Does Linux have an Amiga feel?

[Mrs Beanbag]

Well this is a difficult question to answer, since there are so many different "flavours" of Linux, each with a different look and feel (and which can change quite a lot from one version to the next). Sadly I think Ubuntu and its kin have been aiming to copy Windows far too much, but there's no reason the GUI side of things couldn't be made a lot more Amiga-like. There is a lot of scope for getting quite close since it's very flexible, if anyone seriously wanted to put the time into doing it.

I personally use Kubuntu and put my task bar and start menu at the top of the screen instead of the bottom, which makes me feel a little more at home.

[Mrs Beanbag]

But there was UNIX for the Amiga, that was sold with some A3000s, but requires an MMU so wouldn't have worked on the original 68k machines.

Plus X Windows is terrible even today.

[Mrs Beanbag]

I wonder if something like Microsoft's Singularity OS could work on Amiga, it wouldn't need an MMU.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Theoretically, but what would you gain from it? Singularity has no software and runs on a VM, which is never good for performance. The only really interesting thing about it is its eschewing memory protection for some kind of static analysis that prevents access of out-of-process memory at the code level, which is incompatible with Amiga-style message-passing anyway.

Just a thought experiment, not a practical suggestion. If we are going to talk about OS concepts that the Amiga could have had, I said something "like" Singularity, not actually Singularity of course. The point is it is intended to have modern levels of security but achieves this in a single address space, this latter being one of the principles of TripOS. Switching address spaces has a big overhead, as well as requiring MMU which the first Amigas didn't have. So yes. "The only really interesting thing about it" is precisely what I was calling attention to.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Unix comes in a wide variety of vendor-specific flavors - you can of course get free clones (FreeBSD or Linux) that run on any PC...

Talk of Unix "clones" is a bit misplaced since Unix isn't really an OS so much as a standard. It's not a proprietary product as such and an OS doesn't need to be source-code descended from any older Unix in order to be considered Unix.

FreeBSD and Linux are described as "Unix-like" because they adhere to the standards but don't pay for the Unix certification so aren't actually allowed to call themselves Unix. Apple OS X however is significantly based on FreeBSD, but they DO pay for certification, so they can call it Unix.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Actually Unix is a product, you can find the real descendent of Unix for sale here http://www.xinuos.com/
 
You can read about it here.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_OpenServer
 
POSIX is the name of the standard.

Being "descended" from the original Unix is not a requirement for registering to use the Unix trademark. Meeting the standard is. The standard is called the Single Unix Specification. There are Unixes that are products, of course, but no single one of them is exclusively "The Real Unix" no matter what its lineage.
 

...Or you have to use a virtual machine, which means that any code you write will automatically check bounds on every access. This is also quite an overhead too. It would preclude running any legacy software as there is no way of knowing what the bounds should be.

Well given that the thought experiment was about what OS the Amiga could have had, rather than what would be a practical replacement for it today, "legacy code" is really irrelevant since it only exists in the real world, not the hypothetical alternative reality.

[Mrs Beanbag]

These are people for whom "user-friendly" is the same thing as "idiot-oriented;" the kind of people who give the world things like Gnome 3. They don't get usability, they don't get ordinary users, and Linux is never going to get anywhere in the desktop market until they do.

Here here.

Back in the day I used to run Slackware with Fluxbox windows manager, because it ran nicely on my low-spec PC. But it had its shortcomings in the user experience department, so taking up the Open Source spirit I thought I'd delve into it and fix some things myself. And nobody was interested. I added something so simple as a button on the toolbar to return to the desktop, and nobody saw the point of it because there is a keyboard shortcut for that already, why would you want to use the mouse? The word "shortcut" ought to imply that it's supposed to be the alternative way to do things. I had people seriously tell me that since Fluxbox was intended to be lightweight, making it user-friendly was missing the point somehow, and if I wanted usability why don't I just use Gnome or KDE?

So, frankly, as for the "fix it yourself" mentality, well I can do that but if that's the response then screw it. I don't want to spend weeks staring at somebody else's poorly-documented code trying to work out where to put a single line fix that would have taken the maintainers five minutes, only to be told I shouldn't even have bothered.

[Mrs Beanbag]

The big companies are hooked on the idea of renting things to you. I bet the old fashioned way of: have product... a sale... upgrade the product... another sale... product breaks... customer buys a replacement... That must result in more money than renting.

I don't think so. If you're renting they effectively force you to upgrade even if you don't really need to. Well they say "free upgrade!" but guess who's paying for it anyway.

I think the industry would like to move everyone over to tablets etc, they imagine the public never aspire to do anything creative and will buy any sparkly gadget you throw at them, I don't think they're finding it quite that easy though. There's been a resurgence in tinkering lately in the form of the "makers movement". Maybe it's testament to the fact that hobbying all but died out 20 years ago, that the next generation had to invent another name for it.

When we had computers in the '80s we used them for programming and all sorts of stuff, because development was simple and cheap and anyone could do it if they were willing to read a book. Then it became big business and nobody imagined doing it anymore except if you got a degree in it and god a job in the industry. Now in the era of smart device proliferation, anyone can program again. Every web browser has Javascript. You can get Android dev kits for free. There are abstracted high-level languages for everything. And kids are realising, once again, that "hey you can actually do all sorts of cool stuff with computers!" Because you really can, even with a lowly 800MHz Arm, which has more power than was imaginable when we were kids. Hence the Raspberry Pi.

But the fact is, I think, that nobody needs the very expensive top-of-the-range desktop PCs anymore, not just for facebook &c, but for doing cool stuff too. I use a desktop PC myself out of personal preference (it's what I'm used to), it's quite old and it was "entry level" when I got it (I always hated that euphemism for low-spec, I'm hardly a computer novice I'm just aware of how little power I need) but more and more people grew up with laptops, and are used to them. I don't think PCs are anywhere near dead yet, but the days of needing an ominous full tower system under your desk that sounds like a vacuum cleaner are over. Thank goodness.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Well socialism proper is when The People own the means of production, either co-operatively or individually, the Status Quo kind of in a panic now, trying to subvert the inevitable, now they must surely realise that anyone at all can, with the right skills, produce any of the things that they have held a monopoly over in the last few decades.

[Mrs Beanbag]

In the '80s maybe 5% of people had computers, you bought the computer to do creative things, now with everyone having a computer you may still have that 5% being creative, but that leaves the vast majority of computer owners just doing facebook and watching youtube.  There never was a time when everyone wanted to program.  Many people will be quite happy with using their TV to surf the web.

In the '80s 5% of people bought computers to do creative things.
In the '90s 5% of people bought computers to do creative things and 10% of people bought computers to play Quake
In the ''00s 5% of people bought computers to do creative things and 10% of people bought computers to go on facebook
In the '10s 5% of people bought computers to do creative things and 10% of people bought computers to play Skyrim and 10% buy computers to go on facebook.

There will always be that 5%*(citation needed) of people who aren't idiots.

[Mrs Beanbag]

PCs are appliances, like toasters or dishwashers.  People don't buy a dishwasher to be creative, they buy it to wash the dishes.  Most people want to go on Facebook not write HTML5.

What an odd thing to say. You couldn't write HTML5 on a dishwasher even if you wanted.

[Mrs Beanbag]

If I write a new virus today tell me how your anti-virus will protect you against it.

No matter what the OS is the proper solution against viruses is the prompt installation of a patch for the security hole the virus exploits.

Once the OS vendor patches said hole, why would there be any need for an anti-virus program?  It can't protect you against a new virus and there is no need for it to protect against holes that have been patched.

Anti-virus software is just snake-oil.

Exactly this, security against malicious software should properly be the OS's responsibility. Of course that wasn't an option in the bygone age before updates were instantly available from the Internet but there's no excuse for it now.

Sometimes Linux does have its vulnerabilities though, we left our house server without updating it for a while and someone got in and messed it up through a flaw in its particular old version of SSH.

[Mrs Beanbag]

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.

At least you can fix it. Whenever I tried to fix my old XP install I invariably had to resort to re-installing it. The Windows Registry is the work of the devil. Give me human-readable text config files any day. Well I wouldn't call manually editing config files in a text editor "easy" compared to just putting a CD in but it's definitely preferable if you're technically minded enough to feel comfortable doing it, especially since XP didn't seem able to reinstall without deleting everything in Documents and Settings.

Oh and when I had the audacity to upgrade my hard drive. They don't expect you to do that. They expect you to upgrade your entire computer. There is a feature to migrate your files to a new PC, if you happen to have both of them working at once. Migrate from one drive to another in the same PC, sorry never heard of it.

Windows is only easy if you only want to do the things they specifically designed it for.

[Mrs Beanbag]

But if you are going to develop and promote an OS as a desktop OS, its not reasonable that a user should be searching to find the right OS flavour to meet their needs.

The fact it took you 6 MONTHS to find the right OS-if that doesn't scream:"Houston, we have a problem", then I don't know what does!

I think only Ubuntu is really going for that at the moment.

Mind you when people say to me "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" I roll my eyes because, well, whose desktop? I had to get a Windows 7 laptop for work lately and I absolutely hate its guts. It reboots itself without asking, even when the lid is shut! And I had apps open!

[Mrs Beanbag]

How do I get all the software to use human-readable sort in directory listings instead of plain ASCII sort?

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

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 you do it on Amiga?

How do I disable raise-on-focus in window manager Foo, if I want Amiga-style behavior?

Actually this is an option in every window manager I've used. How do you do it in Windows?

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?

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.

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.

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.

At least Linux has a decent terminal, which is more than you can say for Windows. And you can always fall back on old fashioned text mode if your X install breaks.