Open Source Amiga OS

[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.

[commodorejohn]

If I recall correctly, one of the biggest omissions of AmigaOS is memory protection, or lack thereof.  If I recall, even AmigaOS 4 doesn't have it?  Or maybe it was only recently added.

As far as I know OS4 doesn't have memory protection. The problem is that the Amiga software architecture is designed on the presumption of processes having free access to the memory map; message-passing is done by handing off pointers between processes, API calls are done by simply jumping to system code with no context-switching. Trying to add memory protection to that would impose huge performance penalties, if it would work at all.