Where Do We Draw The Line?

[PMC]

It's been difficult using AmiagOS primarily for fifteen years, before using WindowsXP and finally going back to AmigaOS again now that WinUAE is working satisfactorily.

There are things about XP I like, the task manager being one as killing an unstable program without having to reboot your system is a luxury.  Multi-user support too is welcome, as is the way that XP treats media files and pictures (ie showing them as thumbnails in directorys).  

And then I think of all the things that frustrate, like slow boot times, the spyware issues and MS's obsessive need to be the biggest name, if not necessarily the best quality...

If you flip between my PC and Amiga desktops, you notice similarities, but that's because I like to tweak my desktop a certain way, with certain colours.  

I love the way that Amiga's OS is so damn configurable, the way that Visual Prefs and Birdie seem to produce stunning results with little or no CPU overhead (which let's face it is critical on the vast majority of our systems).  I have spent hours tweaking the GUI to a fine degree and am mostly pleased with the results.

If only I could remember how to get Birdie to work!  

The problem with the above is that it isn't integrated into the Amiga's actual OS.  It would be nice if it were, as we'd all have destop eye candy to rival anything else out there, but the downside is that fiddling is required to get Birdie to work, to make sure the palette in Visual Prefs is locked etc.  So many times I've got the colours spot on, only to save my preferences and be greeted with Magenta window borders.  

[PMC]

Yeah, I too fell in love with the Amiga way of doing things...  It started out in 1990 with the smug feeling that I could out-do expensive machines costing four times as much with my humble A500 and I never tired of watching vector bobs bouncing around my screen or playing the latest all dancing shoot emp up with all the bells and whistles.

By the mid-90's it was solely about sticking to a platform I knew and loved that would be resurrected one day.  Nostalgia for the good old days dictated my decision to stick with the platform.

By the turn of the century I'd just grown used to the Amiga way of doing things, and although my PS2 and PC play games with nicer eye candy, my Amiga boots straight into OS3.9 in a very short time compared even with XP.  On UAE it's faster still (less than 10 seconds!), demonstrating the fundamental appeal of the OS.  

I'm a terrible "fettler".  Before I ride my MTB I can usually be found by the trailside with shock pumps and calculating "sag" settings for the suspension in my head before endlessly tweaking the rebound, compression and preload of my bike's front and rear shocks, before altering the height of the saddle etc.  It doesn't actually make me any faster (am embarrassingly slow as a matter of fact), nor can I clear jumps any higher but I have to feel comfortably "dialled-in" with the bike.  And I'm exactly the same with my Amiga.  I will spend endless minutes tweaking the GUI, messing about with scripts, stack settings (thank you StackAttack!), startup-sequences and MUI preferences.  But do I actually achieve more on the Amiga than I do my XP box?  No.

Most people can't be arsed with all that, they want an OS that works reliably, runs what the hell they like and will play media files.  If they feel like it, they'll upload a new desktop image but that's about it.  

Thankfully, AmigaOS can do the above too - provided someone like me hasn't come along and "optimised" a few things...