I am a former WIN now OSX / Linux user looking for quicker OS

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Gee, if OS X is slow on a 700 MHz G4 then I must be missing out on something!  I've found the speend of 10.3 is acceptable on a 1 GHz G4.  Perhaps not stellar, particularly when a few applications are competing for memory, but a lot faster than what I've used in the past (unless you are using a single measure like boot speed, where something like a Mac 128k could boot and load an application in about 15 seconds).

I can see what your talking about though.  From the perspective of disk and memory usage, the current situation is horrendous.  There are several many things which I can do on my old 68k Mac which would start thrashing the G4's hard disk, even though the G4 has about 8 times the memory and I've been impressed with OS X's virtual memory subsystem for the most part.

My main concern is that switching platforms will not solve the problem.  No offence is directed to the Amiga OS or MorphOS development teams (because I have not seen their products), but it seems as though very few programmers have enough pride to develop small and fast code these days.  I also have concerns that too much attention is being placed on the GUI, and too little is being paid to getting real applications on the system.  Who really cares if the GUI is fully configurable if you don't have a reasonably comprehensive web browser and productivity applications running PPC native.

If anybody wants to dispel those concerns, feel free to.  :-)  I would love it if somebody proved me wrong because the current pile of bloatware, which makes a 1 GHz G4 look insignificantly faster than a 68k for most applications, is really turning me off from computers. :pissed:

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DonnyEMU wrote:
I have a friend who has a G4 Mac with this configuration and he still uses MacOS 9 because it's faster than OSX which is crippled if you don't have a lot of memory and a faster processor. His machine just crawls.

It depends upon your machine and what you're doing.  The benefit of Mac OS 9 and earlier is the ability to run with virtual memory turned off (or set so low that you cannot page stuff to disk).  You do not have the ability to do not have this degree of control over Mac OS X, and it wouldn't matter if you did seeming as the software is bloated beyond belief.

It's my humble opinion that on that same G4 (or even a G3) that BeOS and MorphOS, and AmigaOS run faster because they have a smaller footprint.

If your favoured application uses a lot of RAM, almost certainly.  If it is processor bound, any differences would depend upon the compiler.  All of the smaller platforms seem to be using gcc these days, so I doubt the difference would be large.  Though you can obtain IBM C/C++ and Fortran compilers for Mac OS X.  The Mac OS X High Performance Computing page (hpc.sf.net) claims that IBM's compilers offer a 2 times performance gain.  So that leaves you with how efficiently the OS manages hardware.

The reality of today's OS, you need lots of memory and a fast processor.

In the case of Linux and Mac OS X, the memory is the most important part.  And I really wish that wasn't the case because it pretty much means that you are buying new hardware to support the OS.

That's the problem with the PowerPC/G4/G5 value proposition.. The rest of the world knows better about it's performance and speed.

I agree with the "value proposition" bit.  On the other hand, the "rest of the world" knows bugger all about the PowerPC.  Very few people know what the PowerPC is or, if they do, they associate it with the Macintosh.

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Cymric:

In my case, I'm judging the VM on running many smaller applications concurrently in the background.  Clearly this is different from manipulating a 512 MB image in Photoshop on 256 MB of RAM, but it is what I do.  My basis for comparison is Linux, and the comparison tends to be subjective.

Yes, I can tell when I am having problems with the VM subsystem.  If you hear a little too much disk activity, you start looking at vmstat.

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By modern standards, AmigaOS [...] is not 'feature-rich'.

Is this really an issue?  Things like network file sharing are pointless if you don't use it, and you are better off with something like FTP if you don't use it daily.  For my usage patterns, I would rather do without audio and video support in the default install too.  (Of course, you can leave it as an optional component for people who use their computer as a home entertainment system.)

As far as AmigaOS4 is concerned, AmigaOS is lacking software-support wise in some respects.

Is there a list of native software available for Amiga OS 4 and Morphos?

Are these platforms compatible?  (I get the impression that they are going to diverge radically in the future, but that the current implementations are trying to achieve a large degree of compatibility with the Amiga OS 3.x API.)

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Seems to me that you just want a fast booting computer, buy a PDA

Curiously, I had that thought at one point.  I bought one and returned it within a week.  The problem with those critters is lacklustre handwriting recognition.  While it works perfectly in the store, it wasn't suitable for even a mild workload.  The screens are pitifully small too.  And the internet connectivity isn't ideal.

I looked at the software lists for Amiga OS 4 and Pegasos and must say that it was less than impressive.  The problem wasn't so much the lack of software, but what it was.  Games and emulators, while entertaining, are a bit frivilous at this stage of the game — particularly when you have an excellent library of legacy Amiga games to choose from (well, I guess you'll need UAE for some of those games).

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Dan wrote:
OT but did you know that even calculators have boot-times these days on the TI-89,it´s actually long enough to notice.

Now that you mention it, my TI-92+ does take a while to start up.  Oh how I lust for the days of my TI-85.

But you're right.  It seems as though "faster" machines have longer boot times.  I mean, the Macintosh 128 k took about 10 seconds to boot to the Finder (about 15 seconds to boot to an application).  Macs are much slower these days.