Modern OS?

[Crumb]

A modern OS is an OS that can control Paula, Agnus and Denise natively.

[whabang]

Modern - characteristic of present and recent time; contemporary; not antiquated or obsolete.

A modern OS, is an operating system that is up to date with the latest usage trends and application requirement.

Today, that would be an easy to use and intuitive system with a touch-compatible interface and the ability to run 3d-accellerated applications at HD-resolutions.

That being said, being modern is not the same thing as being good, efficient or easy to tinker with. :-)

[KimmoK]

Modern OS things that we need:
-multicore support
-smart SW shutdown
-more memory protection (if full is out fo reach)
-to be able to use more than 2GB RAM
-thorough 3D support
-better interfaces towards modern tech (bluetooth, etc)

Less critical:
-multiuser support
-OpenCL

There are some things that our niche OSs do better than mainstream Modern OSs, and we should not give away those features (example: responsiveness, light weight).

[gertsy]

How about an OS that is supported to do modern stuff on modern hardware.
On a desktop or Laptop that would be; Burn a HD Bluray disk, Play a fully featured game released last year. Encode a Bluray DVD to a HD MKV file for your HDMI HD Media player in 10 minutes. Home studio quality digital recording, Surf quickly and painlessly. Make a good quality 2 hour home movie in an hour not 2 days.

For a tablet: Ummm  Play PACMAN?

[commodorejohn]

How about an OS that is supported to do modern stuff on modern hardware.
On a desktop or Laptop that would be; Burn a HD Bluray disk, Play a fully featured game released last year. Encode a Bluray DVD to a HD MKV file for your HDMI HD Media player in 10 minutes. Home studio quality digital recording, Surf quickly and painlessly. Make a good quality 2 hour home movie in an hour not 2 days.

You seem to be under the impression that a "modern OS" can magically substitute for hardware might...

[NorthWay]

"Modern" is a bad choice of words. It means one thing for an OS researcher, and another for an enthusiast.

Exec was designed for 128K, 7MHz, and a floppydrive. At that time OS design had included proper management of all system resources for 20-odd years already. Hi-Toro just didn't have the resources available for making it happen.

If you have gigabytes memory, gigahertz processor, and terrabytes storage, you have an expectancy of having all aspects of resource management in place.

Whatever "modern" is, it will at least include what was considered good practice 45-50 years ago. That includes MP, resource tracking, swapping/paging, address virtualization.
Note that none of this means you have to have a traditional unix style fork+exec regime where all processes start from the same address and basically share nothing.

What is ironic in all this is that the Amiga gave the end user many tools and options that felt very fresh and very friendly. Things that you'd think a modern OS could do.

What _is_ modern, and what _feels_ modern is easily not the same.

[psxphill]

Exec was designed for 128K, 7MHz, and a floppydrive. At that time OS design had included proper management of all system resources for 20-odd years already. Hi-Toro just didn't have the resources available for making it happen.

It wasn't just money, the lack of memory protection is baked into the way messages are passed between applications. Passing memory pointers between processes was a conscious decision to make it run quicker. Not only that, the mmu's available back then slowed down every memory access.
 
exec was still the most advanced kernel for a desktop computer or games machine in the mid 80's. None of the competition in that market were even close for many years. Unfortunately the windows/macs evolved and ate the Amiga's lunch. The Amiga was never taken seriously enough to take on Silicon Graphics or Sun, because the design fell short of the workstation market.

[NorthWay]

the lack of memory protection is baked into the way messages are passed between applications. Passing memory pointers between processes was a conscious decision to make it run quicker.

Sharing does not mean not protecting. I recommend checking out research around "SASOS" to see ideas about this. It has become quieter in recent times as it saw interest bloom when 64bit address spaces became commonplace.
The same ideas could have been applied to a 32bit address space when 128K was considered adequate (well, in many ways that is what Exec did, only with non-virtualized addresses, which limits your posibilities).

[nyteschayde]

Important points are interactivity with popular data sharing and productivity software. Part of the reason AmigaOS feels so dated is that its nearly impossible to share, produce or consume data used by other operating systems in an easy manner.

Examples of this are opening, modifying and creating spreadsheets, current video formats (MP4, H.264, FLV, Silverlight, etc..), current audio formats (OGG, MP3 (with good playback), FLAC, FLA, etc..) word documents, open type documents, hell even RTF documents.

We can't really go to most websites which is a huge source of communication these days, you can't consume YouTube or half the time even visit email sites due to a lack of a decent browser; at least not without a serious sacrifice in productivity and usability.

Things like YouTube and GMail seem trivial given the things you can do with AmigaOS but these are the medium through which much communication happens. Even if you get your news form news.google.com or TheVerge or reddit or any of those other sites, we barely support JavaScript and most browsers on the Amiga have no CSS capability at all, let alone the CSS used on current/modern sites.

So long story short, if you can perform your daily routine with only that one operating system and still partake in sharing, consuming and being productive with current data formats then you are likely using a modern OS.

[commodorejohn]

GMail works fine on iBrowse on my 030 system...

[runequester]

In the basic HTML mode, yeah, Gmail works great. I've used it a lot.
It's not fast on an 030 but well, it wouldn't have been fast on a 386 either.

YAM is still my fave email client ever too

Otherwise yeah, compatibility to standards is a problem, but are those OS issues? Is there an inherent reason we couldn't have, say, a more compatible version of APDF, or simple export to .doc format etc in an amiga app ? (assuming there were people to code the damn thing and people willing to sponsor it)

[NorthWay]

Let me try to list a few features I think of as "modern"

- support for hw acceleration of tasks AND using it: a display system knowing and using 3D or other accelerated features, an audio system able to offload effects to hw.

- an integrated object model: what enables you to insert a spreadsheet in your Word document

- a unified storage view: think volume manager or ZFS

- a failsafe storage system: (typically) a journaled filesystem

The last one might not be very modern. And yes, we have that.
For gfx we have 2d help, but the OS has no notion of 3D.
The closest to an object model is datatypes? (not close at all). Not that they aren't a brilliant idea (BeOS is the only other one to pick up that?).