Does Linux have an Amiga feel?

[persia]

Or just run Open Solaris in a VM.  The college of engineering where I work used to be a Sun shop.  As Sun went through it's death spiral the slowly abandoned Solais, even the switch to X86 seemed to help the decline.

[persia]

@ElPolloDiabl

Who care about the desktop?  Look at the post PC market, both Android and OS X are UNIX based and they control over 90% of the market.

[persia]

The sales figures do a quite adequate job of showing the decline of the desktop.  Really except for us computer archaeologists the appeal of a desktop at home is very limited.



The personal computer's role changes, becoming one of many contextual devices rather than the central hub connecting them.

Keep repeating "post-PC" to yourself, man. Maybe one of these days the power of belief will make it true!

[persia]

It's more a realignment, than an actual death.  The PC was the core of the computer world, everything you had fed off it.  Now it's just one device of many that serves those needs.  It's just one of many choices.  There is no one device that everyone must have, it's all context driven, what you need to do determines the device(s) you need.  Nobody needs a PC to do facebook and youtube, but in the past they would buy a PC because it was the only choice, now it's not.  PCs are a declining percentage of smart devices.

[persia]

Your TV does internet, XBOX, PlayStation, Wii do internet, phones do internet, tablets do internet, zeus knows what else will do internet.  The PC age, where the desktop was dominant is no more, devices other than PCs form the majority of smart devices.  The market is proving it as we speak.  Who needs a desktop?  Those who do serious work such as developing apps for other smart devices.  Who doesn't need them?  Most everybody else.  The PC is just one device amongst a host of devices.  This is what Apple and others have meant by post-pc.  Apple continues to develop desktops too, so if they meant what you believed them to mean they'd be kicking a dead horse.  

Speaking of horses, no one would argue that we are in the post-horse transport era, yet I can still ride a horse if I want to.

[persia]

True, Windows 8 doesn't provide much for old Windows 7 users.  Especially on the failure of the Microsoft Store on Windows 8 apps.  I personally have a desktop, but it gets far less use than my iPad or MacBook Air.  

What percentage of people do things other than facebook and email?  Back in the '80s people had a computer to program and tinker with.  But nowadays few program and even fewer tinker.  Windows users don't want to do anything that doesn't involve a GUI, true Mac users can and do drop into a terminal and use a command line but even Mac users rely fairly heavily on the GUI.

[persia]

In the '80s maybe 5% of people had computers, you bought the computer to do creative things, now with everyone having a computer you may still have that 5% being creative, but that leaves the vast majority of computer owners just doing facebook and watching youtube.  There never was a time when everyone wanted to program.  Many people will be quite happy with using their TV to surf the web.

[persia]

PCs are appliances, like toasters or dishwashers.  People don't buy a dishwasher to be creative, they buy it to wash the dishes.  Most people want to go on Facebook not write HTML5.  In the '80s you were dealing with a self selected audience, in the '10s you are dealing with virtually everybody.  The cost of entry was very high US$1300 well over AU$2000 for an Amiga 2000 when average wages were AU$400 per week. Now an iPad costs US$499/AU$579 and average wages are AU$1400 per week.  It's no longer a major investment.  

Take cars, when only the few had them everyone who owned them could tear them apart and rebuild them, now everyone has a car and only a small percentage actually work on them on their own.  It's not an adventure in discovery to own a car, it's a necessity.  People no even vaguely interested in how an internal combustion engine works own them.  But that percentage, that tinker with cars, as a part of the total population, has remained constant.

[persia]

Surely you mean in secondary education, they must still teach programming at the tertiary level.

I thought you were both writing roughly the same thing.
 
The majority of people only use facetwitmytube, they only need a simple appliance. He is making the distinction of people using facebook or html5, but that is just for comparison of user types. Not because facebook and html5 are the only thing you can use a computer for. There are plenty of ways you can consume and plenty of ways you can create. In the UK they are talking about teaching programming in schools again (they only teach you how to use things like word, excel, some form of database right now).

[persia]

And what is creative?  There are video, audio and image editing apps on iOS, surely this is being creative.

[persia]

@commodorejohn

Actually I've been meaning to challenge something that you have been implying, that less people are programming when the evidence clearly points to more people programming than ever.  Just look at the App store or Google Play.

I also find it ironic that you as an Amiga fan would talk about limited apps, iOS has apps far more sophisticated than Deluxe Paint or the video toaster software, so if using 'limited" apps is an issue why do you still use an Amiga?

[persia]

Your original message does not contain the word "school."  It contains the word "teach" something they do in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions.

Higher education isn't called a school in the UK. Even people with degrees barely know how to program these days.
 

 
Probably something you could make money from. Editing your selfies doesn't really count.