About multitasking, what's best : AmigaOS, Linux, or Winblows XP ?

[Speelgoedmannetje]

SamuraiCrow wrote:
@Itix
Oh and incidently Windows 9x didn't multitask either.  It just ran background processes while waiting for mouse clicks and keystrokes.  While the foreground task was running, it hogged the processor.  

Not true. Windows 3.1 did cooperative multitasking, and Windows95 did preemptive multitasking (like AmigaOS). Lousy deceptive marketing strategy it was of M$ to call Windows 3.1 just 'multitasking', suggesting it's being equal to any other multitasking OS.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
Very limited and aged round robin scheduler. Only pre-Windows 95 and classic Mac OS are worse. Executive helps a bit by giving BSDish features.

But then, try formatting multiple floppies at the same time on a PC, or something alike. :-)

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
@Speelgoedmannetje
That's more due to ISA legacy HW, rather than windows. Playing with floppies is equally painful under linux IMO... ;-)

I know. But also, Commodore initially chose also SCSI because it was better usable for multitasking purposes (or so I read somewhere). I mean, Amiga is multitasking in every nerve, so to say.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Ah, thanks for clarifying :-)
There was a kinda similar (off-topic) discussion about this in this thread.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Tomas wrote:

Not true. Windows 3.1 did cooperative multitasking, and Windows95 did preemptive multitasking (like AmigaOS). Lousy deceptive marketing strategy it was of M$ to call Windows 3.1 just 'multitasking', suggesting it's being equal to any other multitasking OS.

No, win9x used cooperative multitasking, which was also the case with later version of classic mac os.

Then why can I play music, play a game and download something at the same time on my old pentium 200 with windows 95?

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Tomas wrote:

Then why can I play music, play a game and download something at the same time on my old pentium 200 with windows 95?

You could do that on win3.1 as well. It just does not work as efficiently.

Nope you can't. You can switch between programs, but they pause if they 'run' in background. Believe me, I tried :-)

[Speelgoedmannetje]

motorollin wrote:

tonyvdb wrote:
on the Amiga you can format more then one drive/partition at the same time. Try doing that on a PC. :-D

So what? How often do you actually do that? I don't exactly think that's a good test of how good an OS is at multitasking.

--
moto

I disagree.
It shows how it manages it's resources.
(/me rants how many times he had some read/write error with winblows because of lousy disk management)

[Speelgoedmannetje]

The multitask theory seems well defined, but is there a perfect implementation of it ?

Apart from programs wich are programmed by me, there is no perfect program in the world so there's not a perfect implementation of multitasking either.

the Amiga has pre-emptive multitasking ... Is this wikipedia entry wrong ?

No it isn't wrong.

Is the pre-emptive multitasking the perfect multitasking ?

No.
It's just multitasking. Co-operative multitasking can rather be called program switching rather than multitasking.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
@tonydvb
But why would you want to limit your video editing to something like the old amiga solutions?

Because it works fine? :-)

[Speelgoedmannetje]

ptek wrote:
@Speelgoedmannetje,

But pre-emptive is better than co-operative multitasking, right ?

Definately. As I stated, co-operative multitasking can hardly/not be called multitasking.
But pre-emptive multitasking comes also in multiple flavours, like Round Robin.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
@tonydvb

I'm not sure how much of this is done by the Newtek cards but still running a video project in the switcher involves running a ton of processes at the same time. The Amiga does just fine doing that. There is no way a windows machine with as little ram and CPU speed could even dream of doing that even today.

I have to disagree really. Assuming you had the equal functionality in the software and hardware, I see no reason why equally specced windows box couldn't handle it. Windows itself requires larger memory footprint, but other than that it should be fine.

No it's not fine. Windows is tied and glued together, not designed with these features. I have had too many problems with Windows to call it fine.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
@Speelgoedmannetje

Amiga hardware provided very efficient and cheap way of implementing video, but that's no OS feature. If you compare the OS multitasking (which this thread is about), pretty much all Windows since NT4 beat the crap out of AmigaOS. Thus, given equal hw features, Windows would be better.

Feel free to disagree. ;-)

Since a simple workbench fits on one disk, (880 kb), and since at avarage, 1 of 2000 rows of code contains bugs, how many more bugs do you think you have with a stripped compiled version of windows (wich is still a lot more megabytes) compared to a smaller workbench?

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
In fact, I haven't seen my XP install crash, except when the HW was malfunctioning.

Well, I did. And there wasn't any hardware malfunctioning.
Yet I haven't seen my Workbench (1.3) crashing.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
@Speelgoedmannetje

Yet I haven't seen my Workbench (1.3) crashing.

It clearly means you must sell your Windows boxen and replace it with A500 running WB 1.3.

Or even better, replace it with C64 running GEOS. It has even less code that can have bugs.

You very well know what I 'm talking about (the KISS-approach)

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Piru wrote:
@tormedhammaren

In my opinion the free unices (Linux and the BSDs) is the most stable OSes for personal users

I agree 100%, being debian user.

Running in a CLI in Linux is simply perfect; nothing goes wrong whatsoever. However, kde is a complete disaster (haven't worked much yet with gnome or xfce).

Windows isn't as horrible as it used to be, however.

Indeed.
But when things go wrong things go really wrong.