uncharted wrote:
AROS has been in existence for a very long time, and yet it has no momentum. It's been struggling for years. There is clearly more to it than developers being reluctant to be the first to dip their toe in the pool. There is a fundamental question of "Why isn't AROS attractive?"
The reason it's unatractive is because of the haphazard manner of the development, the lack of progress in the nearly a decade of development that it's had, including a chronic lack of drivers and APIs; the fact that for mainstream developers who have no attraction to Amiga there are much more complete and usable OSes out there to develop for and the fact that even if they do contribute it's not very likely the OS will ever achieve any kind of success, mainstream or niche. Any of that sound about right to you?
You can't say "no excuses", it's a person's right to develop what they want. Any argument is valid. That isn't the only argument anyway.
Right, okay, I conceed that.
Even if that is the case, people still aren't doing it. And that is a problem. Like I said, I can't run "could". Someone "could" port Mozilla to AmigaOS 4, that doesn't mean that AmigaOS 4 has a modern browser.
Again conceeded...
Dear lord! You think that this is a good way of encouraging development? Pissing and moaning at people rarely get results.
You seem content to rest the blame for this solely at the feet of the developers. What I’m saying is that there must be more to it than this, you can’t just blame everyone else for your problems, you need to reflect upon it and be pro-active in finding a solution. “Developers don’t support AROS because they suck” isn’t going find a solution.
I think what samuraiCrow was trying to point out with that link is that the Core AROS developers are not interested in changing their current culture. This needs to happen in order for new blood to be enticed into developing for AROS. There doesn’t seem to be any strategy, everything just kind of happens.
Here I must take objection,
I have never spent my time 'pissing and moaning' at developers of anything on any format to implement things I or a community I was part of wanted. You asked me what I could do to fix the situation of the lack of progress, my response was not to be taken that seriously; I merely pointed out the lack of influence of a no-body like myself has on who develops what for minority OSes. As for the developer culture I mentioned that in my first post, I too am critical of the way the development team on AROS works but why the bloody hell should they listen to me? They're not on my bankroll are they? They are free to develop in the manner they wish and I can't force them to change their ways.
Yes you did. You were saying that SamauriCrow was “badmouthing” AROS, and that it was a consequence of this that people won’t develop on it. This is one of the dumbest things I’ve read so far. Whether you like it or not, comparisons with OS4 will be made, and AROS is going to loose out. MorphOS is probably a better example, it’s got available, affordable, hardware and it is again far more advanced and useful than AROS, not to mention it has excellent support from developers.
No I said that it was because of such 'badmouthing', perhaps 'negative publicity' would have been a better choice of words on my part, because of this some who might have had a look at AROS to see if they were interested in developing for it might be scared off from the start. Of course even if they do look at AROS, the state it's in they'd likely run a mile anyway.
Uh, BeOS has been on x86 since the late 90’s, Haiku has nothing to do with it. BeOS’s future is bright because of Zeta.
Allright I will conceed that BeOS was 'safe' on x86 since '98, that can't be argued. But before that they were reliant on Apple for hardware, to the extent that the move to x86 was determined pretty much purely by the decision of Apple not to disclose the architectural info on the G3 Macs coupled with them being turned down as the replacement MacOS, because Apple chose Jobs and his NeXT. As for Haiku having no relation, Haiku is a direct reimplementation of BeOS as open source, ZETA is a project with dubious legality and even more dubious future, nobody really knows if YellowTab even have rights to all the source code they need to make changes in the future.
It was the politest way of describing how incredibly stupid you were being. I can go to the harsher end of the spectrum in future if that makes you more comfortable.
Right, gotcha, feel free to go wild with the expletives and ad hominems if you feel the urge in future.
You don’t seem to fundamentally understand what is meant here. Recompiling doesn’t come into it. The way you tout that word, anyone would think you’re Ben Hermans. Most of the Amiga library is 68K. Worse than that, the majority of it is old closed source stuff that is no longer maintained. Without the ability to run older apps, AOS4 and MOS would be close to AROS in the useful-as-a-chocolate-teapot stakes. Amiga users still rely on 68k stuff.
You assume that this stuff is all easy.
As to the UAE integration, it isn’t an official plan, it’s a bounty. It’s up to a developer to decide to take it on. From what I’ve seen, this isn’t really something the core developers want to do. It seems that they want to keep the emulation separated as an application rather than as an OS feature.
From what is stated in the bounty it still wouldn’t give the same level of integration that AOS/MOS users enjoy. Basically it would be good enough for some people but not acceptable for others.
That bounty isn't necessarily the be all and end all of integration for UAE into AROS, it's as you said just a suggestion. I can see the reasoning behind the developers' reluctance to tackle it, from what I can gather they would see trying to integrate an emulator as being 'backwards looking' and would create the impression that AROS is only good for running outdated Amiga apps on a PC, making it superfluous as that can already be done just with WinUAE. Thing is even I can see that that is pretty much all that AROS is good for at this time.
You seem to be getting hardware and software mixed up. One day your PC will die too. When your A1200 dies you could still use OS 3.x under emulation if you wish, just as if your PC dies you can run XP on a different machine.
Ah, but XP I can run on a different machine should I be masochistic enough to want to install it again that wont change for a good long time, and when XP is no longer supported maybe a decade from now, then I'll allways have the option of Vista, or whatever replaces that. AOS will not run on another computer if my Miggy dies unless I track down another Amiga, which over time will become progressively rarer until eventually they'll all be in the hands of collectors and enthusiasts who don't want to let theirs go - I'd certainly never sell my 1200. Emulation on a Windows/Mac/Linux system will never feel right to me, I'll allways have a voice in the back of my head saying 'this is still just a Windows/Mac/Linux PC'.
Uh okay. Where did I say something stupid in the quote you are replying to? Since when has common sense been stupid?
'You may own a computer for the sole purpose of running an OS, but I don't and neither do most people, we use them to do stuff.'
This was what I was referring to, it's fairly obvious that no one just sits in front of their computer and messes about with the preferences or background picture, why you felt the need to suggest that I used my computer to sit in front of and marvel at my pretty desktop I can only assume you wanted to be antagonistic towards someone you don't know over the internet.
But AROS can’t do any of those things now, and won’t do in the foreseeable future. AmigaOS doesn’t necessarily have ‘decent’ versions of that kind of software, but it does have things that can perform those tasks.
The point is users (including you) aren’t going to run out to download AROS if it doesn’t do what they need it to. It doesn’t do that stuff because no-one outside of the AROS core is developing for it. There must be reasons why people aren’t developing for AROS. Find out why that is, do something to fix that, then things will progress.
This again goes back to many points I have made throughout this post - I have allready layed out what I percieve to be the crippling flaws in AROS and how endusers like myself are pretty much powerless to change what we percieve to be flawed as we cannot 'vote with our wallets' as could be done with a commercial application, nor can we cut the pay of the developers, as they are (largely speaking) doing it for free.
Again, you’re mixing up hardware and software. Millions of computer users in the world wouldn’t be interested in running AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, or AROS regardless of the hardware. That’s a cold hard fact.
Hardware is freely available for AROS, and yet still no-one uses it. What does that tell you?
Please don't tell people what they are referring to, it's most annoying, the majority of computer users have heard of nothing beyond Windows and Mac, seriously most of my friends think I'm weird if I dare to mention Linux, nothing is going to displace Windows for the majority of users for a very long time. But for the computer enthusiast, of which there are very many, around the world, they are willing to try out lesser known OSes simply for the novelty of something new, like those who have simultaneous installs of multiple distributions of GNU/Linux and *BSD along with other more obscure OSes like the previously mentioned BeOS or it's derivatives. If OS4 or MOS were available on commodity hardware, do you really think no computer enthusiasts would even give them a go? Hell even just look at the communities? Even if they were to abandon the platform shortly after trying it out, and most probably would. But the few new bloods that would stay would at least breathe some life into the Amiga-clone community in general and possibly even just spread the name around a little so more people at least hear that OS4/MOS actually exist.
