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Author Topic: Does Linux have an Amiga feel?  (Read 41436 times)

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Offline Crumb

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Re: Does Linux have an Amiga feel?
« on: July 15, 2013, 02:40:10 PM »
Amithlon: Best Linux Distro Ever.
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Offline Crumb

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Re: Does Linux have an Amiga feel?
« Reply #1 on: July 15, 2013, 10:40:13 PM »
@polyp2000

why not using a directory with drivers and leaving kernel as is? that way you could update easily your OS without worrying much about drivers. I have listened countless times ridiculous stuff like "I'm going to recompile the Linux kernel in order to use the TV*capture card" because hw didn't work even if you copied the damn driver to the driver directory.

I think that having a small kernel and a directories for drivers and libraries would be much more amiga-like, you could update the OS without requiring recompiling all the kernel&drivers. Updating Linux/Android phones could be easier too: you could have a partition named "hal_and_drivers" and all the specific hw stuff there and to upgrade your OS version you could leave that directory as is and simply copy the updated OS to the os/ directory. I don't think it's asking too much. But it seems it is since when you buy an Android phone you have to rely on goodwill of 3rd party kernel recompilers as Google and the phone producer will forget about you in 18 months, Android drivers are so badly planned that they had to change driver format and instead of adding functionality and allowing drivers to report the capabilities they have and allowing older but powerful phones to run latest version of the OS the agreed with phone companies to let their users rot. I hope Ubuntu OS for phones is better, at least I hope it won't require any JITted/interpretted language to work (bad idea for a mobile device IMHO).
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Offline Crumb

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Re: Does Linux have an Amiga feel?
« Reply #2 on: July 16, 2013, 07:29:02 PM »
Quote from: vidarh;740937
It is a bit ridiculous to compare the newest Windows with a 4 year old completely outdated version of Ubuntu.

All linux versions are outdated, they all feel like a 70's OS compared to any AmigaOS flavour



@stefcep2:
Quote from: stefcep2
I've said it before that one of the great tragedies of modern computing is that the open source movement chose to support Linux.
Indeed! All their efforts seem to be splitted between making a monolithic monster for servers and making horrible GUIs unconnected to the real OS that try to mimic badly the worst inventions of Microsoft & Apple
« Last Edit: July 16, 2013, 07:32:53 PM by Crumb »
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Re: Does Linux have an Amiga feel?
« Reply #3 on: July 18, 2013, 11:13:11 AM »
Quote from: vidarh;741000
Frankly, while there are still lots of things I love with AmigaOS and miss in Linux, this is a downright ridiculous statement to make. It takes a *huge* amount of tweaks to AmigaOS to get a system that is anywhere near as usable as most modern Linux distro's, and you'll still have huge holes.


Linux with its monolithic kernel seems to be the past. It's nowhere as extensible as AmigaOS was in its first day. Any BSD seems much more evolved and advanced than Linux, at least in extensibility.

The rest of the OS (GNU) is not my cup of tea, starting from the lack of coherence between its parts (core and GUI) and all the heterogeneous and badly integrated apps.

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Already in '89 or so while using AmigaOS extensively, my system was tweaked beyond recognition to get to the experience I enjoyed, and it was still in most ways substantially inferior to most modern Linux distros.


Linux is slow, no matter what you do. Any AmigaOS flavour runs rings in terms of speed.

All the rest of OSes: OSX, Windows, BeOS... are far more integrated, intuitive and usually faster.

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Invest the same effort in tweaking a Linux distribution now, and you end up with something vastly more polished. And if you like you could end up with something substantially closer to an Amiga experience.


AmigaOS flavours are already enjoyable out of the box, these are already fast, no need to waste hours tweaking them like Linux.

Amigans enjoy tweaking their systems but it's not mandatory at all.

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the pale in comparison to the features that are lacking, such as proper memory protection and full support for virtualization (I have a dozen or so lightweight virtual machines running on my home machine) or full fledged package management.


Android apps suddenly die and leave your phone frozen and you have to reboot it. It's funny because Android devices are the perfect example of Linux: these require incredible high amounts of resources to do stuff that would work much better on AmigaOS. And memory protected or not Android apps crash and slow down your phone so much that you have to reboot it. I have to reboot phones with "memory protection" much more often than I have to reboot AmigaOS flavours just for the simple fact that Linux is coded like memory was infinite and never exhausted.

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I'd love to be able to use a more Amiga-ish OS as my main OS, but before that can happen, either AROS or AmigaOS would need to take a lot *more* stuff from Unix/Linux, or more Amiga-like features would need to be ported to Linux; there's no way I'd be able to go give up all the things I've come to expect in an OS after using Linux.


Most of stuff that comes with these OSes that take gigabytes of space is rubbish or are 14 outdated GUIs for a cli tool that got recently updated and crashes and burns.

All in all: when Linux crashes and burns you always end up having to edit weird config files located at random paths, instead of having a GUI emergency boot that boots with basic VGA modes and 640x480 I guess it's much more intuitive for these bearded kernel hackers.

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(I say *more* stuff would need to be taken from Unix/Linux, because already with the first handful of Fish disks in the 80's we were getting a steady stream of Unix ports)


If I wanted to run all that GNU apps I would run them on a unix environment (but a more modern one that use microkernel, not a monolithicly obsolete one like Linux).

Monolithic kernels are so 70s...
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Re: Does Linux have an Amiga feel?
« Reply #4 on: July 18, 2013, 03:20:28 PM »
I wonder why Android guys decided to choose Linux... any other BSD would have allowed easier upgrading, at least drivers API is more or less standarized. I also wonder why they decided to choose Java since it devours cpu time and memory, causing battery drain. Everyone is using ARM and Google phases out mobile phones pretty fast anyway (due to not choosing a decent kernel for their OS).

The kernel has more or less wide driver support but being monolithic (and not having a proper standard for modular drivers) it's the worst kernel you could choose.The GNU part of the OS is also horrible, unusable outdated 70s style. It's like painting your old car with some modern patterns and claiming it's modern. Some eyecandy won't modernize it, just like some eyecandy suddenly won't modernize Linux 70's design.
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