Amiga Workbench advantages over other OSes

[AmiGR]

Use or Save: unlike other operating systems, you can use current settings without saving them permanently or save them instantly and permanently - without waiting for "shutdown" for it to actually save (forget the Windows Apply/OK - both buttons do exactly the same thing - save at shutdown!)

Eh? Neither OK nor Apply do "save at shutdown" on Windows. Ok saves the settings while Apply, er, applies them until you close the preferences window or save them.

Windows not moved off screen: prevents "lost" windows, don't have to carefully move windows to avoid them being half off screen

Annoying as hell, especially at lower resolution screens. Can be patched on 3.1, it's already possible on OS4 and MorphOS.

Help key: yes this is hardware, not OS - but still, why does everybody else have F1 for Help? It seems pretty lame to me. (yes I know, for historical compatibility)

The Help key is an Apple thing, actually.

Multiple screens: each application can have its own screen with different resolution/depth and fast flipping/dragging between them

Apart from screen dragging, this is possible on every major operating system, INCLUDING Windows.

Leave out: icons can be left out on desktop without making a "shortcut"

It's not really much different from shortcuts. You just store the filename in a file and Workbench leaves it out.

Assigns: assign token to shorten long paths

You can make symbolic links on any UNIX-like system.

No virtual memory: turn off computer instead of annoying shutdown (no constant HD swapping)

This is not a feature, it's a downside, there's a good reason for virtual memory to be there, even though the Windows swapper sucks and sometimes never recovers from low-memory situations.
Virtual memory allows the application developer to load data that is by far larger than the available memory. If there IS available RAM, they will stay there, else they will be swapped out, to be loaded on demand. This is just ONE use of virtual memory, it has many. Do you like how the Amiga runs out of useful memory very very quickly, as it gets so fragmented that you can have 64MB of RAM free and 50kb largest available block? This can be fixed with VM, as the address space available isn't just the physical RAM space.

[AmiGR]

One small, but very practical feature is, that you can emulate a mouse using the keyboard. I'd love to be able to do that in Windows!

You can, enable it in the Accessibility options.

[AmiGR]

Also, a feature of WorkBench 3.1 was smart window refresh! amazing, when a window with text is displayed UNDER another window, it smart refreshes all text in that window!

SmartRefresh may appear smoother but it's slower.
Also, it's obsolete on OSes that draw stuff as 3D surfaces, OSX, (hasta la)Vista, XGL, etc.

[AmiGR]

4-(amigaos shutdown is faster) ?
I never shutdown my computer using windows buttons...that's is for lamer users
also I have disabled scandisk or checkdisk to not work after a bad shutdown
I see that lamer windows users still don't know that

Nice... 1337 user... I've seen so many Windows installations get trashed because of bad shutdowns that I wouldn't advise that at all...

[AmiGR]

This reminds me of another "Amiga advantage": open files can be copied. In Windows if a file is open, it is locked and can't be copied.

It can be copied on both Amiga and Windows. Can't be deleted/moved on either.

[AmiGR]

Sorry, yes, I just don't think that files locked for writing should be readable by anything else at all (>>corrupted data).

BTW, I have tried turning swapping off in Windows. It does not make them unstable, you just run out of memory WAAAAY too quickly.

[AmiGR]

Believe me, I've spent a lot of time testing this so I know what I'm talking about here. Do a test for yourself. Open a Windows setting (Windows background for example). Make a change and click "Apply". Now click "Cancel". It should revert back to original because you clicked "Cancel" right? Wrong - but that's OK because it shouldn't have saved right? Wrong! It is saved (reboot Windows to find out). Clicking "OK" does EXACTLY the same thing - it only prevents you from having to click "Cancel" to exit the settings window.

Weird, either it worked differently on older versions of Windows or I was under some illusion. :-P

Now for "saving at shutdown" - how do I know this? Test like this: make a settings change and click "OK". It should be saved right away if it doesn't save at shutdown right? Now turn off Windows or have a crash or something to prevent shutdown from occurring. When Windows starts again you'll find that your setting change is not there.

Ah, that's what you meant. Well, that's normal, settings are generally saved on shutdown for a few, very good, reasons. First of all, the system is not supposed to be turned off without a shutdown. Secondly, if a crash was caused by a certain setting, it will be reset to it's previous state. From the user's point of view, it saves it instantly, the user shouldn't turn the machine off without a shutdown.