K upgrade to the new model to feel pretty much the same as before the new OS came out.
Still. You could not setup or maintain these systems through the GUI or install and run high end software through the GUI. No way. That's what separates a real desktop from playtime with window adornments and icon packages.
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BeOS is sort of like if you took Windows and UNIX and hybridized it between them. Its very pretty looking but I find the entire system lacking in expandability, the design choices are questionable such as using bash as the only UNIX shell ( I was never able to load ksh or zsh on it ) and generally it seems while its very overall efficient, it has cons in the areas of security and it just feels uncomfortable to use. Its a hard feeling to describe.
It was a mistake for BeOS to ever try to mimic Unix - a command shell would've been good, but nothing else about the system matches up with the Unix-like paradigm, right down to the fact that it's fundamentally object-oriented while Unix is a conglomeration of processes communicating through pipes. Just terribly misguided - but I suppose this was when POSIX was the New Hotness that everybody wanted to be in on.
I did not prefer NeWS at all, especially because when I used it was under SunOS on a friend's box with a monochrome monitor. It felt very broken but I guess lack of use on a colour monitor may have skewed my views.
NeWS on a color monitor isn't any better - OpenLook is ugly as hell and it's at least as balky as X on my Ultra 1.
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If someone actually thinks
(http://home.arcor.de/gerhard.lenerz/images/Screenshots/irix-4.0.1-img2.gif)
...is somehow more attractive and elegant than
(http://images.appleinsider.com/leopard-graphics-ui-2.png)
...I dunno. That's just boggling. It's like speaking a different language where "elegant", "bulky", "clunky", etc. all have entirely different meanings in our respective languages.
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Ah. With that context, I'd have to agree. I haven't seen that horrible implementation of Motif before, nor that appreciable look for NeWS. I'd only seen the ugly-ass "everything is ovals and corner brackets!" look that Solaris used for OpenLook:
(http://i.imgur.com/7dA8Kv8.png)
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I never had to use Solaris. Our SysAdmin at Metrolight used a B&W Solaris box (Solbourne I think) to manage everything but I can't say I ever did more than a passing glance at it. But I got about a year's exposure to SGI's implementation of the Sun interface on a variety of 4D hardware and it was simple and elegant and razor sharp.
Applications ignored the baseline UI anyway and always wrote their own, so it was generally just styling for your shell windows and after the first time you sat down in front of one you never ran the demo toys again or giveaway stuff that came bundled. Then IRIX 4.x started to transition in, likely Summer-ish of '92 and everything changed. If you didn't get a machine upgrade to one of the new Indigos you often found yourself working overtime so that you could hop on one after someone else had left for the evening, even though you were using the same software as always and now just felt half as productive after the OS change, because of the bloat.
X11 is a pig, no matter how you dress that pig up. We've just increased resources and computing power to the point that its not as noticeable. The antithesis of the "Amiga way" things should work, in point of fact.
edit: and though I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, another illustration of the difference in performance between pre and post X11 IRIX is the NeWS version, being Display Postscript, could move whole window contents redrawing them as a solid entity, like NeXT (and that was such a high performance windowing system it could do that on a 68K based system, without fancy accelerated graphics). You couldn't do that with an X11 system at the time. Maybe now. I can only imagine the clearly visible fill-rate for an X11 implementation on a 68K based workstation. 68K SGI Irises just booted to a command prompt, no UI at all.
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I see what you mean Sean. Honestly I never leave IRIX or Solaris in its default GUI configuration. Once I get my Fuel upgraded and reOS'd and configured I'll take a screencap of the desktop so you can see how I run them. I don't like 4Sight honestly as it reminds me of NeXTSTEP and I dislike that OS a lot. I also despise OS X so definitely different ideals of beauty
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Windows 8 has the worst interface of them all.
I have to agree with that statement a thousand times over! I don't usually hate anything, but have developed a strong hate relationship with my Win8 laptop (more like portable desktop at 17" LCD and hot i7 CPU, plus dedicated graphics card).
I think that most OS GUI's can be configured to look better or worse than their original state, so this poll is hard to answer. Of the several different OSes I have here, currently I think that MorphOS and MacOSX are my favorites for visual beauty, with AmigaOS3.9 running the AmiKit enhancements as a close 3rd place contender. Any of them can be modified to a point where they could easily switch places with the others, and that is where AmigaOS and other Amiga inspired OSes shine brighter than most other mainstream operating systems.
Some of the Linux distros I have seen over the years have been fairly good looking too, and even WindowsXP and 7 were not bad looking.
It is hard to believe something as ugly as Windows3.1 ever became popular enough to dominate, but then it was not the looks, or even the functionality that drove it's popularity to the top.
Sad that the person setting up this poll did not list all of the different Amiga inspired choices first, before running out of available choices.
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I selected Other.
I could teach a semester as to why but I will try and explain my view briefly herein.
When it comes to GUI not a single OS stands out above the rest. They each have a nicety here and there, and they each fail abysmally at the task of providing a true Graphical USER Interface.
I have seen neat things done in Windows, Mac OS, Mac OS X, Amiga OS, BeOS, NextSTEP, KDE, Gnome, IRIX, Solaris, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone OS. But moreover, the best GUIs I've seen where confined to specific applications, and to further support my view these application GUIs used very little of the native OS GUI.
These applications show us we can have better GUIs, so the only conclusion I can draw is that the OS GUI teams choose not to.
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I see what you mean Sean. Honestly I never leave IRIX or Solaris in its default GUI configuration...
And perhaps 6.x is a lot better. By around 2001 I'd worked on my last IRIX box because the R10K was just too slow anymore. The Quadro and Fire-GL cards in the mostly Intel boxes that replaced SGI at places like ILM, DD, Sony, Disney, Dreamworks, etc. weren't as good as the graphics subsystems available from SGI, not even close, but the days of $90K, $75K, $55K and even $25K workstations were over and SGI just weren't able to keep up in that sector, ironically falling victim to PC technology the same way SGI killed the mini and took a major bite out of mainframe and supercomputer markets not quite 20 years prior.
That's something I don't get, because losing so many customers all at once put them in a major bind there for a while, so much so they had to sell off Alias|Wavefront even though Maya was an industry standard. They should have become a major player in the graphics accelerator market and killed Nvidia and ATI at the professional level, since they never could be bothered to do pro level drivers.
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The best GUI I think is the one which you can customize to most.
Change every aspect of the GUI.
For example adding countless animations to everything ranging from iconifying to resizing your windows or even switching screens.
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About the default GUI looks I like AmigaOS4 the best.
(my MorphOS setup looks also nice after small tuning, slitaz looks nice, same for bodhi. but it seems if I tune Linux looks, I end up in situation where it malfunctions. Amigalike systems seem more robust for "tuning".)
So far there is not any "perfect" for me... so, customizable GUI is best for me.
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I just wondered as we are supposed to be all inclusive here, then seeing as we have 'infected' ourselves with an option in the poll for WinXP, & Vista, & Win v8 of the Microsoft OS's, even old Classic Mac OS & the Mac OS X's GUI, then WHY is MorphOS, which is as Amiga-like as you can get, NOT given a specific item/button to vote on in this current poll?
I tried OS4, I'm not keen on the OS, but the OS looks OK, but is overly expensive as is the hardware, and does not work so well for me and my hardware.
Wheras the GUI of MorphOS looks really great, is customisable, works on a variety of 2nd hand Apple G4 hardware, now affordable, is based on Amiga OS3.1, uses MUI as it's main GUI implementation, has a laptop option - the Powerbook G4, now entirely working wirelessly with support for the Airport Extreme cards, and gets updated every few months it seems, even more often than that on occasions.
So, come on guys, show some support where it's due, and offer MorphOS an option button in this poll, and make it fair ! :lol:
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@Nearly-Right
the original poster didn't include the option, and the polls only allow for ten options. :(
-- eliyahu
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Well that sounds very narrow-minded if MorphOS wasn't considered yet Windows 8 and Mac OS Classic gets an option but not MorphOS.
Needless to say then I won't be voting, and that more than likely goes for many other MorphOS users - if they are being side-lined like this, not very fair of Amiga.org to allow such a narrow minded poll to be run, IMHO. :(
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@Nearly-Right
what on earth are you talking about? :confused:
none of the staff posted the poll, we didn't approve the poll. the OP created the poll; anyone can make a poll -- so can you.
-- eliyahu
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I agree with Karlos, on Amiga Os 3.X, how could anyone vote for a Mac OS, I get nausea just thinking about Mac OS, you really have to be a diseased person to even touch a Mac. I made a mistake once and bought a Mac, lucky thing I had hazardous material training in the Navy and still had my old suit, wouldn't of touched that mini mac any other way. Threw it out in the street once and someone threw it through my truck window, saying how day I throw this junk out in the street. Left it on a street corner saying free for the taking, and someone called the police and said I was contaminating the city, had to take it back in the house. Lucky thing I had my hazard suit or else the police would of made me go to the hospital for a checkup.
My second best GUI is Linux, using Zorin 8.0, looks and feels like windows, but doesn't crash and works. It now takes care of all my important stuff, like how many dollars I have, doesn't have to work to hard in this category though, it always reads 0, LOL.
Have fun and don't contaminate the U.S. don't buy a Mac, Apple, or whatever. Windows is better then Mac's, Windows only crash twice a year, Mac's just die, and at their price, well you know.
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You really shouldn't go off your meds.
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Other. C64 GEOS for me. ;)
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Other. C64 GEOS for me. ;)
Hah-hah, I used this in high school before I got my Amiga. And I had one of those crap thermal printers. When I printed out reports I was essentially giving my teacher "scrolls", lol.
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Just throwing this out there - my various linux desktops win, but that's due to the customizability and the community :)
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btw. I prefer drawers. No folders on Amigas, please. ;-)
@smerf
Zorin 8 looks nice, must try!
(I believe I have many many times suggested some features for Amigalike OS. Now Zorin 8.0 seems to have some of them.
(videos + effects on desktop background, and this http://zosimg.webs.com/lookchanger.png))
hmmm... there was some effects for 68k wb background: http://aminet.net/package/util/wb/wbstars2
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I might as well bring it up again...
An OS use to be a way to get to your programs. Now they hog up 1GB to 10GB of your hard drive. It probably started when MS 'had' to integrate internet explorer into Windows 98.
There is no easy way to turn off default features.
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I might as well bring it up again...
An OS use to be a way to get to your programs. Now they hog up 1GB to 10GB of your hard drive. It probably started when MS 'had' to integrate internet explorer into Windows 98.
There is no easy way to turn off default features.
M$ wanted to make features to sell new OS versions. They did not care to optimize because:
- People did not have any alternative to windows on x86
- RAM+CPU capabilities seemed go up automagically when they release slower than before SW. They even built in things like flight simulators to excel.
- it was normal/ok to force people to buy a new computer in every few years
- support of hundred thousand expansions needed gigabyte of drivers (M$ plug and play wanted all of them on HDD, wether you need it or not)
- etc...
@topic
Ot some point my A2000 looked like this: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qLTDyJicgOA/T_Dx33083II/AAAAAAAAAV0/QQgTGoddwEY/s640/classicamiga_emu02.png
(source: http://amigax1000.blogspot.fi/2012/07/classic-amiga-emulation-on-x1000.html)
But on 1.3, the copper background was even more cool.
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No MorphOS in the options?! Ok well I guess OS4 at a second choice.
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Here some info on Win 8 usage:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/03/windows_7_xp_and_even_vista_gain_market_share_again/ (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/03/windows_7_xp_and_even_vista_gain_market_share_again/)
Windows 8 % 5.93
Windows 8.1 % 6.61
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Here some info on Win 8 usage:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/03/windows_7_xp_and_even_vista_gain_market_share_again/ (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/03/windows_7_xp_and_even_vista_gain_market_share_again/)
Windows 8 % 5.93
Windows 8.1 % 6.61
LOL, pretty clever. They put forward the premise that Win 8.0 has actually declined. I wonder if that might have something to do with moving to 8.1 it being basically a service pack in the old vernacular.
And why so many people on XP not wanting to shift? Arrrrrg Pirates they be.
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And why so many people on XP not wanting to shift?
Maybe because XP lets them use their computer the way they've been using their computer for the last nineteen years and doesn't expect them to alter their entire workflow because Microsoft's design department isn't feeling appreciated enough?
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There's, apparently, folks still using NT.
I never was a fan of XP. I had a nasty situation where after installing a high end Soundblaster the driver would, over a period of less than a day, cause the OS to eat and corrupt itself. I couldn't believe that one.
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XP had a number of significant driver issues early on in its lifespan, but they really did get it together by SP2. It's on the clunky side by now, but it's still quite solid and usable.
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I don't doubt it. But I lost a lot of time and all confidence in that OS so I was glad to be rid of those boxes eventually. I couldn't install anything new without feeling like it was going to get the cancer again. Of course, I'll never buy another product from the makers of the Sound Blaster either. They were totally unhelpful and uninterested once I discovered the problem with my gold plated suppository.
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And in so far as Beauty my favorite skin and theme for XP was the Media Player 11 one.
Glossy black is beautiful.
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And in so far as Beauty my favorite skin and theme for XP was the Media Player 11 one.
Glossy black is beautiful.
That right what wonderful memory. I miss them days. Media player 11 deserves praise. I remember the old media player. It was very gray like with black buttons.
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That right what wonderful memory. I miss them days. Media player 11 deserves praise. I remember the old media player. It was very gray like with black buttons.
Yeah, it's still available for XP, Vista, 7 : http://www.belchfire.net/themes_file-8323.html
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I have always liked OS/2 Warp 3 desktop. Of course I may have fallen down the stars 2 or 3 to many times.
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No MorphOS? Thats because it would win hands down before you added any extra effects.
Don't consider phones etc. as an OS, just a background manager.
Linux, Winblows, Unix and OSX . . . Blah!
Macintosh OS9 is a nice OS, so is Amiga OS but as with most of the good OS's its dated or not updated enough . . .
More the new and modern the more they suck!
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My favorite GUI is that of Amiga OS4.1
followed by Mac OSX Mavericks, than Windows Vista.
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In regards to out of he box, Id have to say MorphOS is the best looking Amiga-oid system.
OS3.9 is nice and clean, but requires a bit of tweaking of things like Reaction, MUI, fonts, etc. before Im happy (disregarding birdie and visual prefs, or afa_os for the moment). OS4 doesnt stray too far , mostly doing the theme creators take on those tweaks.
Overall though pretty much any OS can look similar to any other these days, so its all down to the artist of the themes rather than one system looking better than another.
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It has not been mentioned here yet, but before WinXP was released, when Microsoft was hobbling along with ME, there was another OS/GUI I thought was stunning - SUN Solaris.
Here is a 10 year old screenshot.
(http://lh5.ggpht.com/chandanlog/RubAn8PbemI/AAAAAAAAAlw/jhJUFG50uPc/s400/Screenshot-nevada-shadows.png)
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See, that's nice. I don't know WTF people are thinking saying Motif is anything but the fat, uncoordinated kid at this schindig. 4DWM was born looking old, fat and kludgy by comparison. That actually has appeal.
Which WM is that, BTW? It doesn't look like NeWS, unless their's is just wildly different than 4Sight.
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(duplicate removed)
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After more than 20 years of systems switching / distro hopping etc etc. I would be INCAPABLE of saying what I prefer the most. I tend to find I can get used to anything and when that's the case, my opinion on the other environments change too...
So, at a time I was in love with AOS 3.x, with MorphOS, with BeOS, with OSX ; now I'm rather a Linux guy and I'm quite of fan of KDE (which customizability is similar to what I loved with AOS+MUI)... Also sometimes I love the look of x, y, or z, but end up finding it's unpractical...
So, I couldn't say but if I have to tell what, at one time or another, left me a strong impression I would say :
- end of 80s : Atari GEM / classic MacOS
- early nineties : AmigaOS
- end of nineties : BeOS / GNOME / Afterstep
- beginning of 2000 : MorphOS & OSX
- end of 2000 / now : KDE (Linux)
Edit : ah yes, Ambient/MorphOS was forgotten in the poll ; important choice IMHO :)
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@Iggy
Solaris is a nice OS.
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I voted other. I haven't read most of the thread but when I program in C++, I use wxWidgets because it uses the native gadgets of whatever OS you use. In that way you don't have to choose, you let the end-user decide!
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(http://www.1msry.com/wp-content/uploads/13.gif)
My vote is on Mac OS Classic, more specifically System 7. The simplicity and elegance of the GUI elements, along with the great bitmap fonts and icons made by Susan Kare are just perfect together. OS X is ugly by comparison.
Among Amiga systems my vote is on AmigaOS 3.x with MagicWB and MUI.
Wow, that is really nice, they finally added color, but I notice the folders are still in black and white, that is really nice, I guess someone made a mistake by adding color, it would look way better if you just stayed at black and white, and who knows by keeping it black and white it might be able to keep up with a 4k Vic. Just think of the possible speed improvement.
LOL!!
smerf
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@Iggy
Solaris is a nice OS.
OMG!!! You have to be older than me, if you are using that!!!
Have you tried the TRS80 model One yet, I hear it really out perfoms Solaris.
smerf
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And this is why we can't have nice things.
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OMG!!! You have to be older than me, if you are using that!!!
Have you tried the TRS80 model One yet, I hear it really out perfoms Solaris.
smerf
I think Oracle would disagree with you.
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/solaris/solaris11/overview/index.html
Enjoy your Trash 80, it went out of fashion in the early 1980's.
:)
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I think Oracle would disagree with you.
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/solaris/solaris11/overview/index.html
Enjoy your Trash 80, it went out of fashion in the early 1980's.
:)
I think Smerf was kidding Pyro.
BTW Smerf, I managed an independent Radio Shack in the '80's (and, yes, I'm probably older than most of you).
I think I still have a Color Computer 3 around here somewhere.
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It has not been mentioned here yet, but before WinXP was released, when Microsoft was hobbling along with ME, there was another OS/GUI I thought was stunning - SUN Solaris.
Here is a 10 year old screenshot.
(http://lh5.ggpht.com/chandanlog/RubAn8PbemI/AAAAAAAAAlw/jhJUFG50uPc/s400/Screenshot-nevada-shadows.png)
...and later you probably publicly expressed hatred against WinXP because of its looks? :p
;)
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And like many others, I was completely puzzled why MorphOS (any or all) themes wasn't allowed in this post. It's like the dark ages over at AmigaWorld.net, where MorphOS was discarded as equally Amiga irrelevant as Windows, MacOS or Linux. But then again, here we have all of these (irrelevant) OS's mentioned. But not MorphOS.
:confused:
Several posters in this thread has already put forward many good looking MorphOS GUI's, so I won't bother. Especially not since it's obviously *off topic* in this thread! :rolleyes:
:(
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@tmhg: what does it all matters, knowing how dependable aorg polls always been anyway?
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...and later you probably publicly expressed hatred against WinXP because of its looks? :p
;)
It's very reminiscent of Windows style, it just does it better and cleaner. Most of the Windows-like UIs the difference comes down to whether or not you let software engineers do your graphic design, hire a graphic designer or hire a good graphic designer. Then this gets lots of details better simply by being DPS and not all pixel-y. It's cleaner and has better use of tone.
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(http://www.1msry.com/wp-content/uploads/13.gif)
My vote is on Mac OS Classic, more specifically System 7. The simplicity and elegance of the GUI elements, along with the great bitmap fonts and icons made by Susan Kare are just perfect together. OS X is ugly by comparison.
Among Amiga systems my vote is on AmigaOS 3.x with MagicWB and MUI.
I voted Linux because that's what I use to achieve something similar to this.
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When I get IRIX Magic Desktop configured just as I like it I'll have to post a picture. Its so elegantly simple and free of the stuff that makes OS X and GNU/Linux terrible looking. BSD is also a great OS, but it lacks the elegance. Its like an AKM vs a G3 rifle, the G3 is prettier, but the AKM sees far more use as a military weapon.
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And like many others, I was completely puzzled why MorphOS (any or all) themes wasn't allowed in this post. It's like the dark ages over at AmigaWorld.net, where MorphOS was discarded as equally Amiga irrelevant as Windows, MacOS or Linux. But then again, here we have all of these (irrelevant) OS's mentioned. But not MorphOS.
:confused:
Several posters in this thread has already put forward many good looking MorphOS GUI's, so I won't bother. Especially not since it's obviously *off topic* in this thread! :rolleyes:
:(
If you read the entire thread you would already know the answer to your question. It was the original poster who created this thread and poll who left MorphOS off of the list, and had nothing to do with any of the moderators or owner(s) of this site. Anyone can create their own poll of any type and choose which names to include or exclude from the poll options.
The original poster said that he just ran out of poll slots (only 10 are allowed by the poll system), before he got to including MorphOS. It might have been an unintentional result, or it may have been an intentional insult, but only the original poster would know the answer to that question. I PM'ed him asking that he try to be more considerate of all Amiga and Amiga inspired choices first next time he does anything similar to this poll, so as not to insult any of our forum members.
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When I get IRIX Magic Desktop configured just as I like it I'll have to post a picture. Its so elegantly simple and free of the stuff that makes OS X and GNU/Linux terrible looking. BSD is also a great OS, but it lacks the elegance. Its like an AKM vs a G3 rifle, the G3 is prettier, but the AKM sees far more use as a military weapon.
This I have to see. It must be some real magick in there because 4DWM in base configuration is the dullest, most useless desktop environment I've ever had the displeasure of using. Though, all you're really tweaking at the end of the day is what your shell window is going to look like since no real apps, in my experience, use the OS UI anyhow. If they're not doing their own through GL they'll use a different toolkit like TK (first couple GUIs for Nuke were TK).
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Well I got it the way I like it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but XSGI is an engineering marvel - X11 without the bull, yet mostly compatible with it. Here I show off the standard IRIX console, my desktop, iconifying, mrxvt ( my terminal emulator ), FIrefox and the toolchest. At 1600 x 1200 on Mima, my Octane, I can comfortably browse the internet, check email etc. Which is important right now because my intel box caught a SIGHALTANDCATCHFIRE the other day and decided to burn its CPU up without cutting the power, ruining a $400 computer. Thus Mima is taking over daily driver duties as the Fuel is up for sale and Mima is roughly the same pace, unsurprisingly as the Octane is the pre-Tezro, which was the big brother of the Fuel. 4DWM may not be the prettiest out there, but it sure share's AmigaOS's customizabilty. Its definitely UNIX, but it has a artistic flair. (http://s29.postimg.org/8my3mkdtf/image1.jpg) (http://postimg.org/image/8my3mkdtf/)
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Yeah, that seriously just looks like plain 4DWM to me. It's so bulky and unsophisticated looking, on top of being slow. And there's just no getting around how janky and under-styled all the icons look.
I've got nothing against IRIX, because I totally took to its shell environment as being like a super version of AmigaDOS. In turn, the couple Amigas I had after I started using SGI I tried to make as Unix-like as possible, with BSD-like command additions, etc. and I even chose, at the time, an ISP that presented me with a shell prompt on a SUN with everything console/text based (this was pre-web and then using DNET for multiple shells and AMosaic).
Its only real advantages on the look of Workbench, which is also fairly unsophisticated in its design up to 3.9 (and now with 4.x made of what appears to be styling cues from about a decade ago and not modern at all), is that it's proportional at least and while the text rendering is really poor and ugly, they at least default to a good and readable font, jaggies and all.
edit: I didn't notice at first you scaled down your frame edges. I worked a few shops where they must have had this installed because default install wouldn't let you get that tight. I still went smaller on the top frame, which seemed to help the buttons. Basically being able to scale everything about the UI to like 1/2 or smaller compared to the way it ships helps the window manager look less crude. There's just no helping those icons though. With the icon pack craze that has long existed, with real, working and gifted graphic designers doing totally cool replacement icon packs for other OSes, why couldn't SGI get ahold of some of that if they didn't have anyone internal with any sort of eye?
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Well as I said beautiful is a subjective term. I find 4DWM superior to even more advanced DEs such as GNOME or KDE. Now Lumina is shaping up if you ask me, but its still buggy and has a lot of work ahead of it. Enlightenment is good, but has way too much eye candy at times. I also hate how everything in Enlightenment is cross licensed so it makes it here for a user who prefers to avoid GPL when feasible from trimming dependencies.
And by the way just for kicks I messed around with NeWS on SunOS on my SPARCSTATION 20. All I have to say is its basically a rudimentary version of Quartz or Display PostScript. NeXTSTEP is awful too.
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And trust me, plain 4DWM looks terrible by comparison. I scaled down the widgets,and cleaned up the general configuration. If you don't have experience with the 6.5.22 or above its totally different from the 4 and 5 and even the early 6 series.
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And by the way just for kicks I messed around with NeWS on SunOS on my SPARCSTATION 20. All I have to say is its basically a rudimentary version of Quartz or Display PostScript. NeXTSTEP is awful too.
NeWS on Solaris is horrible; ugly as sin and about the best thing that can be said is that at least it's not as slow as their X implementation.
As for NeXTSTEP, the icon-dock concept has grown on me, but the default "black bars" look is unappealing, and that three-column file manager is just ridiculous. I don't know how they ever expected people to get any serious work done with that.
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I don't mind the iconification of minimized programs. What I do mind is that NeXTSTEP is a proto OS X with just as many issues as the real thing. Golly gee I hate when people call it UNIX when its freaking Mach that is the kernel. I'm sorry but outside of Tru64 UNIX/Mach it sucks.
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And Mach is a Unix kernel. Therefore it is Unix.
Linux isn't Unix. From an end user perspective it doesn't really matter since it walks and talks like that duck, and "Unix", from an end user perspective is more about the BSD tools than much of anything anyway, since you can run any shell on almost anything and the nittier and grittier stuff is only really relevant to IT professionals whose job is to make it work as close to advertised as is humanly possible, and religious software engineers, but NeXT and its flavors called OpenStep and OSX are not NT and it's not even arguable that they're the most successful modern implementation of Unix there is, not only for doing what the Linux crowd still cannot but also for what came to life on NeXT and the NeXT technology that powered a fledgling internet as it gained mainstream and enterprise acceptance.
And trust me, plain 4DWM looks terrible by comparison. I scaled down the widgets,and cleaned up the general configuration. If you don't have experience with the 6.5.22 or above its totally different from the 4 and 5 and even the early 6 series.
But your screenshot only shows an improvement in the right, left and bottom frame borders, making them almost disappear compared to default. The top bar is still generic and unattractive with non-antialiased text. Or do you just not have a picture of this "totally different" 4DWM? Because that's effectively just a slightly anorexic looking version of bland as it ever was 4DWM and icons that go all the way back to pre-4DWM IRIX (which, icons didn't matter then or later since the "desktop" functionality of IRIX was pretty much ignored in the context of how alternatively useful this mode of machine interation is on Mac and Windows). Roll back to the SS I posted just grabbing a 4DWM picture from the net and your's is not appreciably any more attractive, it's just put window borders on a diet.
I looked at the dates and the last version of IRIX I used was earlier 6.5.xx (up to about 6.5.12 or so), because by 1999 they had failed to keep up with Intel and now they were far too expensive for how slow they were. Here we had multi-proc, multi-core Xeon systems becoming affordable and your average SGI workstation at the time was still P3 class performance with a small mortgage or car payment attached.
As much as I was not a fan of NT the absolutely stupidly designed, Xeon-powered 540 was a shot in the arm for productivity for a couple years in 1999 before BoXX and HP and even Dell systems running various grungy flavors of Linux with shoddy gfx drivers took saved us from a Windows future. In 2000 I ended up working freelance at this little boutique and was saddled with an Octane and it was just awful going so backwards, even though it was as upgraded as one could. Except for vector and shading performance the shiny new PowerMac I bought that year felt faster.
Guys drilling for oil, universities, etc. likely still used SGI after 1999 but only facilities locked into server class hardware for Flame and Inferno (or just still paying off workstations nobody wanted anymore) continued to burn money on SGI after the Turn of the Century.
4DWM, by then, could have had hot and cold running Jolt Cola and it wouldn't have mattered because the hardware was so not up to iterative compute intensive tasks any longer and there in the early days of OSX and the beginning of the buzzword for "cluster" computing they didn't have much leg to stand on in massively scalable computing either. And at the end of the day, nothing that's ever been done to 4DWM makes it more attractive than IRIX 3.3 and I call your bluff on them really changing much of anything at all...here:
IRIX 4.0.1
(http://www.sgistuff.net/software/irixintro/images/irix-4.0.1-img1.gif)
IRIX 5.3
(http://www.sgistuff.net/software/irixintro/images/irix-5.3-img1.gif)
IRIX 6.5
(http://www.sgistuff.net/software/irixintro/images/65_games.jpg)
...third verse, same as the first.
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btw you could group win7, vista and windows xp together they are quite similar.
XP & Vista aren't similar, especially out of the box. Windows 7 & Vista maybe.
M$ wanted to make features to sell new OS versions.
How else do you think they'd be able to sell new OS versions?
They did not care to optimize because:
- RAM+CPU capabilities seemed go up automagically when they release slower than before SW.
The same has happened on Linux as well. People want newer flashier things & they need more CPU + RAM.
- it was normal/ok to force people to buy a new computer in every few years
When developing Vista they saw was that computers were doubling in speed every 18 months and people were buying them because games were also doubling in their requirements every 18 months.
Optimising software costs a whole lot more money than not optimising it & Microsoft sell most of their OS licenses with new computers anyway. Vista was a terrible time for Microsoft, like Pentium 4 was for Intel.
However Windows 7 is better than Vista and Windows 8/8.1 are better than Windows 7.
- support of hundred thousand expansions needed gigabyte of drivers (M$ plug and play wanted all of them on HDD, wether you need it or not)
Most people see that as a positive. I'd like to see how many people can cope with downloading the source of a driver for their network card, transferring it to a usb stick, copying it onto Linux, compiling it, re-linking the kernel.
Maybe because XP lets them use their computer the way they've been using their computer for the last nineteen years and doesn't expect them to alter their entire workflow because Microsoft's design department isn't feeling appreciated enough?
You make it sound like a dependency issue. But I like the way you angrily try to blame other people by making stuff up. Maybe this reaction is triggered because you don't feel appreciated enough?
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Has this thread turned to ugliest GUI of them all?
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You make it sound like a dependency issue. But I like the way you angrily try to blame other people by making stuff up. Maybe this reaction is triggered because you don't feel appreciated enough?
I make it sound like a giant freaking hassle, which it is. But I like the way you try to play armchair psychoanalyst and invent more complicated reasons for people being frustrated at Win8 than simply "they just want to actually get stuff done the way they've been getting stuff done for the last nineteen years."
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MorphOS/Haiku
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Honestly thought there would be more screenshot pics in this thread.. :).
Rich
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Honestly thought there would be more screenshot pics in this thread.. :).
Rich
I did, but it seems pointless as we've now seen Solaris attacked as "ugly as sin".
Funny, I thought that was most Linux themes (or MacOS).
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Kickstart 1.4 + dropshadow for me.