AmigaOS as a hobby or main operating system?

[AmiDelf]

Hello.


What do you really use your Amiga for? Both AmigaOS4 and MorphOS users go on please,...

Amiga 1200
Amiga 3000/4000
AmigaONE
microA1
Pegasos
PegasosII
Efika
PC with AROS
etc...?

Do you use your AmigaOS 3.x, AmigaOS 4, MorphOS or AROS operating system?

What do you use it for?

At which areas can AmigaOS compete with Windows, Linux or MacOSX today?

With OWB for it. Amiga have atleast taken a right step into the others world. But what about all graphis, audio and games etc?

In this thread Amiga people which uses Amiga daily should speak out I know musicians using Amiga still today for money making etc.

Is there someone with PC that takes AROS, which runs it?

Please try not to come with anything negative. What can AmigaOS do today, which the others cant or which AmigaOS compete at a ok level etc.

[persia]

I have a 3000 and a 1200, I use them for games, mainly out of a sense of nostalgia.  I used to do video, photos, 3D rendering, etc on Amigas, but modern hardware & software are just so darn powerful I be foolish to even attempt them on an Amiga nowadays.

It fun remembering the past, maybe writing a little basic.  Sort of like Amateur radio, you can throw an antenna up in a tree and send morse code with a 5 watt transmitter for fun, but if I need to call home I just pull out the mobile.  If my goal is to have a little fun I might try it on my Amiga, but if my goal is to just accomblish the task, I fire up the Mac Pro....

[murple]

AmiDelf wrote:

Do you use your AmigaOS 3.x, AmigaOS 4, MorphOS or AROS operating system?

I have a 1200 and 4000, the 4000 will be my main home system when I get my hands on more memory for it somehow, maybe even a better CPU. Right now its an '040 maxed out with 16MB. I mainly use my 1200 since it has lots of memory and is portable and fully set up.

I run 3.1 on the 1200 and 4000. I have some older Amigas with older OSes but they dont get any use these days.

What do you use it for?

Vintage games, demos (including sometimes in public on a projector)... occasionally just to show people "hey look what this antique can do!" and put it on the internet and play a fancy demo or two.

Just keeping them working can be a fun hobby.

At which areas can AmigaOS compete with Windows, Linux or MacOSX today?

It can compete in seeming cooler to Commodore/Amiga collectors. Other than that, it can't compete and never will. They're old machines, and that's half the fun.

I guess some people might find them easier to use for making music or graphics, but modern hardware can do basically the same thing now. Somebody that's never used an Amiga in that way would probably not see any advantage over newer hardware and software.

[AmigaMance]

@AmiDelf
Check out this thread:
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=39007

[pVC]

Do you use your AmigaOS 3.x, AmigaOS 4, MorphOS or AROS operating system?

MorphOS as my main operating system and AmigaOS as hobby one.

What do you use it for?

For everything I need to do with computers. Internet, music, movies mainly. Classic Amigas for gaming and demos.

At which areas can AmigaOS compete with Windows, Linux or MacOSX today?

MorphOS can compete very well with movie playing MorphOS version of mplayer just works so well out-of-the-box, that I never have had so easy playback on any platform. Even on Windows players suffer for codec hunting, subtitle problems, audio problems etc. I have noticed it many times with same video files on several platforms. Always problematic on Win, Linux, Mac... even mplayer on those platforms suck with default settings with subtitles etc.

Oh and others don't have any chance on fun and quickness of new amigaish systems And everything feels so clumsy and restricted compared to MorphOS if you take count window handling etc usage issues.

With OWB for it. Amiga have atleast taken a right step into the others world. But what about all graphis, audio and games etc?

I guess it can't compete with professional use, but for end users' everyday photo manipulation etc there are good programs on Amiga/MorphOS. ShowGirls is excellent tool for digital photos and older Amiga's paint/image manipulation programs work well enough still.

For gaming, the old good games won't disappear anywhere and there's fresh air for them with WHDLoad etc. But new games is a problem. Games are always made for current mainstream platform. It's same for all marginal platforms.

[AmiDelf]

That's really good. This is exactly my point of this thread. Get the positive out of AmigaOS/MorphOS today. Sure there are areas that AmigaOS/MorphOS should have improved long time ago, but here you write what you like about AmigaOS/MorphOS and if it is a hobby or a operating system that you use daily.

With daily I mean, surfing the web, e-mail, irc, ftp, msn etc.. OWB have made AmigaOS/MorphOS into a new era. Have you started to use your AmigaOS/MorphOS more because of it? Anything.

This is the positive Amiga thread

[murple]

Mplayer works perfectly fine on Linux... and I'm pretty sure it was written on Linux.

We can argue whether or not MorphOS, AROS, AmigaOS 4 etc actually count as Amiga. I don't think they do. If it doesn't run on a machine designed by people working at Amiga/Commodore before it became nothing more than a purchased brand logo when Escom died, it isn't Amiga. These new machines and their new OSes may be Amiga-like in many ways, but they aren't an Amiga any more than DOS & Windows are CP/M.

Doesn't matter for this discussion anyway. Amiga or not, these OSes won't ever be serious contenders because they just don't have enough people working on them. How many years has it taken for an official AmigaOS 4? Does anybody here think any of us will be alive still when AmigaOS 5 comes out? If the various Amiga-like OSes ran on easily available machines and had either rich companies like Microsoft or massive networks of volunteer programmers like Linux, maybe in a few years they could be developed into something as full featured and useful as Linux or Windows. Chances of that happening are near zero, however.

People who expect Amiga to rise again from the ashes of Commodore and Escom to become serious non-hobby machines with popular appeal... it reminds me of 40 year old guys who still wear a football jacket and talk non-stop about when they played ball in highschool, or balding dudes wearing Judas Priest shirts who still listen to nothing but 1980s metal and act like the 80s never ended. It was awesome. We have lots of memories. We have cool souvenirs we can still play with. It's over though, and if you cling to the past too much you'll miss the exciting new things happening in the world.

I think the amateur radio analogy is a perfect one. It's a fun nostalgic hobby (not that I have a radio) and keeping the equipment working and pushing its limits is a nice mental challenge. But would I use that as my main connection to the world? Hell no, I'm going to have a blazing fast cablemodem, DLS, FIOS, or other broadband internet connection hooked up to a shiny new Linux machine.

If your computing needs are limited and an Amiga or a hobby OS meets your needs, great, by all means keep using it if it works. Don't go expecting it to compete in the real world with modern equipment though. The chance for Amiga to be a major OS died long before Commodore died. They missed the window in marketing when the Amigas 500 was still a fancy new computer, and the rest is history.

[redfox]

@AmiDelf

At work I use a laptop PC with Microsoft Windows XP Professional corporate network software.  I use specialized programs to access some corporate databases and web-based tools to access other corporate databases.  It is all strictly controlled and I do not have any admin rights whatsoever for the laptop.

Remember when computing was fun?

At home, I use my MicroA1 / AmigaOS 4.1 system daily for web browsing, email, listening to music files, listening to streaming music from an internet radio site, watching videos, playing a few games, writing with Final Writer 97, tinkering with ARexx programs.  Sometimes I paint or draw with TVPaint or PPaint.  Just having fun.

Even though we also have a laptop PC and two other PC's, I use my MicroA1 the most because it boots up quickly and I can be surfing on the internet before any other the other machines have booted up into XP.

---
redfox

[HopperJF]

I was thinking about this the other day when I looked at my A1200 T gathering dust.
Partly because I just don't have the space damn it, partly because the novelty wore off.
I think anything running 3.9 or lower can only be a hobby machine, 3.9 or lower cannot compete.

OS4 offers a ray of hope
If I am ever to get into Amiga again it will be by moving forward and investing in a SAM with OS 4.x

[Sandman]

Murple, in my opinion you are right-on on this one!

I love toying with this old hardware and nostalgic gaming, etc. but often ask myself how far I want to take this and why?  

I mean, it is easy to get carried-away Amiga wise and lets face it alot of the good stuff is expensive and rare and that makes it fun to hunt down, but in the end it still is a bunch of outdated computer parts that can take alot of room and time.

All said though, I can't wait to see the next Amiga goody at a garage sale, flea market,etc.  I guess some people just can't be cured! :lol:

[pVC]

murple wrote:
Mplayer works perfectly fine on Linux... and I'm pretty sure it was written on Linux.

I've had problems with subtitles (srt, sub) with it on several linux systems. Font sizes, colors etc have been far from sensible and needs some extra tinkering... but maybe some systems are fine by default, but it's been too many times on my case that they don't work properly at all by default. I hate when trying to watch some movies at somewhere else where you might not be able to even tune the system...

[zylesea]

I use MorphOS as my main OS at home. There is only little demand for other things. I surf the web with MorphOS, do my mail (with a continuous archive going back more than 10 years ago), have a chat, listen to music, watch videos, view my photos, write some stuff, do a little programming, have a play, work with gfx, do some musical stuff, read my pdfs.
Of course I also have my win maschine and my Linux maschine and my OS X maschine. But for some reason *I* prefer MorphOS (I use Amiga systems since the late 80ies!) and don't really care if other ppl don't. It does the job reasonable well.
At work it is another issue, Win is the first choice there (but there's WinUAE on the maschine, too).

[mechy]

I have a huge assortments of amiga's here, the main one being a A4000 with mediator,voodoo4 4500,csppc 604e/233-060/60,128Mram,dvd burner,Deneb,sb128,tv card,and such.
This machines runs 24/7 and is used for browsing,email with yam,and burning cd's/dvd's with fryingpan and makecd, as well as scanning(fxscan works well with my epson 1240U usb scanner).
playing with tv paint,imagefx,fxpaint,photogenics,and arteffect sometimes.streaming with aminetradio,and you gotta love turboprint to the network printer via lpr.device.
sabremsn is handy for keeping in touch with friends as well as amigaAIM and JAbber.I still irc on it daily.wish we had a native port of pidgin.Still love HBmonopoly,when i can find some other amigan's to play over the net(anyone!?)

I am about to replace the 18gig UWscsi hd with a 32Gb compact flash card. OWB has come along well for browsing on tough sites but is a bit ram hungry. I play mp3's,and the usual stuff,and whdload for  games. I run morphos,amigaos3.9,and 4,0 on this machine. its run 24/7 for the last 10 years and has been reliable other than 1 HD failure(4 year old seagate UWscsi hd!).

I also have a A4000t escom model im putting together with the other csppc,algor usb,PIV,16GBcf etc. it will get used alot.

I use the 1200,600,other 4000d's,draco vision less,but they do get turned on and used on a semi regular basis.

the 3000t is decked out with a 040 and cv64,amiganet card,etc

my 500 and A1000 are even ethernet capable!the 500 has a gvp Anet 500 ethernet sidecar,and i've hacked a x-surf to the 1000 with a viper 520cd inside(020/33mhz 8M ram,and 3.0 roms) and browsed the net in a glorious 16 colors with ibrowse lol!

I still don't know why most people complain about the cost of amiga hardware,its a great investment,and when/if you decide to sell,you mostly get your money back,and if not close.Granted,csppc's and such are costly.

Theres a dell pc in the next room,but i get little joy from using it,its 3ghz with 4gigs ram,but some things i can still do faster/easier on the amiga.

Enough rambling for now.
to each his own i guess.

Mech
  :-)

[Tomas]

I dont use Amiga OS as my main system, but do have a Sam in my living room for basic web browsing, irc and mp3 playback which i use daily.

The reason i dont use it as a main system, is because it is still a bit to slow for cpu intensive stuff and lacks some software i need.

[Colani1200]

Classic AmigaOS: gaming, demos, tracker music, sometimes IRC
AROS: web browsing, IRC, internet radio, tracker music, emulation (e.g. C-64), learning C...

For anything more serious, I (still) use FreeBSD + Ubuntu. But AROS is slowly catching up...