Does Linux have an Amiga feel?

[psxphill]

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.

Windows has a better shell than Linux.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell
 

I love linux, runs most windows progs fine, amiga programs with uae fine, dos programs with dosbox fine... And of course any linux app.

Windows has better compatibility with Windows software and can also run any Linux app. http://www.colinux.org/
All with industry wide driver support.

[gertsy]

Windows has a better shell than Linux.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell
 

 
Windows has better compatibility with Windows software and can also run any Linux app. http://www.colinux.org/
All with industry wide driver support.

Why?  If you want an OS for an OSs sake than Linux is great, but you might as well use Amiga OS 3.9 in that case.  If you want an OS to actually do stuff, you know productive stuff like video editing and music production you're looking at Mac or Windows. Then it's just a preference on the way you do stuff. I like to right click.

(An HP-UX and Solaris Unix admin for 5 years)

[stefcep2]

To be honest, I wish someone would just use linux as an under the hood solution for drivers and such and simplified everything else, like beos or amigaos on top... AEROS just may be this... But I haven't given it serious time yet...

Its ironical that whilst linux's hardware support is often said to be limited, its wide hardware support is in fact its best asset.  Maybe its only one.

I've said it before that one of the great tragedies of modern computing is that the open source movement chose to support Linux.  

Still for a free system cobbled together, linux is pretty goddam good.

Yes in that context it is.

But for $30 i upgraded an old XP Tablet PC laptop to Windows 8 and it wipes the floor with previous Ubuntu 9.10 in terms of performance, installation time and 100% working hardware and a gazillion quality software options that a double click of the Install icon will achieve.

[psxphill]

Why? If you want an OS for an OSs sake than Linux is great, but you might as well use Amiga OS 3.9 in that case. If you want an OS to actually do stuff, you know productive stuff like video editing and music production you're looking at Mac or Windows. Then it's just a preference on the way you do stuff. I like to right click.

Just in case there is some Linux software that you need to run, that hasn't been ported to Windows. I'm not saying I have a need for it, just that you can.
 

But for $30 i upgraded an old XP Tablet PC laptop to Windows 8 and it wipes the floor with previous Ubuntu 9.10 in terms of performance, installation time and 100% working hardware and a gazillion quality software options that a double click of the Install icon will achieve.

And Windows 8.1 preview is currently free, in case anyone wants to try it on their hardware.

[vidarh]

If you want an OS to actually do stuff, you know productive stuff like video editing and music production you're looking at Mac or Windows.

So "actually do stuff" == "productive stuff like video editing and music production"? That's a ridiculously limited view. I've made my living for the last 17 years "actually doing stuff" almost exclusively on Linux machines. No, I don't do video editing or music production.

Put me in front of a Windows machine, and it feels like you've chopped off my hands. OS X is better, but for my needs I'd still rather have a recent version of Ubuntu any day.

[vidarh]

But for $30 i upgraded an old XP Tablet PC laptop to Windows 8 and it wipes the floor with previous Ubuntu 9.10 in terms of performance, installation time and 100% working hardware and a gazillion quality software options that a double click of the Install icon will achieve.

It is a bit ridiculous to compare the newest Windows with a 4 year old completely outdated version of Ubuntu.

[vidarh]

Windows has a better shell than Linux.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell

You can get object oriented shells for Unix-y OS's too. Nobody tends to use them because they are generally way too verbose to be worth it compared to the standard shells, so "better" is definitively debatable.

Notice how PowerShell syntax has gradually moved towards the brevity of Unix/Linux shells over time..

[gertsy]

It is a bit ridiculous to compare the newest Windows with a 4 year old completely outdated version of Ubuntu.

unfair or incongruous yes, but ridiculous? Probably not.  But in reality 12's not gonna do much more for you than 9.  Same legacy driver challenges will be there, or settling for NdiSwrapper madness. For me family time is more important now. Maybe when I retire. It's a good OS for Octogenarians, nice and steady and smells like moth balls. Will go nicely with my beige cardigan with the vinyl elbow patches.

[Kremlar]

It is a bit ridiculous to compare the newest Windows with a 4 year old completely outdated version of Ubuntu.  

True.  Latest Ubuntu is probably even slower.

[commodorejohn]

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

How do you do it on Amiga?

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.

I'm not talking about the Amiga, because nobody is making the claim that the Amiga OS is so damn flawlessly customizable like haywirepc is claiming for Linux.

And anyway, I'll give an OS a hell of a lot more slack on failure to be consistent when it's an OS that's had to be hacked into even what modernity it approaches by outside developers hooking into system calls. Linux is open-source; what's its excuse?

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.

Precisely.

[Mrs Beanbag]

And anyway, I'll give an OS a hell of a lot more slack on failure to be consistent when it's an OS that's had to be hacked into even what modernity it approaches by outside developers hooking into system calls. Linux is open-source; what's its excuse?

Pretty much the same thing, actually. It IS open source, but they're still tied to legacy stuff for the GUI like X Windows, which goes back to 1984. All the things you complain about (i.e. user interface stuff) run in user mode and have to go through that arcane monstrosity to do anything. It might not technically be "hacked" but if anything it's worse. These things don't have anything to do with the kernel.

[commodorejohn]

Again, a kernel is not an OS. Linux as an OS is much more than just the kernel. But I agree: basically every problem Linux has is down to being stuck on crufty, monstrous legacy frameworks for its userland. The difference is, it didn't have to be that way. It was created from scratch as a hobby project and opened up to community involvement, not hacked into its present state as a guerilla update to a closed-source OS that was effectively abandoned twenty years ago. There's no reason whatsoever that they couldn't have ditched the cruft, designed newer, better frameworks, and implemented compatibility layers to keep old software running. Even Windows could and did do that. The Linux developer community chose to make it what it is; the Amiga hackers didn't have that choice.

As stefcep2 says, it's a tragedy that twenty years of the time, energy, and zeal of the open-source movement have gone into recreating an assemblage of legacy cruft built around a system architecture from the 1970s. Imagine if that time had gone into a project along the lines of BeOS instead...

[Crumb]

It is a bit ridiculous to compare the newest Windows with a 4 year old completely outdated version of Ubuntu.

All linux versions are outdated, they all feel like a 70's OS compared to any AmigaOS flavour



@stefcep2:

I've said it before that one of the great tragedies of modern computing is that the open source movement chose to support Linux.

Indeed! All their efforts seem to be splitted between making a monolithic monster for servers and making horrible GUIs unconnected to the real OS that try to mimic badly the worst inventions of Microsoft & Apple

[haywirepc]

In truth there have been many times I threw the towel in and just went back to windows for alot of my needs. Now I use linux for 90% of things though.
Linux can be awfully aggravating till you get the hang of it.

Still use windows for video editing, because the apps available are just better.

But In the end its about feeling comfortable. I think maybe if I put half the time into customizing windows as I have had with windows, I'd be just as happy. Somhow I've never done that in windows because I just don't like windows in general... But could be done.

Windowblinds, rocket launchbar and some other stuff can make it more appealing... But I don't know I just prefer linux, even with all of its trappings and downsides. Can't stand constantly running spyware sweepers and stuff like that in windows, makes me worry about my data alot.

None of that in linux and also...
I don't know I also just enjoy compiz too, yes I actually use it...

[vidarh]

unfair or incongruous yes, but ridiculous? Probably not.  But in reality 12's not gonna do much more for you than 9.  Same legacy driver challenges will be there, or settling for NdiSwrapper madness. For me family time is more important now. Maybe when I retire. It's a good OS for Octogenarians, nice and steady and smells like moth balls. Will go nicely with my beige cardigan with the vinyl elbow patches.

My experience with 12 is that I've had some problems with one obscure Chinese scanner, but on the other hand Ubuntu supports my printers right out of the box, while Windows requires a 250MB download to get one of them set up.

Drivers was a big deal 5-10 years ago, or if you pick up no-name unknown hardware from China or something released in the last week without checking if it's compatible first.

Other than that, driver support is often *better* than Windows these days, especially for older hardware.

[vidarh]

All linux versions are outdated, they all feel like a 70's OS compared to any AmigaOS flavour

Frankly, while there are still lots of things I love with AmigaOS and miss in Linux, this is a downright ridiculous statement to make. It takes a *huge* amount of tweaks to AmigaOS to get a system that is anywhere near as usable as most modern Linux distro's, and you'll still have huge holes.

Already in '89 or so while using AmigaOS extensively, my system was tweaked beyond recognition to get to the experience I enjoyed, and it was still in most ways substantially inferior to most modern Linux distros.

Invest the same effort in tweaking a Linux distribution now, and you end up with something vastly more polished. And if you like you could end up with something substantially closer to an Amiga experience.

Sure, there are still things modern mainstream OS's lack, or are just "reinventing" now (the parallel between workspaces and increasing use of fullscreen apps to screens for example, is quite amusing and satisfying; and Ubuntu's switch to a global menu bar likewise), but the pale in comparison to the features that are lacking, such as proper memory protection and full support for virtualization (I have a dozen or so lightweight virtual machines running on my home machine) or full fledged package management.

I'd love to be able to use a more Amiga-ish OS as my main OS, but before that can happen, either AROS or AmigaOS would need to take a lot *more* stuff from Unix/Linux, or more Amiga-like features would need to be ported to Linux; there's no way I'd be able to go give up all the things I've come to expect in an OS after using Linux.

(I say *more* stuff would need to be taken from Unix/Linux, because already with the first handful of Fish disks in the 80's we were getting a steady stream of Unix ports)