Most beautiful GUI (OS 4, Windows 8, ...)?

[AmiDelf]

MorphOS should be listed here.

[ElPolloDiabl]

I have a poll to add after this one...

Which OS is more like AmigaOS?

1. BeOS
2. IRIX
3. AmigaOS

[Magitius]

I think my modern OS X desktop looks nicest. After that, in order:

2. MorphOS
3. AmigaOS 4
4. Linux Mint
5. Classic AmigaOS

Not touching any Windows with a 10-foot pole.

[Megamig]

I protest... No Microsoft BOB!

[Kesa]

It's a shame the Atari green os wasn't an option...

Anyway my fav experience with any os gui was using Ubuntu 10.10 so that would be gnome 2. I had mine setup with the Shiki colours theme. I was using a dark grey colour scheme with green stripes in the window/title borders. It was beautiful

[Sean Cunningham]

I have a poll to add after this one...

Which OS is more like AmigaOS?

1. BeOS
2. IRIX
3. AmigaOS

I never used BeOS, though I followed the early BeBox and considered getting one for a while.  IRIX was nothing like AmigaOS though.

The Amiga's desktop was actually useful as a desktop environment.  The "desktop" aspects of IRIX were mostly ignored and the the UI mostly a means to manage all the command shells you would generally have open.  You did everything from command shells.  Unlike the Amiga, or any flavor of Mac or Windows you could not actually "run" an IRIX machine from the GUI or really function in that environment.  They might be there with the most mainstream "pop" distro of Linux but I seriously doubt you could fully utilize or configure or even adequately launch major third party applications strictly from the desktop without the aid of a "high priest" previously creating the illusion that it was functional in that way.

After adding BSD-like tools to my Amiga, a good shell (CSH/TCSH for me) and various text/shell networking and communications tools I started using my Amiga at home more like how I used my SGI at work, but that's bending AmigaOS to work like just about any AT&T + BSD system rather than the two being inherently alike in any way.  It's essentially what I've done to just about every Windows system I've used since working with IRIX though you still have to contend with slashes going the wrong direction under Windows :angry:

At one point I think I even added a shell environment to MacOS 9 and was using some software for a while that made heavy use of TCL.  With the change to OSX it meant I could do everything from the shell like I would generally work on an IRIX or Linux system but it, like the Amiga, had a functionally useful desktop environment too.

[TeamBlackFox]

I have a poll to add after this one...

Which OS is more like AmigaOS?

1. BeOS
2. IRIX
3. AmigaOS

BeOS is sort of like if you took Windows and UNIX and hybridized it between them. Its very pretty looking but I find the entire system lacking in expandability, the design choices are questionable such as using bash as the only UNIX shell ( I was never able to load ksh or zsh on it ) and generally it seems while its very overall efficient, it has cons in the areas of security and it just feels uncomfortable to use. Its a hard feeling to describe.

In contrast to Sean Cunningham's experiences, I find IRIX to be a good balance of console and GUI work. While I do most configuration from the commandline out of habit, its entirely possible to do from within the GUI. I find the Magic Desktop and CDE to be both well designed and I did not prefer NeWS at all, especially because when I used it was under SunOS on a friend's box with a monochrome monitor. It felt very broken but I guess lack of use on a colour monitor may have skewed my views. XSGI is SGI's proprietary implementation X11 which is multi-threaded and well optimized for the hardware. Out of all the proprietary X11 variants its the least broken and the most suitable for GUI use while retaining the benefits of X11 ( network transparency still works when I used it ). Plus I like Motif toolkit honestly then again my Fuel is a pretty fast SGI so on something slow like an Iris Indigo it may be totally different. In general I feel like I'm on a high end Amiga when I'm on my Fuel. Just no floppies or Guru Meditations to deal with.

[Sean Cunningham]

Slow like an Indigo, GTFO.  You're comparing two different eras of SGI.  The Fuel was introduced after SGI had already lost the workstation market, had been dying for years, a decade after the introduction of Motif and SGI's X-Windows based UI.  You're talking about what it is on one of the fastest desktop implementations they eventually built.  Assuming it would be possible, it's almost like a theoretical RTG high bit desktop on an A500 compared with a G5 FrankenAmiga.

My take is from actually living through the real implementation of this stuff as it happened, not through the rose colored glasses of vintage computing.  I used these when these were contemporary workstations and necessary for real work.  SGI 4D to Indigo to Indigo2 to Octane.  I had to actually try to get work done during the transition between 3.x and 4.x and there was a marked difference in performance on the same exact hardware between the two, putting aside aesthetic issues.  Using a post-21st Century model after multiple generations of proc revisions to pick up the slack and absorb the bloat isn't very convincing to me.  I was using machines that worked and could get real work done and then could not, requiring a new, at that time $90K upgrade to the new model to feel pretty much the same as before the new OS came out.

Still.  You could not setup or maintain these systems through the GUI or install and run high end software through the GUI.  No way.  That's what separates a real desktop from playtime with window adornments and icon packages.

[commodorejohn]

BeOS is sort of like if you took Windows and UNIX and hybridized it between them. Its very pretty looking but I find the entire system lacking in expandability, the design choices are questionable such as using bash as the only UNIX shell ( I was never able to load ksh or zsh on it ) and generally it seems while its very overall efficient, it has cons in the areas of security and it just feels uncomfortable to use. Its a hard feeling to describe.

It was a mistake for BeOS to ever try to mimic Unix - a command shell would've been good, but nothing else about the system matches up with the Unix-like paradigm, right down to the fact that it's fundamentally object-oriented while Unix is a conglomeration of processes communicating through pipes. Just terribly misguided - but I suppose this was when POSIX was the New Hotness that everybody wanted to be in on.

I did not prefer NeWS at all, especially because when I used it was under SunOS on a friend's box with a monochrome monitor. It felt very broken but I guess lack of use on a colour monitor may have skewed my views.

NeWS on a color monitor isn't any better - OpenLook is ugly as hell and it's at least as balky as X on my Ultra 1.

[Sean Cunningham]

If someone actually thinks



...is somehow more attractive and elegant than



...I dunno.  That's just boggling.  It's like speaking a different language where "elegant", "bulky", "clunky", etc. all have entirely different meanings in our respective languages.

[commodorejohn]

Ah. With that context, I'd have to agree. I haven't seen that horrible implementation of Motif before, nor that appreciable look for NeWS. I'd only seen the ugly-ass "everything is ovals and corner brackets!" look that Solaris used for OpenLook:

[Sean Cunningham]

I never had to use Solaris.  Our SysAdmin at Metrolight used a B&W Solaris box (Solbourne I think) to manage everything but I can't say I ever did more than a passing glance at it.  But I got about a year's exposure to SGI's implementation of the Sun interface on a variety of 4D hardware and it was simple and elegant and razor sharp.

Applications ignored the baseline UI anyway and always wrote their own, so it was generally just styling for your shell windows and after the first time you sat down in front of one you never ran the demo toys again or giveaway stuff that came bundled.  Then IRIX 4.x started to transition in, likely Summer-ish of '92 and everything changed.  If you didn't get a machine upgrade to one of the new Indigos you often found yourself working overtime so that you could hop on one after someone else had left for the evening, even though you were using the same software as always and now just felt half as productive after the OS change, because of the bloat.

X11 is a pig, no matter how you dress that pig up.  We've just increased resources and computing power to the point that its not as noticeable.  The antithesis of the "Amiga way" things should work, in point of fact.

edit: and though I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, another illustration of the difference in performance between pre and post X11 IRIX is the NeWS version, being Display Postscript, could move whole window contents redrawing them as a solid entity, like NeXT (and that was such a high performance windowing system it could do that on a 68K based system, without fancy accelerated graphics).  You couldn't do that with an X11 system at the time.  Maybe now.  I can only imagine the clearly visible fill-rate for an X11 implementation on a 68K based workstation.  68K SGI Irises just booted to a command prompt, no UI at all.

[TeamBlackFox]

I see what you mean Sean. Honestly I never leave IRIX or Solaris in its default GUI configuration. Once I get my Fuel upgraded and reOS'd and configured I'll take a screencap of the desktop so you can see how I run them. I don't like 4Sight honestly as it reminds me of NeXTSTEP and I dislike that OS a lot. I also despise OS X so definitely different ideals of beauty

[amigadave]

Windows 8 has the worst interface of them all.

I have to agree with that statement a thousand times over!  I don't usually hate anything, but have developed a strong hate relationship with my Win8 laptop (more like portable desktop at 17" LCD and hot i7 CPU, plus dedicated graphics card).

I think that most OS GUI's can be configured to look better or worse than their original state, so this poll is hard to answer.  Of the several different OSes I have here, currently I think that MorphOS and MacOSX are my favorites for visual beauty, with AmigaOS3.9 running the AmiKit enhancements as a close 3rd place contender.  Any of them can be modified to a point where they could easily switch places with the others, and that is where AmigaOS and other Amiga inspired OSes shine brighter than most other mainstream operating systems.

Some of the Linux distros I have seen over the years have been fairly good looking too, and even WindowsXP and 7 were not bad looking.

It is hard to believe something as ugly as Windows3.1 ever became popular enough to dominate, but then it was not the looks, or even the functionality that drove it's popularity to the top.

Sad that the person setting up this poll did not list all of the different Amiga inspired choices first, before running out of available choices.

[agami]

I selected Other.
I could teach a semester as to why but I will try and explain my view briefly herein.

When it comes to GUI not a single OS stands out above the rest. They each have a nicety here and there, and they each fail abysmally at the task of providing a true Graphical USER Interface.

I have seen neat things done in Windows, Mac OS, Mac OS X, Amiga OS, BeOS, NextSTEP, KDE, Gnome, IRIX, Solaris, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone OS. But moreover, the best GUIs I've seen where confined to specific applications, and to further support my view these application GUIs used very little of the native OS GUI.

These applications show us we can have better GUIs, so the only conclusion I can draw is that the OS GUI teams choose not to.

[Sean Cunningham]

I see what you mean Sean. Honestly I never leave IRIX or Solaris in its default GUI configuration...

And perhaps 6.x is a lot better.  By around 2001 I'd worked on my last IRIX box because the R10K was just too slow anymore.  The Quadro and Fire-GL cards in the mostly Intel boxes that replaced SGI at places like ILM, DD, Sony, Disney, Dreamworks, etc. weren't as good as the graphics subsystems available from SGI, not even close, but the days of $90K, $75K, $55K and even $25K workstations were over and SGI just weren't able to keep up in that sector, ironically falling victim to PC technology the same way SGI killed the mini and took a major bite out of mainframe and supercomputer markets not quite 20 years prior.

That's something I don't get, because losing so many customers all at once put them in a major bind there for a while, so much so they had to sell off Alias|Wavefront even though Maya was an industry standard.  They should have become a major player in the graphics accelerator market and killed Nvidia and ATI at the professional level, since they never could be bothered to do pro level drivers.