Bloatware AmigaOS?

[stefcep2]

Iif there's one thing I have learned over the years is that software will always grow to fill the hardware.  Amiga hardware has been caught in a 1993 time-warp, so the OS and software run within these hardware constraints.  It gets interesting if you emulate some of the different Amiga OS distributions out there:  Amikit looks like the most modern AmigaOs you can get in terms of eye candy and "features" but it is far slower than Amigasys or classic amiga, which aren't as "feature" rich.  Still, the Amiga would have bloated over time, but not nearly as much as X86.  Don't forget the X86 hardware platform is basically designed to suit the windows way of doing things ie its windows that demands the hardware be designed to suit it, not that windows is made to run on the hardware.  Much of the efficiency that comes from the Amiga is because the hardware and os are tightly integrated together.  But you can't get that with generic mass produced hardware, it has to be propriatory and no users  want that because its expensive eg remember the powerpc macs cost nearly twice as much as equivalent PC hardware at the time.

[stefcep2]

AmiKit wrote:
@stefcep2

Amikit looks like the most modern AmigaOs you can get in terms of eye candy and "features" but it is far slower than Amigasys or classic amiga, which aren't as "feature" rich.

http://www.amikit.amiga.sk/benchmarks.htm

Yep OK CPU speed is dependent on x86 CPU hardware so will always trump 680x0 these days but the interesting one is the intuition benchmark.  In my day to day use I would say Amikit with magellan or OS2.9 feels to be running far slower than AIAB and Amigasys than this benchmark would indicate.  Much of this has to do with the font antialaising which does look great

[stefcep2]

W
Also keep in mind that the Amiga really didn't have a lot of drivers for things.  The whole OS was pretty much hard-coded just for the chipset, which of course was its greatest downfall.  Take a look at the Linux kernel, and you'll find tons of hacks to make hundreds of devices work.  Even the Macintosh, a closed hardware platform, has to support huge numbers of different hardware configurations, and the OS is expected to adapt to each one, not require you to re-install every time you swap out one or two parts.  Any OS by itself is usually quite lean.

this is my point: the fact the computers need to install and load in device drivers is the windows way of doing things: each device could have its drivers built into rom, so that the driver automatically interfaces with the OS as soon as the device is plugged in: nothing should have to be installed, or loaded at boot, this is true plug and play, not plug and pray

[stefcep2]

The reality is that AmigaOS doesn't do very much. Yes, it's lean on resources, but it doesn't do most of the things you'd expect from a modern OS.

Such as?  The OS is merely the vehicle whereby the user interacts with the computer.  The real "doing' happens when an app is used to write a letter, play a game,video, cd mp3, edit video, burn discs, do a 3d render etc, web, email etc.  The Os does none of this , but provide an onscreen display, mouse and keyboard to let the user issue commands via the app to the hardware to do this stuff.  The AmigaOS is perfectly capable in its current form to allow the user to interact with the hardware every bit as well as Vista, except the Amiga software apps don't have all the same functionality of the Vista apps because there's been no development in the apps to speak of for 10 years.
Getting back to core OS functions,  how can it possibly REQUIRE megabytes of programming code so as to work out where the mouse pointer is on the screen? why does an old P3 500  512 meg boot xp as fast as a dual core running at 3000 mhz with 4 times as much ram, much faster hard drive, bigger caches? Yeah hard drive spin speeds are not much faster but the data density is so much higher, so more bytes per spin are being read, but even so it still takes 30+ seconds to boot!

The point is the user experience in interacting with the computer (ie using the OS) has not improved despite hardware speed and capacity increasing 1000 fold. Thats an issue related to the fact that the hardware x86 design is dictated by the OS that will run on it, not the other way around.

[stefcep2]

[/quote]

In what way is an x86 processor limited by the OSs that run on it? Windows could be ported to any processor architecture and still look and feel the same it does on x86, provided the processor was fast enough to run it. Similarly, any OS could be ported to x86.

I do not know enough details about x86 **processors**, i was talking to the whole PC architectural design which nowdays is x86 based for home use.(Nevertheless per clock cycle its my understanding that the x86 processors did less than 68k.).  Whether you run Windows, OSX, or Linux, they are still running on the same hardware design, along with all its limitations.  

Waccoon wrote:
I disagree. Even X86 is pretty efficient if you think about it, because hardware engineers cannot be anywhere near as sloppy as software engineers

What we should really be asking is does AmigaOS do what we need it to do? I believe the answer is yes. Most of the functionality of computers should come from apps anyway.[/quote]

Agreed.  The question that needs to be asked is why does this functionality need 1000 times the hardware resources under windows, or put another way can't the user interact with the PC 1000 times faster

[stefcep2]

Absolutely, an OS is nothing without Apps, but I think we should care when we buy hardware that is 1000 times faster and spacous and only to find we go 50% slower in being able to control those apps just because we 'upgraded" the OS.