Does Linux have an Amiga feel?

[commodorejohn]

Actually I've been meaning to challenge something that you have been implying, that less people are programming when the evidence clearly points to more people programming than ever.  Just look at the App store or Google Play.

I never implied any such thing. You've been the one maintaining that 95% of people (a figure that you still have yet to back up in any way) don't program or do any other creative pursuits on PCs and only need Facebook and email and that's why nobody needs PCs anymore. (Don't pretend this isn't what you were saying. I'll go back and grab the quotes if you want.)

I also find it ironic that you as an Amiga fan would talk about limited apps, iOS has apps far more sophisticated than Deluxe Paint or the video toaster software, so if using 'limited" apps is an issue why do you still use an Amiga?

"More sophisticated" in terms of overall horsepower applied to a task? Sure; even the original iPhone beats out an Amiga for that. And some iOS software does manage to ignore Apple's "don't do anything that might confuse the computer-illiterate" guidelines, and is more capable for it. The platform as a whole, however, is still geared away from productivity and towards passive consumption. That makes it simply not a good platform for creative pursuits. All this you have yourself admitted multiple times in this very thread.

Whereas - say what you will about the Amiga - it never had that problem, because, like classic Windows and classic Mac OS, it dates from the days before the industry started this push towards computer-as-glorified-TV. In the Amiga's heyday, it was expected that if you bought a computer, you were either going to do work on it or engage in creative pursuits, not just fart around on Facebook and watch YouTube. Consequently, the Amiga has a full complement of quality creative software which doesn't try to compromise on delivering a full-fledged desktop creative workstation experience - and I don't really care whether you think they're "ew, primitive," I'd take an Amiga with a handful of quality programs over iOS shovelware any day.

[commodorejohn]

Windows/AmigaOS are definitely easier to use and way harder to break though. I would probably have to spend 5 hours and 10 pints of beer to screw things up inside Window's registry the way I did for Linux with one silly command.

And then you'd at least have ten pints in you to soften the blow!

[commodorejohn]

Besides, what computer hasn't given anyone a challenge here or there...

Plenty of systems have given me a challenge. Only Linux has ever made me want to slit my wrists.

[commodorejohn]

Don't feel bad..
Computers are confusing..  But keep at it...  You'll get it...  ;-)  :roflmao:

And this attitude would be Why People Do Not Like the Linux User Culture.

Jackass.

I find that most of the people I work with who can't stand a particular system had a bad experience with that system early on, and then they just "shut down" for that system.
No amount of tweaks or fixes or improvements will matter..  They've decided, and that's OK.  There are plenty of options...

I spent about eight years making multiple attempts to get into Linux. I've tried at least half a dozen distros, in multiple versions. I took a course on it when I was in college. And ultimately, I realized that I was putting more work into trying to force myself to acclimate to a badly-designed system for the sake of ideology than I'd spent learning every other OS I've used put together, and concluded that it just wasn't worth the pain.

But no, you go ahead and keep insisting that I just haven't tried.

On reading some of the posts in this thread I'm  reminded of the old clichés "A good workman never blames his tools"

Which is an awfully convenient loophole for crappy toolmakers.

[commodorejohn]

See sig.

Does anyone have the context for this quote? I'd be interested to know exactly what he meant by it, because there's several ways to read it, some of which agree with you, and some of which agree with me.

In any case, while I respect Mr. Ritchie greatly, A. the standards for OS design in 1970 were very different from the standards of OS design in 1985 or the standards of OS design today, and B. Unix cruft is only one of the reasons that Linux is a terrible user experience.

[commodorejohn]

How in the world did you miss the smiley and the ROTFL animation?

My apologies. Unfortunately, sarcasm can be difficult to convey/detect over the 'net, and I missed it. (Doesn't help that plenty of actual zealots use "ha ha, just kidding! (You idiot!)" fake-geniality as a twee affectation.) But if that's not what you intended and I misread, I'm sorry.

[commodorejohn]

If you call that a "badly-designed system" then where the heck does Windows end up in that equation?

Honestly? People who are still flogging the "LOL WinBlow$ BSOD LOL Micro$shaft!" mantra haven't done any serious reevaluation since the days of 95 or Me. 2000 and XP are perfectly reasonable, stable systems with a coherent, modern design that's carefully relegated legacy DOS scariness to emulated support. Vista had plenty of problems, but 7 is even more generally well-regarded than XP (though I prefer XP myself.)

Whereas Linux piles framework after framework after framework onto the system in an attempt to build a modern desktop OS out of an architecture designed to drive VT-100s from PDP-11s...

There are some major bulletin-points for Linux (or any other POSIX compliant Unix clone, for that matter) and against Windows.

1. Performance

Every system I've used Linux on has been either only as fast as or noticeably slower than an appropriately-configured Windows/OSX install. Of course, zealots will bleat about this being the fault of proprietary drivers and how it's your problem for not using open hardware and conveniently ignore how they told you that Linux will make sweet wizardly love to all of your hardware no matter how old or obscure...

2. Ease of use (once you've figured everything out, it's easier to fix basically everything. Including situations in which Windows would just throw nonsensical walls of text at you).

This is true if, by "once you've figured everything out," we mean "once you've memorized The Design and Implementation of the 4.4    BSD Operating System" or something equivalent. In any other case: Bull. Shıt. Fixing Linux involves anything from posting on forums asking for help from the much-lauded and oh-so-helpful Linux user community (standard answers: "works for me," "you don't need this broken feature," "this bug was already logged in 1996, please add relevant details to the ticket and wait for a fix," or the ever-popular "you have the source, fix it yourself!") to chasing includes from one /etc shell script to the next looking for any string even vaguely related to the error.

3. An independent set of tools (no need to install or update stuff you'll never even use. Windows is still plain silly, in comparison. Just today, I was required to update Internet Explorer because someone thought it was smart to base his online client on calls specific to this monstrosity).

No need to install or update stuff you'll never even use! You know, like DBus, or PulseAudio, or grandomcryptonerdwanklibrary-effthensa or any of the zillion other packages that are required to install basically any Linux software, from text editors to web browsers, that's been around long enough to attract a dozen developers who each pile on every feature they think the software should have, no matter how esoteric.

4. Customizability of both, the user interface and the kernel.

Yes, because what I really want to do on a computer I just want to be able to do stuff on is rebuild the damn kernel.

UI customization, on the other hand, would be great - if it were in any way consistent across any set of programs outside of the megalithic KDE-type desktop application suites (and those, of course, are the absolute worse offenders on point #3.)

5. A helpful community of people who know exactly what they're doing.

A community of people who can't be assed to post meaningful information, suggest you "RTFM" no matter what your problem is, and make fun of you for not having memorized the source code. Yes, very very helpful folks.

6. A very compatible toolchain for software developers.

A very compatible toolchain, unless of course you want to do something crazy like run a GCC 2-built binary on an OS that expects binaries built with GCC 4. That's just crazy talk, man!

[commodorejohn]

I've had some brutal BSOD experiences under  Win XP.
So no, the NT kernel didn't solve that.
While I am not a big Apple fan, I don't think I've ever seen OSX crash.

I'm not going to claim Windows is flawless; I've never had BSODs on XP that weren't driver-related, but it definitely still has issues. What I will have no truck with is this notion that Linux is some godly feat of tech wizardry that is, "by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error." Instead of, you know, a mainframe OS from the '70s that's been progressively kludged into something resembling modernity but mostly on the surface.

(Also, I've had BSOD-analogue crashes on OSX, more often than I have on XP, and I use XP a lot more than I use OSX. But it's still pretty solid. Anyway, OSX is based on BSD and not Linux, and uses its own custom userland, just like Android, the other successful, well-regarded consumer-level Unixoid...)

[commodorejohn]

You do realize Windows is, essentially, framework driven? Sure, most of them are Microsoft products. But to say Linux piles up frameworks whereas Windows doesn't, is kind of silly.

Does Windows have additional frameworks? Yes. Are many of them somewhat unnecessary? Yes. (I hate the push to .NET for absolutely everything...) What it doesn't have is a userland made entirely out of separate, single-purpose frameworks tacked onto a core OS originally from 1970 that hasn't seen a serious architectural update since 1983. It doesn't have sound-architecture-du-jour. It doesn't have a massive, kludgy graphical environment.

Can't really follow you there. Linux runs great even on the smallest system. Of course, you shouldn't run stuff like Ubuntu or the likes.

"Linux runs great on everything! As long as you don't run the Linux that doesn't run great."

You have to know something? Tough luck! It was never touted to be a newbie OS.

You yourself were just lauding it as "easy to fix," dingbat.

Distros != OS

GNU/Linux doesn't require any of that stuff. Only certain distros package stuff like Pulse Audio, while others (such as any lightweight XFCE based distro) use ALSA.

If you're going to run with the tired old "it's only a kernel!" mantra, I want to know how you run any useful software on the facilities provided by the kernel.

And you missed my point. Plenty of distros don't install crapware like PulseAudio by default - the problem is all the software that requires eight different libraries to run. (And of course now you're going to bleat about how the problems with Linux software aren't problems with Linux - bull. The Linux developer culture is diseased, and that's why Linux software is as bloated as it is. And anyway I'd like to know what good an OS is if it doesn't have good software to run.)

I currently run Ubuntu with Unity on my laptop (utilizing a MacOSX theme). Aside of Steam (which is build on top of Chromium and thus no real native application), every application I use is styled consistently.

Tell me, when you say "styled," are you merely referring to the look? Because yes, you can get a window manager to consistently apply a look to windows. You can even get an application's controls to match that look (but you better have Qt, WxWidgets, FLTK, Tk, etcetera versions of your theme! And good freaking luck with Motif applications.) But good luck getting everything to behave consistently, outside of the mega-suites like GNOME and KDE.

Dunno which community you are referring to, but people in the newer, more streamlined usergroups generally offer valid support even to people new to Linux/Unix.

I'm referring to anywhere I've ever looked for help. You wanna point me to this wondrous fairyland of actually helpful Linux geeks?

Have you ever actually looked inside Windows/MacOSX development? Plenty of 3rd party Windows applications ask for Net 2.0 when Net 4.5 is already installed.

I'm not going to go to any great lengths to defend .NET because it's a scam to get developers stuck on Microsoft's own tools and I resent having to have it installed - but at least its stupid binary incompatibilities aren't integral to the build of the actual operating system.

[commodorejohn]

As a newbie, I found the most intuitive OS to be......System 7.  IMO if you just wanted to get the job done, it worked and worked well.

But as a semi newbie that liked tinker, Amiga is the best hands down.  Very easy to access the system files, easy and logical names.

Heh, indeed...System 7/7.5 was the most tinkerer-friendly Mac OS ever got, but even that doesn't hold a candle to the Amiga's customizability

[commodorejohn]

There is something most people miss...

Linux can have whatever look and feel you want.

Oh, not this crap again...

everything you see or interact with can be endlessly customized.

Only to the extent that it will let you customize it. (And don't trot out the "Use the Source!" mantra; if I wanted to rebuild every damn thing I use in order to make it what I want it to be, I'd just write my own damn operating system.)

If you want it to look exactly like amiga, you can do that. Exactly like osx, you can do that, windows, beos, riscos, whatever you want.

Yeah, yeah, you can throw any coat of paint imaginable over software that remains exactly the same regardless. Tell me, how do I customize the behavior to anywhere near this extent? How do I get all the software to use human-readable sort in directory listings instead of plain ASCII sort? How do I make Alt toggle me into and out of menu context without having to press a specific menu accelerator, as it works in Windows? How do I disable raise-on-focus in window manager Foo, if I want Amiga-style behavior? How do I apply any changes consistently when there are at least three major UI toolkits and any number of window managers and desktop environments?

The extent to which the Linux developer community has focused on mere graphical skinnability as a stand-in for real customization is symptomatic of the fact that they just don't get usability. If they did they would understand that making Linux look like something it doesn't act like is, simply, deception. (To be fair, it's self-deception in the case where the user is the one trying to pretend that throwing an Amiga coat of paint over things changes anything about the actual user experience, but in any case, it doesn't make Linux a different thing any more than putting on a slinky flesh-tone dress would make me Marilyn Monroe.)

So if linux does not work or look how you prefer... Its your fault.

Of course it's our fault. It's always our fault, always the fault of the user, because it's just impossible that it could ever be Linux at fault. Linux is pure, Linux is blameless. After all, if the user would just force themselves to believe that they're having a good experience, they wouldn't have anything to complain about!

And you wonder why desktop Linux hasn't even cracked Apple's level of market share. Maybe it's because every time anyone has a problem with it, you tell them thatit's their fault for not liking it.

[commodorejohn]

How do I do it on Amiga? I have lots of Amiga software that behaves this way.

How do you do it on Amiga?

Well you only ever have one window manager running at once. But the Amiga always had that problem too. The widget types that come with Intuition are very basic and not very customisable, so people made MUI and ClassAct/ReAction, and NewIcons.

I'm not talking about the Amiga, because nobody is making the claim that the Amiga OS is so damn flawlessly customizable like haywirepc is claiming for Linux.

And anyway, I'll give an OS a hell of a lot more slack on failure to be consistent when it's an OS that's had to be hacked into even what modernity it approaches by outside developers hooking into system calls. Linux is open-source; what's its excuse?

This much is true. I think the average Linux developer doesn't even see the point of usability, let alone understand it. They think you just have to make it look more like Windows and it won't scare the average user off, then throw in more special effects, because "real" users just want to use the terminal anyway.

Precisely.

[commodorejohn]

Again, a kernel is not an OS. Linux as an OS is much more than just the kernel. But I agree: basically every problem Linux has is down to being stuck on crufty, monstrous legacy frameworks for its userland. The difference is, it didn't have to be that way. It was created from scratch as a hobby project and opened up to community involvement, not hacked into its present state as a guerilla update to a closed-source OS that was effectively abandoned twenty years ago. There's no reason whatsoever that they couldn't have ditched the cruft, designed newer, better frameworks, and implemented compatibility layers to keep old software running. Even Windows could and did do that. The Linux developer community chose to make it what it is; the Amiga hackers didn't have that choice.

As stefcep2 says, it's a tragedy that twenty years of the time, energy, and zeal of the open-source movement have gone into recreating an assemblage of legacy cruft built around a system architecture from the 1970s. Imagine if that time had gone into a project along the lines of BeOS instead...

[commodorejohn]

The decision to use X-Windows wasn't so strange back in 1991, since they were going for something Unix-like and it was an established standard, and it meant that they could run software on Unix servers remotely which was very cool then and is still very cool now. Remember Windows 3.1 came out in '92 and could do none of these things, and wasn't even fully multitasking.

But Workbench 2.0 came out in 1990, and System 7 came out in 1991. (And if I'm reading up correctly, Linux didn't even get X until XFree86 in 1994, by which time Windows 3.1 was well-established and 95 had been seeing betas released to preview customers since 1993.) There were already well-established lessons in good desktop design in every major corner of the personal-computer market, and known deficiencies of X that you point out yourself, like its presentation-centric model to UI (which had already led to the development of the Motif toolkit as an attempt at standardization.)

People did know better in 1991, or if they didn't they should've. Linux could have chosen to build something better. But they don't believe in that over there, they believe that "worse is better" and crappy designs are fine as long as you get them to a working beta faster. So instead they just reimplemented the flawed system instead of trying to fix the flaws - which basically sums up the whole project.

[commodorejohn]

So yes, Linux could have chosen to put more emphasis on having a nice user experience for computer novices, but then it would have just been competing with Windows and would have met exactly the same fate as BeOS et al, in other words obscurity.

Well, first off, usability is not just about novices. A really good interface is a good interface for everybody, from novices to pros. The whole idea that "user-friendly is for newbs" ingrained into the developer culture is half the reason Linux UI sucks so bad today. The Mac didn't make that mistake, and as a result it had pretty much the best UI out there for years. The Amiga didn't make that mistake, and while it wasn't quite as beautifully intuitive as the Mac, it still got a hell of a lot closer than Linux did. Windows didn't make that mistake, and while its UI sucked at first, by Windows 3.0 it actually got pretty decent, and by 95 it set the template for pretty much all future desktop environments in one way or another. Even niche OSes like BeOS don't make that mistake; only the Unices do.

(And as for the idea of competing with Windows being doomed to fail: who cares? I'll take a good failure over a mediocre success any day. See also: Amiga.)

Anyway, you can make the argument that Linux was never intended to be a user-friendly desktop OS. Looking at it I'd be inclined to agree with you. (Certainly it's better as a server OS than it is as a desktop OS.) But if that's the case, they certainly shouldn't have promoted it as one. If that wasn't the intention, then every loudmouth zealot who ever pushed it as a good alternative to Windows is a liar fudging facts for the sake of promoting ideology.

[commodorejohn]

How is it not "mainstream boring?" It's a million infinitesimally-different Unix clones in addition to the dozen actual, official Unices that already existed. (And the other, non-Linux Unix clones...) In terms of number of similar OSes (as opposed to actual systems in service) it's by far the most mainstream OS in history (especially now that Mac OS is another damn Unix clone.)

It's just that, you know, it's not a very good one.