anon123 wrote:
I am a hobby programmer with experience in Linux. I'm interested in alternative O/S's and Amiga caught my eye. I figure if the user-base is so dedicated, there must be something to it. From both a user and developer point of view, what makes Amiga (modern, MorphOS, AROS, OS4 etc.) so good?
It was very ahead of it's times, but it sadly is now starting to lag behind modern systems due to the fact that it has not really been developed since commodore vanished in 94.
So you have to remember that it lacks some essential features like full memory protection, multiuser capability and similar. It does however still have some advantages, like the rad disk, small footprint, pre emptive multitasking, dataypes and so on.
I also like how the libs go into the libs drawer, the executables go into c, drivers going into devs, monitor conf going into monitors, filesystem goes into dosdrivers and so on.. If you need to add a driver or filesystem, you just simply drag and drop it into the appropriate drawer.
Also you can simply install games/software just by dragging the folder over to your hd and then just delete it once you dont want it anymore, which means no need for painful install and uninstall process that often leaves traces.
But remember that it right now is more of a hobby system, and thus cannot really be compared to even linux since it lacks things like a decent browser and features like memory protection. It is however very pleasant to use as long as you keep in mind the current limitations.
