Bloatware AmigaOS?

[uncharted]

Reading through some of the comments in the OS X Leopard thread decrying OS X as bloatware got me thinking.

Is AmigaOS really mean and lean because of its design philosophy or is it more to do with its situation?

If you think about it, could it be that AmigaOS is so lean because it was never given the resources by Commodore and has been left to rot ever since?  

Back in the early 90's AmigaOS was, size-wise, on a par with MacOS.  Could it be that had development continued with a decent amount of resources that AmigaOS would be as fully featured and as large as modern OSes?

Perhaps, the "efficiency" crown jewel of the community in nothing more than a symptom of undernourishment and wasted potential.

Discuss.

[Roj]

The mouse driver distribution for my Logitech cordless is just over 60 megabytes. That's just a mouse driver. I think it's the other way round. From that, it looks like Windows lacks the resources and needs special help to get a mouse to have proper behavior.

[HellCoder]

Thanks to windows the complexity of an OS has increased alot. Shadow fading windows, 3D rotating stuff. Compatibility with older OS's. This adds alot of functionality and is never good for the speed. If AmigaOS continued to evolve I'm sure it would be slower, but machines would be faster.

Unless the OS is kept clean and anything you add isn't part of the OS but just a commodity, than it could be small and quick.

[hamtronix]

TinyXP gave me no problems and was vastly shrunk in size...

[Speelgoedmannetje]

hamtronix wrote:
TinyXP gave me no problems and was vastly shrunk in size...

Still 200 megs...
Pity I haven't got the time to install it though...

[itix]

Is AmigaOS really mean and lean because of its design philosophy or is it more to do with its situation?

Kickstart 3.1 was shipped with six DD floppies and you could boot to full Workbench from single floppy. It ran on an Amiga 500 (68000/7MHz) with 1MB RAM. Try this with HP's OS 3.5 or 3.9!

Today we could not imagine MorphOS or OS4 running with so little.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Though it's a good question, which I have been thinking about before, there's one thing that made me conclude: BeOS. As tiny as 10 megs (a 500 megs image, where the rest of the megs are being used as BeOS formatted disk space, which could be ran from Windows), compared to the 300 megs of Windows 98 at that time, and it had a HUGE functionality, it even supported my tv card as standard, back then. It was super fast too. I loved that OS to bits.
Pity it's today obsolete, not supporting my usb keyboard, usb harddisks and other hardware. But back then, everything worked out of the box :-D

Just wiki'd it, and I saw it has been made by former apple developers. And it has been adopted by Palm. Another manufacturer whom's OS I love :-)

[Hans_]

@uncharted
Interesting idea. I think that the efficiency benefits are also visible on higher-end systems. Being forced to be efficient may definitely be a contributing factor. Having said that, I'm convinced that the base system design was efficient to start with.

I'm currently working on schemes to get around memory bandwidth limitations. If I had a brand new machine, it probably wouldn't be necessary. However, the schemes (work in blocks that can be kept in the CPU caches, nothing new really) will also benefit faster systems. Maybe all developers should be given a machine with restricted resources, and told to make it work usably on that.

Hans

[Paradox]

The AmigaOS os is the most simplified structure and therefor can be advanced upon much further than any other OS.

Therefore I agree that AmigaOS could be the most efficient and resource saving OS ever.

I think it would be best if we all had the same system specs as eachother or near as possible that way we cn path the future more lavishly.

Every other OS is bullied by services, dll's, paging, virtual memory which is no good for a disk based OS.

The only way Amiga should have paging is if its run from solid state or actual ram or in an embedded environment similar to QNX.

DEATH TO SPINNING DISKS

Regards

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Paradox wrote:

DEATH TO SPINNING DISKS

Regards

Don't you want to say that out loud, plz? :nervous: I haven't backed up my harddisks yet :nervous:

[hardlink]

Hans_ wrote:
...Maybe all developers should be given a machine with restricted resources, and told to make it work usably on that.

That was literally the case with the BeBox developers. The machines had two processors, but they were only allowed to have around 16 Mb RAM installed (look it up).

[mdwh2]

Back in the 80s/90s, AmigaOS was a lot more efficient than DOS/Windows, and even MacOS to some degree (Macs couldn't really get far without a hard disk, for example). So this claim isn't just comparing to modern machines.

I'm sure if Commodore hadn't gone bust, modern Amigas would have higher system requirements, but obviously it's impossible to judge something which never happened. OS X isn't even the same OS as Mac OS of the 80s/90s anyway, so one can't really say that Mac OS grew more bloated, rather Apple ditched it for another OS. Who knows, if Commodore hadn't gone bust, modern Amigas might be running the bloated Vista... (I believe the plans for next generation Amigas at one time included HP Risc machines running Windows NT?)

[stefcep2]

Iif there's one thing I have learned over the years is that software will always grow to fill the hardware.  Amiga hardware has been caught in a 1993 time-warp, so the OS and software run within these hardware constraints.  It gets interesting if you emulate some of the different Amiga OS distributions out there:  Amikit looks like the most modern AmigaOs you can get in terms of eye candy and "features" but it is far slower than Amigasys or classic amiga, which aren't as "feature" rich.  Still, the Amiga would have bloated over time, but not nearly as much as X86.  Don't forget the X86 hardware platform is basically designed to suit the windows way of doing things ie its windows that demands the hardware be designed to suit it, not that windows is made to run on the hardware.  Much of the efficiency that comes from the Amiga is because the hardware and os are tightly integrated together.  But you can't get that with generic mass produced hardware, it has to be propriatory and no users  want that because its expensive eg remember the powerpc macs cost nearly twice as much as equivalent PC hardware at the time.

[Agafaster]

Really, it all boils down to this:


"Necessity is the mother of invention."

cos most amigas had a 7MHz processor, and half a meg of RAM, coders and developers got good at fitting a lot into relatively little.
but there was a time when I thought 48K was a lot !

[AmiKit]

@stefcep2

Amikit looks like the most modern AmigaOs you can get in terms of eye candy and "features" but it is far slower than Amigasys or classic amiga, which aren't as "feature" rich.

http://www.amikit.amiga.sk/benchmarks.htm