Could you PC loving Aholes go home?

[commodorejohn]

The principle design paradigms of the Amiga (multiprocessing hardware with dedicated units for sound, graphics etc.) has been fully adopted in the PC world for over 15 years. And it's been steadily improved over the years, with ever faster, cheaper and more modular components. With any old PC, virtually anything you dislike about it can be swapped out and replaced with an alternative that suits you better. Whether it's hardware, applications or the OS.

That presupposes the existence of a better PC-compatible alternative, though, and in my experience there usually isn't one. PC hardware used to have some interesting alternatives back in the day (Adlib/Sound Blaster versus Gravis UltraSound versus IBM MFC versus an external MIDI module, different and sometimes quite interestingly quirky early 3D accelerators,) but they've all long since been stamped into conformity with a single standard that's usually defined more around whatever the Windows API already provided than any consideration of what made for a good standard (do you remember when sound cards didn't all use that crappy-ass Roland patch set that newer versions of Windows won't even let you switch out?) GPUs are pretty much the last holdout, and even they now differ pretty much only in specs on the same handful of categories. It's a vast landscape of increasingly-indistinguishable options.

And you can swap out the OS, but there really aren't any good options; there aren't even any interesting options that aren't stuck in perpetual beta. Linux more or less works until you touch anything under the hood, or touch anything that touches anything under the hood, or look at it funny, at which point there's a healthy chance that the entire modern-UNIX house-of-cards will collapse and leave you staring at a command prompt and trying to put things back together using tools from the '70s. Windows used to be crashy as hell and has since gotten better, to the point where it's a damn solid workhorse OS, but it's also gotten exponentially bigger with every version, to the point where you need what would've been considered a high-end PC just six or seven years ago merely to run it these days.

PCs have evolved over the last thirty years, but they've never lost that fundamental kludge-ugliness, and what they've gained in reliability has mostly been obtained by hammering flat any feature that might once have made them interesting. Iggy is dead-on here.

[commodorejohn]

However, and you are free to disagree, in achieving the goal of becoming the ubiquitous one-size fits all solution for most people's computing needs, a lot of clever ideas have been packed into a system built on an architecture that in any sane universe would have been drowned at birth.

Can you give me some examples? Every clever or interesting thing I can think of about PCs got stamped out in standards transitions.

And the fact that it all works is very interesting.

No it isn't. A machine being in a state of proper function is a fine thing, but that doesn't make it interesting.

Also, you mentioned just a handful of "uninteresting" operating systems. There are literally dozens of esoteric operating systems for PC hardware. MenuetOS was the last one I played with; an esoteric OS for people that want to write everything in assembler.

What I said was "there aren't any interesting options that aren't stuck in perpetual beta." Or, more fairly to some of them, "that have enough of a software base to be generally useful." MenuetOS is neat as hell, I agree - it's just that when it comes to stuff you can use for your day-to-day computing needs, people are often stuck with the big, boring players that aren't very good but aren't bad enough to keep them from being the standards.

Don't get me wrong, the Amiga will always be my favourite, but I don't get the need to rant about perceived shortcomings of PC's in 2012. It's like raging about the inadequacies of your fridge or TV set.

Well, I can't speak for Iggy, but there's a couple reasons this often feels rant-worthy. First and foremost, 'round here, is the group of people who, despite being members of an Amiga forum, and typically professing to like the Amiga, respond to any thread about next-gen Amigoid systems, exercises in pushing the boundaries on classic Amigas, attempts to "switch over" to next-gen or classic Amigas for daily-driver use, hypotheticals about where the Amiga might have gone, or threads about the weather with ritual chanting of "THERE IS ONLY AND SHALL EVER MORE BE ONLY X86, DECLARED THE ONE TRUE ARCHITECTURE BY GOD HIMSELF THROUGH HIS PROPHET DON ESTRIDGE, BOW DOWN AND WORSHIP, O YE IGNORANT HEATHENS!" Often with an added chaser of "and anyway the Amiga was totally crap because it couldn't play Doom unexpanded, I don't know why you people here on an Amiga forum seem to like it so much."

But even aside from that specific annoyance, the whole attitude that "PCs are meant to be identical and boring" is pretty frustrating. It didn't used to be that way; people used to be interested in computers for their own sake, and consequently computers used to be really interesting. Back in the day, there was a veritable menagerie of quirky, interesting little systems to choose from - or you could use a common backplane standard to play mix-and-match in a way that modern PCs don't even begin to approach.

Then the IBM PC came along and triggered a mass extinction event; a few survivors hung behind or thrived in specialty markets for a while, but eventually it was just PCs as far as the eye could see. Even that wasn't so bad, back when PCs still had some interesting features, but that creeping homogeneity has all but completely overtaken the world of personal computing by now. Even Macs are PCs now! Hell, the most diversity we've had in years has been due to the hesitant, not-yet-fruitful dalliance of ARM hardware from the smartphone market with laptop form factors.

Some folks here remember those earlier days with fondness. Some of us weren't around for them, but wish we'd been. In either case, we're maybe not so gung-ho about standards and interoperability that we wouldn't like to see some variety in the market again - and you don't even need to want that to think that the IBM PC-compatible architecture is looking pretty icky after thirty years of progressive kludges. You can talk about how great standards are all you want, and I'm not going to claim you don't have a point, but it's like arguing that dinosaurs were just too big and inefficient and it's their own fault that they didn't survive changing climate conditions, for being too dependent on a predation cycle based around lush, plentiful vegetation - that may be true, but you're missing the point that dinosaurs were hella cool in a way that very few mammals are.

[commodorejohn]

If you can honestly look at a modern PC motherboard  and associated components and not see 2 decades worth of accumulated  cleverness in the component parts and their interconnections then  there's no point in me even trying to point any out. You simply don't,  or won't appreciate it. Which is your prerogative.

That's not an answer to the question, that's you telling me that I don't  want an answer to the question, and I'll be the decider of my  own motivations, thank you. If I wasn't interested in hearing your view on it, I certainly wouldn't have wasted my time asking.

So I'm very curious of what they make of Wayland as the only resource-hungry aspect of Linux is the x-windows system.

Wayland has some good ideas at the core, and yes, XWindows is ripe for replacement. Problem is, as far as I've read it sounds like they're betting everything on GPU acceleration, which is only good if you have working GPU acceleration. In Linux, that depends largely on what exact core of whose basic architecture your GPU uses, and the open-source driver projects for even the big names in video cards are pretty scattershot in their support.

Wayland claims that'll be taken care of by a software fallback layer. Ideally that would mean no worse performance than a non-compositing window manager, which would be pretty fine. Unfortunately, what they're planning to do is run the compositing window manager through the Mesa software renderer. Which, if you've ever used it for anything more complex than a spinning-teapot demo, is a sluggish agony. So if your laptop has an unsupported chipset, the question will be whether or not the pain of maintaining and using X is worse than the pain of using Wayland on a software emulation of hardware acceleration.

[commodorejohn]

Scalable fonts. There's just no reason to subject your eyes to low resolution any more.

I like lower resolutions, myself.

[commodorejohn]

See it this way: for Workbench to run at all, you need an Amiga, for Linux you need certain well-supported hardware and their proprietary drivers to run nicely. Basically, the Apple way.

That's true enough, though it would help if advocates didn't like to keep repeating lines about how Linux runs on anything and makes sweet wizardly love to your old hardware. Well, not if your old hardware isn't within a certain specific subset of all available hardware, it doesn't...