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

[koaftder]

It's not fair really, to compare AmigaOS to linux or NT.

I'm on a Windows XP box right now, that I picked up from the bargan bin at circuit city 2 years ago for 400 dollars. It's a 2GHz P4 with 768MB of ram and 80gb of storage. I have three monitors on this machine, 2 monitors at 1280x1024 and one at 1600x1200 all in 32bit color mode.

At any given time i have a dozen instances of firefox, several ssh sessions, excel, codewarrior 9, napster and NSBasic running, along with a dozen or so other apps. I switch between them all day long. Going from any app to another app is instant. My machine gets reset maybe every 2 to 3 months, because of software updates or power glitches. Occasionally firefox goes nuts and eats up all the memory or spirals out of controll, no problem, pop up the task manager and kill it. The system keeps chugging along. I use this system 14 hours a day constantly.

I just plain can't do that with the Amiga. I use my a300 lightly, and it gurus all the time.

Comparing AmigaOS to WindowsXP is like comparing a model T to a honda accord. Sure, they both get you to where you need to go, but the Accord will run for 120,000 miles before anything serious goes wrong.

[koaftder]

The reason your A3000 crashes on you is because, conciously or not, you're probably trying to use the Amiga in the same way you use your wintel box.  If your Amiga had unlimited memory, a faster system bus, and updated chipset all those "queen-size" applications would run much better and more efficiently than on a PC simply because the basic architecture (of the Amiga) is superior.  

I don't use my A3000 like I use my pc because that would be impossible. It has no network interface and no fancy 400 dollar video card. (I have a better chance of meeting Jesus than running into a picasso IV) I sure won't be pimping any mp3s or divx videos on my stock 25MHz a3000. No web browsing, no email, no blender, and no snatching frames from my firewire video camera.

I use it to play games from time to time mostly, and editing text files and screwing around in dpaint. It gurus. Even if you cranked it up to 3GHz added 2gb of ram and a terrabyte of storage, it would still occasionally guru when switching from microemacs to dpaint4.  

Amiga's don't have the brute power that brand new PCs have, but they don't really need it because they get such better mileage from what they do have.  Big windoze applications -- bloated, resource hogs that they are -- run "well" on PCs because of sheer horsepower of the hardware.  They run in spite of XP, not because of it.   I see no elegance whatsoever in Windows, and especially not in Linux.  MacOS doesn't count unless you like the feeling of working in Crayon while simultaenuously being insulted with dumbed-down system nags.  

Every single day on Amiga.org somebody pops up with a question regarding their system that requires some obscure or arcane fix. Patch this, edit these files, goto aminet and preform these 10 steps on the cli and somehow this is all considered elegant.

The following would make the amiga unhappy, but it wouldn't phase linux or NT:

unsigned char * lol = 0 ;
for(int i=0;i<8192;i++){*lol++=0;}

[koaftder]

stopthegop wrote:

unsigned char * lol = 0 ;
for(int i=0;i<8192;i++){*lol++=0;}

Just tried it with the free compiler lcc on my Dell Laptop with XP.  Gave me a blue screen.  Which is why I'm writing this post from Ibrowse on my Amiga..  

You are a liar

[koaftder]

koaftder wrote:

stopthegop wrote:

unsigned char * lol = 0 ;
for(int i=0;i<8192;i++){*lol++=0;}

Just tried it with the free compiler lcc on my Dell Laptop with XP.  Gave me a blue screen.  Which is why I'm writing this post from Ibrowse on my Amiga..  

You are a liar

Better yet, i'll give you $100 if you can demonstrate crashing NT kernel by writing zeros to address 0x00000000 through 0x00002000 from userspace.