Open Source Amiga OS

[spirantho]

 I was drawn to Linux in the hope i would find a system as responsive and as resource efficient as my 68060 A4000. I was told windows was inefficient and bloated compared to Linux.  Well thats bull****.  Windows XP blows out of the water every full featured distro I've tried.

The days of the popular Linux distros being faster and more efficient are long gone, I'm afraid. Most of the Linux distros like Ubuntu are now actually substantially less responsive than Windows! They've tried so hard to beat Windows they've lost their man in advantage.

That said, I believe there are Linux distros which are centred around speed and responsiveness, and a light weight. Take a look at some of the smaller distros and you may find one more suitable for you.

[bloodline]

Inskcape and Gimp, Blender is very cool programs. Takes a few turns to master them, especially Blender but complaining about UI's is like complaining about other peoples rugs. They might look awkward to you at first, but have another look at them and you may start to like them.

+1 three of the most amazing pieces of software I didn't have to pay for!

Sadly Learning to use blender is like tying to shave your eye balls, but the program is phenomenal in its power!

GIMP is just slow and Inkscape is buggy, though both of these criticisms are aimed at their interfaces rather than the software directly, as I run all three on a Mac and the non native interface is jarring.

[ncafferkey]

AROS may be an alternative that is modern to AOS, but it just doesn't seem as fast and responsive as AOS. Now that I know that AOS was written in Assembly(I thought it was C and Asm combo), I suppose that the genuine 68k code really doesn't do anyone any good since the instruction sets are different.

AOS *is* a C and Asm combo.

(If anyone can help and show me how to make AROS as fast as AOS, I'm all ears. I tried it and was completely lost from the door, so I didn't really give it a fair shake, so to say.)

What aspects of AROS did you find slow? What kind of PC did you try it on?

[ncafferkey]

a user/developer culture that lives by the mantras ... "you don't need that,"

Some companies have that attitude too, e.g. Apple.

[Manu]

No. Just no. Blender is insane, though at least they're making efforts to get better. GIMP is just wretched. I've gone over it in detail in another post, but really it's just inexcusably bad. It doesn't even know where its own windows are. That's braindead. GIMP displays every symptom of having its UI hacked together by programmers who really only care about the backend functionality and only include an interface as a begrudging concession in order to get people to actually use their software, and while it's an extreme case that's really true of the vast majority of Linux software to one extent or another.

Blender is hard to master no doubt about that. But I didn't expect a 3D application to be easy to learn at all. Imagine on Amiga was hard at first too. Only after a few tutorials one could get satisfying result. It's all about how hard you want to learn or not. Complaining abut UIs just because you don't have time or will to learn is pointless.

I could also complain about the syntax of C, or C ++, I never really learnt how to master coding in C. It must be because the language is too complicated, right ? It has nothing to do with my desire wanting to code, has it ? Had I cared enough then I'd learnt it is my point.

You can put some Photoshop look on GIMP if that's what you long for. That wouldn't do any good for me cause I never had the time to learn Photoshop. Guess it must be because Photoshop's UI sucks :-)

[commodorejohn]

Blender is hard to master no doubt about that. But I didn't expect a 3D application to be easy to learn at all. Imagine on Amiga was hard at first too. Only after a few tutorials one could get satisfying result. It's all about how hard you want to learn or not.

I might buy that if 3D Studio Max and even friggin' Moray weren't a hundred times more intuitive and sensible.

Complaining abut UIs just because you don't have time or will to learn is pointless.

I could also complain about the syntax of C, or C ++, I never really learnt how to master coding in C. It must be because the language is too complicated, right ? It has nothing to do with my desire wanting to code, has it ? Had I cared enough then I'd learnt it is my point.

And here we go again with this line of argument that "you're not allowed to complain about something being overly complex and unintuitive because it just has a steep learning curve and you must not want it hard enough." You've got it backwards: it has a steep learning curve because it is overly complex and unintuitive. C is fundamentally intuitive and easy to understand once you grasp a few simple principles like pointers that are ignored in most of the "teaching" languages; the same cannot be said for Blender or the GIMP.

You can put some Photoshop look on GIMP if that's what you long for. That wouldn't do any good for me cause I never had the time to learn Photoshop. Guess it must be because Photoshop's UI sucks :-)

If you think that making one program look like another program equals changing its interface, you will never understand the difference between good and bad UI. It's not how it looks, it's how it behaves.

[Thorham]

I might buy that if 3D Studio Max and even friggin' Moray weren't a hundred times more intuitive and sensible.

Not to mention that 3D Studio, like most Autodesk software, has free licenses that last three years and can be renewed for free. No need for Blender, unless you want to use the software commercially.

[Manu]

I might buy that if 3D Studio Max and even friggin' Moray weren't a hundred times more intuitive and sensible.

So who said there couldn't be differences. Once you learn how to do things you get along with it. Take a look what they accomplish with Blender. They wouldn't have done half of what they've done if it where 100 times harder to do. You make it sound like it's no point in using Blender. Of course it is, just because you have a hard time learnin how to use it doesn't automatically mean your neighbour has too.

And here we go again with this line of argument that "you're not allowed to complain about something being overly complex and unintuitive because it just has a steep learning curve and you must not want it hard enough."

And here we go again with commodorejohn telling the utter thruth so there can be no other truth. If you haven't manage render one image with blender yet then you haven't tried hard enough. That's just it.

You've got it backwards: it has a steep learning curve because it is overly complex and unintuitive. C is fundamentally intuitive and easy to understand once you grasp a few simple principles like pointers that are ignored in most of the "teaching" languages; the same cannot be said for Blender or the GIMP.

You see problems where there's none. I don't say GIMP is the sharpest tool in the box but you can do lots of nice things with it. And since it's free why don't learn to use it. The same with Inkscape, it's really simple to use and makes amazing results. And it doesn't cost a dime for you to learn. Many times I use PaintNET instead of GIMP when I don't need the features GIMP has, when I need less work done. Again PaintNET an excellent tool, free to use. Just learn how to use it.

If you think that making one program look like another program equals changing its interface, you will never understand the difference between good and bad UI. It's not how it looks, it's how it behaves.

No I must be dumb then because I thought User Interface meant the Interface, buttons, sliders presented to the user and how to activate/combine them to get desired results. Instead we seem to be talking about rendering alogritms and god knows what then.

[commodorejohn]

So who said there couldn't be differences. Once you learn how to do things you get along with it. Take a look what they accomplish with Blender. They wouldn't have done half of what they've done if it where 100 times harder to do. You make it sound like it's no point in using Blender. Of course it is, just because you have a hard time learnin how to use it doesn't automatically mean your neighbour has too.

Contrariwise, just because my neighbor invests an assload of time in learning Blender's arcane interface doesn't mean that it was a good use of time and he wouldn't have been better served spending that time to learn his way around the actual functionality of a program with a saner, cleaner UI.

The fact that people can use a tool for something doesn't make it necessarily a good tool. Political prisoners have written on cell walls with their own crap; they still would've been better off with a pen and paper.

And here we go again with commodorejohn telling the utter thruth so there can be no other truth. If you haven't manage render one image with blender yet then you haven't tried hard enough. That's just it.

This is like saying that if I haven't managed to break through a wall by banging my head against it, I just need to bang harder. Strictly speaking it might be true, but wouldn't it make more sense to use a sledgehammer?

You see problems where there's none. I don't say GIMP is the sharpest tool in the box but you can do lots of nice things with it. And since it's free why don't learn to use it. The same with Inkscape, it's really simple to use and makes amazing results. And it doesn't cost a dime for you to learn.

I never bad-mouthed Inkscape, because I've never used Inkscape. But the fact that you can accomplish good results with the GIMP means only that its backend functionality is good, which I never disputed. It's still a giant pain in the ass to use.

No I must be dumb then because I thought User Interface meant the Interface, buttons, sliders presented to the user and how to activate/combine them to get desired results. Instead we seem to be talking about rendering alogritms and god knows what then.

What. I was never talking about algorithms or backend functionality of any sort. What I said was that skinning GIMP to look like Photoshop won't make its UI behave like Photoshop. It'll still be a half-assed, incomplete clone of Photoshop's UI.

[nicholas]

Ladies!

Just use the tools that fit your workflow best, whatever they may be. End of.

[nicholas]

AROS may be an alternative that is modern to AOS, but it just doesn't seem as fast and responsive as AOS. Now that I know that AOS was written in Assembly(I thought it was C and Asm combo),

It is. (Pre-2.0 it was full of BCPL too).  MorphOS, OS4 and AROS are all rewrites of the OS in mostly C.

If you are a coder you could sign up to the AROS Dev mailing list and volunteer your services to help Toni and Jason improve the performance of 68k AROS.

https://www.hepe.com/mailman/listinfo/aros-dev/

[ElPolloDiabl]

Amiga also has forks. From the beginning people wanted non-Amiga features.

I like things like enhanced icons and hi-res desktop. I don't like pop-up help. I didn't like pop-up menus, but I don't mind them now.

If you want to remain Amiga pure, everything should remain simple. Any adjustments should be put in and done in the prefs. The startup-sequence should remain editable.

I think some people would hijack AmigaOS and turn it into Windows, while still calling it Amiga OS. I can guess that the only reason is out of spite, or else they would be using Windows.

Thanks, I'm with the let's dumb down Amiga and add as much bloat as possible crowd. When it reaches 10GB in install size people will be saying, "When are they going ditch some of the legacy drivers. It makes the OS slow."

[commodorejohn]

I think some people would hijack AmigaOS and turn it into Windows, while still calling it Amiga OS. I can guess that the only reason is out of spite, or else they would be using Windows.

This is, of course, in stark contrast to the people who hijacked AmigaOS and turned it into Linux, which we all know is the Only True Future of the Amiga.

[slaapliedje]

This is, of course, in stark contrast to the people who hijacked AmigaOS and turned it into Linux, which we all know is the Only True Future of the Amiga.

I've always pretty much figured the only 'real' future of the Amiga OS is AROS, 1) it's open source, so even if the current developers die, or whatever, it'll be out there for people to pick up and work on.  2) supports the most hardware platforms.  

Regardless of how awesome AmigaOS 4 and Morphos are, eventually there'll be no PPC chips/boards for them unless we start getting them ported to IBM i or pSeries.  And if people thing the X1000 is expensive...

Only other way would be if some company could get all the manufacturing rights for 68k and PPC line to start making their own processors / boards specifically for the Amiga.  Then maybe there could be a continuation of Amiga compatible OSs.  Since an operating system doesn't mean jack without hardware.

If AmigaOS4 would become open source and could be ported to ARM or x86/64 then maybe it'd have more of a chance.  You could still require physical kickstarts and replace the UEFI systems that are common to the newest motherboards, to have 'real' Amigas.  

I came real close to buying a Mac back in 2005, only because I wanted a PPC based system, but then Apple right around that time had announced that they were going Intel, so I gave up on that idea.  It's also a shame that the Amiga doesn't work on a Coldfire.  That would have been another possibility.

Just a quick note on those previously in the thread that said they had so many issues with dependencies in Linux, and that Aminet makes it easy for the Amiga...

I would LOVE apt-get for Aminet... 'apt-cache search gcc' 'apt-get install gcc' and have it fetch all the geek gadgets stuff and install and configure gcc for me?  that would be AWESOME!

I did see fink on Aminet (which basically is what the Mac uses for debian style awesome) but it was really old, and the notes on it said it didn't work all that well anymore.

I've also found that for the Amiga there is Aminet (huge, and is awesome) but then much like Debian, there are bits and pieces that are required for smooth running all over the Internet.  To be able to apt-get Samba, and SSL support, and nfs, etc would be fantastic.  As it is a few bits of Amiga software are still in git or svn repositories and people have to set up a full development system just to use them (like anfs).

slaapliedje

[Linde]

I use Linux and loads of free software, and I'm enjoying it. Using a package manager surely beats downloading an installer or a zip file as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure what package manager you are using, commodorejohn, but to me, "dependency hell" means that pacman will display a list of required packages and prompt me to install them. Admittedly, I don't use software like photoshop or any 3D modeling software, but as a developer, I can say that to me, both professionally and personally, free software has been all great. I modify and incorporate components of other software as far as the licenses permit, I port existing software to officially unsupported platforms and I learn from reading freely available source code. Open source and free software is a huge resource however you look at it.

And hey, let's just mention things like nginx, apache, gcc, python, linux, gecko, webkit -- you'll find that free, open source software supports the bulk of the very infrastructure you use to call its proponents "freetards". From this site running apache, to your router most likely running Linux and into your browser.

[ElPolloDiabl]

The coldfire is interesting, but cold you get the same speed from 68060
at 100mhz?
While we are at it can we have an FPGA implentation of AGA for people still on an A500 or A2000. If you can get at least a 1000 people interested, the project is worth doing.