I find the Amiga to be a very usable system and I have much less than 10 years of epxerience under my belt with it. Some parts of the OS do need to be explained, but it would perhaps take ten or fifteen minutes to do so. Then, if you want, and I haven't bothered yet except changing a filesystem once, you can get into really fancy things like custom editing the drivers for your devices, or moving just about any folder on the system drive around. Between the way Miami works and the way windows handles TCP/IP stuff, I choose Miami, having done plenty in both. Amiga is pretty spartan though, and the amount of workbench hacks needed to make it look slick is annoying, but on the other hand it runs on slow processors with almost no memory.
My experiences with linux lead me to believe you can have A) a fast newish computer running something like Fedora B) An older computer running an Xwindows session that looks worse than vanilla Workbench 3.1 and C) a very powerful text shell. Nonetheless, I think Linux is a great server operating system, and great for home use if you can afford to run a big distro, mind you, a 1GHz cpu with 128 to 256 megs of RAM will do the basics in even Fedora... seemed to work fine on a 1.3GHz Duron/128MegRAM/ATI Rage system. Most people I know don't have a system that powerful even though, although they certainly aren't expensive.
I don't have much experience with macs really, but the times I have used them they seemed very nice, although the dang dockbar always autohid, and if you left it alone to go get lunch (used some G4 OSx machines at an art class) the screen would blank into some kind of power saving mode that often involved photoshop crashing.
Windows. Windows can be a PITA. Windows users like to use IE and Outlook. The barely realize how many virii and trojans they get on their system, it gets buggy stable and inconsistent, also the way Xp and 2000 work are different enough to make help docs for one often worthless because of some undoable step for the other. That said, with the free AdAware, and AVG Antivirus, plus firefox and Thunderbird (and optionally stuff like gAIM) I find windows works very well. It's finicky about hardware, but so is every OS. I can get along in Xp with 128 megs of RAM easily, and 64 if I stay off've the games (with 64megs Gnome is sluggish). I use all that free third party software, and one a nice Vaio machine (1.4GHz P4, 384 megs PC800 RDRAM, Geforce 2 MX; 400MHz FSB *IIRC*).
Then there's FreeBSD, very stable but a less userfriendly than windows or linux or amiga or mac for desktop use. Also less binaries floating around.
I find QNX to be very nice, although you'll have no RAM left for apps, it'll run without swap in under 32megs of RAM, it's very easy to get a basic desktop setup, but I have yet to be able to find all the boot scripts and whatnot so I can't edit them. Like BSD QNX lacks binaries (I know they have linux emu, but that's still a hassle then, yeah yeah yeah GCC Makefile my butt ) :-P
Linux is perhaps put in an unfair light. Amiga OS 3.1 is very old, that's why it can run on a 68000. Windows is rarely upgraded on a machine, and usualyl comes with, so it's rare to find someone whining about Xp on some ancient machine. MacOSX certainly won't run on a 604 either, which is about equivalent to Linux not running on Pentium 1s. QNX is efficient and modern though, and OS4 seems to be too.
My thoughts anyhow, Jeff
