About multitasking, what's best : AmigaOS, Linux, or Winblows XP ?

[Agafaster]

Tomas wrote:

ptek wrote:
So, the Amiga is better at multitasking than Linux ?

From how it feels to me, then yes. But i can only talk from a user perspective.

I can quantify that:

try multitasking in a graphical environment, in a low power (by modern standards) system:
AmigaOS: A1200 030 at 25MHz with 8MB ram OS3 (any of em!)
Linux: same setup, but one of the m68k builds, I tried BSD (couldnt get X working) and debian 2.something m68k build.

you will find that linux is dog slow even just running X! ok, thats cheating a smidge, cos I was trying to use X on AGA, but the point, I believe, is made.

[Agafaster]

Is there a perfect multitasking machine on this planet ?

Mainframes do a pretty good job...

and they go all the way back to when they were little more than ZX Spectrums in terms of horsepower/RAM...

the philosophy of mainframes is still there, but now they have terabytes of RAM, and even more disk/tape space.

mind you, they also have multiple processor cores.

[Agafaster]

ptek,
I take your point: Debian is fine on my A1! (800MHz G3 now, instead of 25MHz 68030/68882)
but then, I tend to use Sawfish, and steer well clear of KDE.
OS4 is good too, it seems to allow more time for non-os things than debian does. I will quantify:
Playing non-protected DVDs is smoother in DVPlayer on OS4 than on Xine/mplayer on debian.
(I only ever watch movies on debian if they are WMV, and even then, not all are supported there!)
but that could be any number of things, and not necesarily down to the actual scheduler.

-edit-
its also worth pointing out what they are:
AmigaOS (even version 4) is essentially a single-user single core multitasking system, and debian (indeed any linux) is a multiuser multicore multitasking system.


note: by single/multi core I mean capabilities, not requirements!
linux takes care of every eventuality - dealing with lots of users, lots of sessions, and (potentially) 1-to-lots of cores.