Open Source Amiga OS

[commodorejohn]

What wrong with using the closed source version that makes you interested in this idea.

Hahaha, you don't know freetards do you.

[commodorejohn]

Baffles me. AROS is  already free. And how closed can it be?
Its got a multitude of developers.
Only the two primary PPC variants of the OS3.1 API are closed.

See, freetards don't think that way. In the Gospel According to Stallman, all proprietary software is capital-E Evil, and the goal of all software is (obviously) to metamorphosize into a Free Software Alternative, probably with four different variants depending on whose UI toolkit is the Free-est at the moment, two separate Windows ports for the poor benighted peons stuck on Proprietary Software, and eleven abandoned forks, at least one of which was an attempt to "integrate social media features."

Thus saith Lord Stallman!

[commodorejohn]

@commodorejohn

If you love closed source you must be an Apple fan....

You need to take remedial set theory. There are how many closed-source OSes out there? For all you know I could be a fan of BeOS, OS/2, or (*gasp*) Windows.

Actually, I don't love closed-source so much as I have been quite forcefully disillusioned from buying into the FSF propaganda that open-source is magic pixie dust that makes everything better unilaterally and has no disadvantages whatsoever. Comes from multiple attempts over a solid seven years and change to try and get a really usable, pleasant user experience out of any of the eleventy billion mutually-incompatible Linux distros.

I do like Haiku as it's shaping up, but then Haiku takes the unorthodox but eminently sensible approach of allowing open access to the source but forbidding forking, so you actually get a single cohesive user experience.

[commodorejohn]

What makes you think the Haiku licence forbids forking? It's MIT licenced which is even more permissive than the GPL.  You can literally do whatever the hell you want with it, including refusing to release the source to your own changes.

I could be wrong on that, it's what I recall being told but I'm not 100% sure. In any case, there aren't Haiku forks, so there's still no confusion over which of a multiplicity of distros is good for what; there's just Haiku.

We've been here before John, your problem with the *nixes is that you don't know how to use UNIX to do what you want to do, nothing to do with the licencing model of the code*.

*Correct me if I'm wrong but you'd be just as baffled by the closed and proprietary HP/UX and AIX as you are by GNU or OpenBSD.

I love how "doesn't like *nixes" automatically equates to "doesn't know how to use them." I know perfectly well how to find my way around Unix derivatives; the fact that Linux distros are plagued by terrible UI, nightmare depency trees, and a "who cares if it works so long as it's free" attitude has little to do with the basic Unix architecture (which is old and crufty, but fundamentally workable) and even less to do with confusion on my part.

But no, it must be that I'm just some poor benighted soul meddling in things I can't possibly understand, because there's no way my grievances could be legitimate just because Linux software developers neither know nor care what makes a good, cohesive user experience.

And I've never used HP/UX or AIX. From my limited experience with Solaris, I can say that that at least is a significant improvement in terms of consistency and intuitiveness in the user interface, though that may be down more to the Common Desktop Environment, I dunno.

There's a big difference between Free Software as defined by the FSF and Open Source as defined by the OSI too.

Yes, there is. OSI doesn't care about whether the product is good because it can probably be fixed later, at some point indefinitely far into the future and possibly not until after World War III, while the FSF doesn't care about whether the product is good because who cares if it's good when it's a Free alternative, why don't you just go back to your Micro$haft masters you backwards ingrate Uncle Tom!

[commodorejohn]

Linux is the kernel, the distro is not Linux.

That argument would be meaningful if a kernel were the same thing as a complete operating system.

[commodorejohn]

Without open source there would be no Gimp, no Open/Libre Office, no Firefox...

Firefox is the only one of those worth its filesize, and that was open-source but also managed and coordinated by a semi-traditional (if nonprofit) company. And even then it got off to a rocky start and had to learn the hard way that, to quote erstwhile Netscape/Mozilla developer Jamie Zawinski:

Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea.  If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ``open source,'' and have everything magically work out.
 - jwz, "nomo zilla"

As for GIMP, that shıt is the final, monstrous UI nightmare that crystalized all of my various frustrations and finally drove me away from Linux.

My experience is that in recent years, installing  Ubuntu is easier than getting Windows to run reliably at anything than  snails pace, and things like getting it to recognize printers requires  far less voodoo (what a change from a few years ago..).

That's lovely for you then. My experience is that I had to  struggle endlessly with a nightmare of dependency issues, libraries that  just plain broke other libraries, assorted random failures, and a  user/developer culture that lives by the mantras "works for me," "you  don't need that," and "you have the source, fix it yourself!" all in  order to have a full complement of software that wasn't even as good or  as usable as the software I can get for free for my Windows  machine.

More importantly, even if it isn't suitable as a desktop OS for  you, the immense success of open source is demonstrated quite well in  that most of us have at least one device running Linux (or less likely  another open source Unix clone) in our house - even if you don't know  it. Most routers and set-top boxes run a Linux version these days, for  example. And of course any Android phone.

The fact that stripped-down Linux-kernel builds with a custom userland  (i.e. not the nightmare that normal distros use) have seen  success in embedded applications means jack shıt about its usefulness in  any other setting. Maybe it runs my toaster; I don't care, I don't want  to compute on my toaster.

And Android is a perfect example of exactly the point you aren't  trying to make. When the single most important step you can take to make  something good from Linux is to completely jettison  everything except the kernel and roll your own entirely different  replacement, maybe that should tell you something about the quality of  the Linux userland.

[commodorejohn]

Oh, any distro will give you a working install fresh from the CD. It's when you decide that you want something different than the default applications that the dependency shıt hits the package-manager fan.

[commodorejohn]

No. Just no. Blender is insane, though at least they're making efforts to get better. GIMP is just wretched. I've gone over it in detail in another post, but really it's just inexcusably bad. It doesn't even know where its own windows are. That's braindead. GIMP displays every symptom of having its UI hacked together by programmers who really only care about the backend functionality and only include an interface as a begrudging concession in order to get people to actually use their software, and while it's an extreme case that's really true of the vast majority of Linux software to one extent or another.

[commodorejohn]

Blender is hard to master no doubt about that. But I didn't expect a 3D application to be easy to learn at all. Imagine on Amiga was hard at first too. Only after a few tutorials one could get satisfying result. It's all about how hard you want to learn or not.

I might buy that if 3D Studio Max and even friggin' Moray weren't a hundred times more intuitive and sensible.

Complaining abut UIs just because you don't have time or will to learn is pointless.

I could also complain about the syntax of C, or C ++, I never really learnt how to master coding in C. It must be because the language is too complicated, right ? It has nothing to do with my desire wanting to code, has it ? Had I cared enough then I'd learnt it is my point.

And here we go again with this line of argument that "you're not allowed to complain about something being overly complex and unintuitive because it just has a steep learning curve and you must not want it hard enough." You've got it backwards: it has a steep learning curve because it is overly complex and unintuitive. C is fundamentally intuitive and easy to understand once you grasp a few simple principles like pointers that are ignored in most of the "teaching" languages; the same cannot be said for Blender or the GIMP.

You can put some Photoshop look on GIMP if that's what you long for. That wouldn't do any good for me cause I never had the time to learn Photoshop. Guess it must be because Photoshop's UI sucks :-)

If you think that making one program look like another program equals changing its interface, you will never understand the difference between good and bad UI. It's not how it looks, it's how it behaves.

[commodorejohn]

So who said there couldn't be differences. Once you learn how to do things you get along with it. Take a look what they accomplish with Blender. They wouldn't have done half of what they've done if it where 100 times harder to do. You make it sound like it's no point in using Blender. Of course it is, just because you have a hard time learnin how to use it doesn't automatically mean your neighbour has too.

Contrariwise, just because my neighbor invests an assload of time in learning Blender's arcane interface doesn't mean that it was a good use of time and he wouldn't have been better served spending that time to learn his way around the actual functionality of a program with a saner, cleaner UI.

The fact that people can use a tool for something doesn't make it necessarily a good tool. Political prisoners have written on cell walls with their own crap; they still would've been better off with a pen and paper.

And here we go again with commodorejohn telling the utter thruth so there can be no other truth. If you haven't manage render one image with blender yet then you haven't tried hard enough. That's just it.

This is like saying that if I haven't managed to break through a wall by banging my head against it, I just need to bang harder. Strictly speaking it might be true, but wouldn't it make more sense to use a sledgehammer?

You see problems where there's none. I don't say GIMP is the sharpest tool in the box but you can do lots of nice things with it. And since it's free why don't learn to use it. The same with Inkscape, it's really simple to use and makes amazing results. And it doesn't cost a dime for you to learn.

I never bad-mouthed Inkscape, because I've never used Inkscape. But the fact that you can accomplish good results with the GIMP means only that its backend functionality is good, which I never disputed. It's still a giant pain in the ass to use.

No I must be dumb then because I thought User Interface meant the Interface, buttons, sliders presented to the user and how to activate/combine them to get desired results. Instead we seem to be talking about rendering alogritms and god knows what then.

What. I was never talking about algorithms or backend functionality of any sort. What I said was that skinning GIMP to look like Photoshop won't make its UI behave like Photoshop. It'll still be a half-assed, incomplete clone of Photoshop's UI.

[commodorejohn]

I think some people would hijack AmigaOS and turn it into Windows, while still calling it Amiga OS. I can guess that the only reason is out of spite, or else they would be using Windows.

This is, of course, in stark contrast to the people who hijacked AmigaOS and turned it into Linux, which we all know is the Only True Future of the Amiga.

[commodorejohn]

You're grasping at straws here. Prove it

You prove it.

Ahh come on, if don't have anything to say why even try.

The irony that this would be your response to an actual argument is rather staggering.

Pain in the ass only matters in how often you do something. Of course I cannot know what you need to get done in GIMP from time to time basis but in my case after a few years using it quite often it's not hard at all. It takes me somethimes a a quick google to refresh my memory if I need to do something that I did a year ago and don't quite remember.

The fact that you've trained yourself around a crap UI does not make it not a crap UI.

I have ranted back at people who put the hate  on the Gimp, simply because it's all open source, if you have such a  vicious hatred toward it, FIX IT.

Why? There are perfectly good alternatives out there, and it would be far less of a waste of time to use them instead than to try to fix a project created by a culture of people who never cared about good design in the first place.

[commodorejohn]

To which the user thinks:" I'm not a ****ing programmer, I just want to use the damned thing without tearing my hair out...how do I remove this **** off my hard drive."

Yup. And this would be why 90% of the Linux userbase is Linux programmers...and why desktop Linux has something like a 1-3% market share.

Well use those apps yourself and STFU dictating  to everyone else what they should or should not be using.

Nobody was saying anybody should or shouldn't be using anything. You wanna bang your head against the wall of crap UI and tell yourself that it's better for you, you go right ahead. We just want to note that you may find it feels pretty good to stop doing that.

[commodorejohn]

Don't know what to say, you are actually starting to think like me, after all the original Amiga is based on Unix, which Linux is an off shoot of.

The fact that you can't detect sarcasm aside, this isn't even remotely true. AmigaDOS is well-documented to have been based on TriPOS, a minicomputer operating system; the rest was created specifically for the Amiga. There's pretty much nothing Unix-like about it at all; the Amiga eschews memory management while Unix (outside of esoteric variants) depends on it, the Amiga uses shared-memory message-passing for inter-process communication while Unix (generally) uses a "file" construct, the Amiga operates on the basic assumption of running on a single-unit workstation with local video and sound while Unix abstracts those out to a client/server model in case it's running on a mainframe, etcetera etcetera.

But, you know, keep passing that myth along. Maybe some day the power of belief will make it true!

[commodorejohn]

If you're not a programmer, pay one to fix it for you.  Companies do it all the time.  Most of the people will work off of donations.  The fact is, open source software is usually written to scratch an itch, and if that itch is scratched for the writer and not for all the people that complain about usability, than what should the actual answer be?  "Sure, I'll completely redo my program for free even though it works fine for me...."  People have to eat and all that.

My beef isn't as much with the programmers who can't be assed to write a halfway decent interface (though seriously: come on, guys, if you're going to do GUI at least do it well,) and I'm not going to demand that they spend all of their free time fixing it. My beef is much more with the zealots who try to sell an OS and software ecosystem written by Unix nerds, for Unix nerds as being all Love, Freedom, and Rainbows and The Future of Computing when it has UI that in the best circumstances is still not as good as that of most Windows or Mac software and in worse cases is actually more of a pain than just using the command line.

These are the people who brag on their blogs about how Granny needed a new computer because her Windows 98 box "can't do the Facebook" and so they totally got a new computer for her and installed Linux on it, so now she has to acclimate to a different environment, but hey, at least she'll be completely free of crashes forever, until someone in upstream testing misses a bug report and she updates anyway because they turned on auto-update because you can trust the repository! And let's not forget FREEDOM! And then they pat themselves on the back for advancing The Cause and move on to imagining that they're Woody friggin' Guthrie.