Best things about owning an amiga?

[lsmart]

It was the best machine you could afford and nothing came close. But the best thing was that you had the power to change everything and make it truly yours.

Today it's great that you can afford all the soft and hardware you once dreamed of and even take all your software with you wherever you go. Because machines can finally run UAE at decent speeds and your thumbdrive can hold 50 HD partitions withno trouble at all.

[lsmart]

Except for the fact that the desktop and window manager suck big time. This has to change!

I can't understand this statement, since my way of working is much more compatible with Workbench than KDE, Windows, Finder, GNOME and FVWM combined. You are confusing your preference with superiority!

If you take Workbench from me, you are taking a part that I really love from Amiga. I´d pay 60 bucks just for the "click to back" feature in Windows alone. I miss IconEd on a Mac and tooltypes beat registys & .ini any time!

So tell me how to make other OSs more like Workbench and you will find me grateful.

[lsmart]

In fact if it did change this would be the last day I'd be using the box.

[lsmart]

The AOS desktop and window manager are very primitive and slow, many of the current features are missing, and I find this a pain.

Most Features you might be missing can be installed with commodities. If you are missing something like mac´s QuickLook - well make multiview a hotkey.

As for speed - on comparable hardware you won´t find anything that is faster than Workbench.

What is your favorite WM? I used WindowMaker in the late 90s and I think it is among the best of them. I have however never found a filemanager that satisfies me. Also many X11 software really isn´t designed for click to focus or focus on background windows...

it's actually quite important to be able to configure such a system to work in the way the user wants.

But neither KDE nor GNOME nor Windows nor Mac OS let you even control the Z-order of your windows properly. You can´t tell Windows to open two files of the same type with different programms. You can`t leave out icons on your desktop or snapshot a window or icon. All this is just on Workbench and I bet if someone implements "modern" features into Workbench, he is going to break some of the old stuff. Why not let these be commodities?

I don´t get your meaning of "modern" anyways. Or do you mean multitouch?

[lsmart]

Those are nothing but flaws in those gui systems, and there's no reason why we can't have a gui system that does it all right.

I used to think that as well, but my optimism faded. Good if you have kept yours. I can remember how I was amazed by Daves Jazzbench it replaced my Worbench for some time until 2.0 came. So yes, I have seen somebody who really understood the Amiga way and was able to improve on it. But I haven´t seen this kind of skill in recent times.

Oh, and don´t bash commodities, because they are a great way to make a GUI adapt to some users preferences, without bothering the others.

If someone really does something to advance GUI in general it´s probably Apple and the iPad. But I don´t think this way will fit the Amiga.