What's so great about AmigaOS?

[smoorke]

http://aminet.net

[Fingerlickin_B]

Originally Posted by twizzle

dont you mean disasemble / take apart / dead ooooohhhh amiga No5 is alive

GOLD!

[TCD]

What blackcornflake and ppill said pretty nicely sums it up Well guess the robustness wouldn't be at the top of my list
I really like the idea of icons only for the 'important' files for the user and that you can 'thin' the OS to your needs pretty much as you like it

[klx300r]

Originally Posted by alexh

Dunno what AmigaOS you've got but OS3.9 on my A4000D takes ages to load from cold. My XP system with 3-disk RAID5 loads much much faster.

1200 running 3.5, Blizzard 030@50 with 32MB, Indivision AGA, 2 GB CF as HD0

[tin]

Fast boot (don't care what you say AlexH my 1200 always booted in 15 sec with a crappy old IDE HD, and my XP with two disk raid 5 still boots in times measured in whole minutes)

The transparency, couple of e.g's: Startup-sequence for stuff that's starting up on boot, Libs go in libs: devs in devs: etc (compare linux - is it /usr/local/bin or /usr/local/sbin or /var/this that and the other? argh I dunno!). Snoopdos would weed out what was missing in seconds (try that on Windows - bazillions of OS calls per second) Libraries that were ACTUALLY shared (seen how many .dlls on your win system?)

Robustness IS on my list - basically if you had an app that twatted into the memory of others it did not get used for long - forced better programming and no enourmous waste of CPU checking the memory accesses were allowed.

That said - Crashing also very nice. Crash, quick guru, reboot, back to where you were. Better once they remove the necessity to press the LMB

User interaction - having the OS drive a programs' GUI and not the program itself was genius - made the system feel much more responsive even when it wasn't - the screen updated even if the app would not. And none of the system thinking you clicked on something that wasn't even there when you clicked (even bloody tomtom sat navs do this!). None of the window repainting problems that win STILL suffers with either.

Multitasking - I still maintain I have seen NOTHING that can genuinely multitask as well as the Amiga OS, although I am REALLY not sure why that is. As a small example, look especially at the apps that do graphics/video. You will see stuff running at 50fps and NOT juddering, jerking, pausing for thought. Even video display systems run by very fast PCs as so often the case these days will run at 33 1/2 fps or something slightly out, and every now and again they'll pause briefly for a little think when something complicated happens - like maybe accessing a file on a share or something

Files being identified by what's in them rather than the three letters on the end. I thought this was SUCH a good idea and really can't understand why it's not more prevalent.

Fast off. Make sure your files are saved, wait a sec, and power the thing off. None of this "shut down" bollocks. "Shut down" is NOT a task that I ever WANT to do!!


Yeah I agree with some on here, the addons to make AmigaOS come into the '90s (never mind the '00s) have made it flakey and unreliable. TBH that's probably why windows is so bad - it's still fundamentally the original thing with millions and millions of addons bolted onto it. The original underlying OS (up to 3.1 I'd say) was still very beautifully done. It astounds me that a 50mhz 020 Amiga with 16 meg of RAM can feel more responsive than a 2ghz dual core beast running Vista.

Wow that turned into something of a rant. sozzer about that

[Parsec]

I think it was because it was ahead of its time too. WB 1.3 on my A500 was what impressed me the most, it could do amazing things at the time and was a much better UI than Windows 3.1 which came years later, plus it multitasked a lot better. Later on, my friends A1200's didn't impress me quite so much, it was still good but not as groundbreaking.

When I got my first PC I thought Win 3.1 was rubbish compared to my Amiga. They even had 2.0 at my college and that was unbelievably bad.

Windows 95 changed things a lot though, they finally got the UI right, and although you could tell it was still an OS bolted on top of another, I thought it was pretty good from a usability point of view. I'm not convinced a lot of the changes they've made to the Windows UI over the years have been good. I think the UI peaked with Windows 2000 myself.

[Oscar Castillo]

It was great compared to anything available at the time, but those days are long gone.

[Amiga1992]

Whoever wants and believs a comeback of the Amiga will happen in some sort of way or the other, are as hopeless as those expecting Jesus or Aliens or Whatever come back to save us.

Poor zealots.

I love my Amiga and I really liked the OS (still one of my faves, I Admire the simplicity and tidiness of the system structure... look at a messy unixish system to flee in horror), but zealotry pisses me off, and is what allowed 'phony' incarnations of Amiga inc. to extend the agony of teh system and make a quick buck out of these idiots and bury the Amiga name under miles and miles of elephant shit.

[klx300r]

Originally Posted by Akira

Whoever wants and believs a comeback of the Amiga will happen in some sort of way or the other, are as hopeless as those expecting Jesus or Aliens or Whatever come back to save us.

ahhh I think you posted in the wrong thread

Wow - great to read everyone's opinions. I guess the general consensus is that it was ahead of its time, but showing its age now. I definitely would agree with both of those points.

The transparency aspect is great, I agree. It's feels "manageable" - i.e. it feels like you could really understand how it all works, and all the component pieces - something that you'd be hard pressed to do with a more modern OS.

[blade002]

Originally Posted by pubzombie

Hi Tinto,
I am a gamer, I was a gamer when the very first electronic games arrived and have had em all over the years. The amiga and c64 were/are my favourites. I never did anything with my miggy's other than play games, I may have formatted a few disks back in the day, but thats all. Having a miggy again is great, but i hate the OS!! I can build a peecee and upgrade drivers and encode video etc but cant do diddlysquat with amiga, and its just not intuative either.
games, me want games
pz

The Amiga OS was really quite relatively painless back in the day and in my opinion very easy to use , its just because you were kind of forced to use PeeCee's and use drivers to run games that you know how to use a Windows system, but installing software and getting things to run on the Amiga really was and is a piece of cake.

And for those games that were not meant to be installed on the HD (as in no install script) and were Amiga DOS disks (unprotected), it just meant a manual install, so you would copy all the game files to a directory on the HD and then assign each disk.

For example, in the user startup, it kind of went.

assign realmsdisk1: dh1:games/realmsofarkania
assign realmsdisk2: " " ... etc

Shared libraries were another great idea, with you simply copying a new library to the libs directory and then if you had the same library that you were copying across or the install was copying it across it would simply ask you "if it was the latest version" if you would like to overwrite it.

Anyway... in a nutshell, the Amiga OS was beautiful to use and as simple as anything, but yep, today its well behind the times

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by klx300r

ahhh I think you posted in the wrong thread

Nope, however, you may suffer of attention disorder, for you missed this bit:

Originally Posted by tinto

One thing that has surprised me, though, is how many people still love AmigaOS and hope for its return in some way

Look, I put it in bold for you and all.

[klx300r]

Originally Posted by Akira

Nope, however, you may suffer of attention disorder, for you missed this bit:

Look, I put it in bold for you and all.

yes indeed you did....now if you only read the other 30 posts...1 comment in one post does not justify such a generalization..at least according to these tired eyes...need some sleepy time now

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by klx300r

1 comment in one post does not justify such a generalization

I made no generalizations, what I said was precisely pin-pointed.

[Fred the Fop]

Originally Posted by Akira

Whoever wants and believs a comeback of the Amiga will happen in some sort of way or the other, are as hopeless as those expecting Jesus or Aliens or Whatever come back to save us.

Poor zealots.

I love my Amiga and I really liked the OS (still one of my faves, I Admire the simplicity and tidiness of the system structure... look at a messy unixish system to flee in horror), but zealotry pisses me off, and is what allowed 'phony' incarnations of Amiga inc. to extend the agony of teh system and make a quick buck out of these idiots and bury the Amiga name under miles and miles of elephant shit.

You and I have been fighting zealotry in here for a while.Most of those we tried to reason with and failed have seen the light, 4 or 5 years later.
Hell, how many people do we both know now that praise Mac OSX and have abandoned Windows? Too many to count.
People need time to see the light I guess.

[exoticaga]

Vitual Memory kills the pc for multitasking still, and causes many video playback glitchyness that has been mentioned here.

Use every pc without vm, and you will have no such video problems. Though it still won't make multitasking better, but may help.

The amiga was designed very well to multi task. A modern pc still has a hard job to do so, needs at least 64bit (or better) lots of cpu cores, real memory etc.

The amiga only became good with added cd, hd, MHz and more memory. Shame it was a locked architecture, that left no room for further upgrades for console users. And had to modify amiga into a tower just to add extra bits needed. Then still you needed a gold reserve to buy all the extra bits that you needed.

For a games machine it was good in the day, against todays games machines for graphics, speed and sound not so good. For original game play it still a good games machine.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by tin

don't care what you say AlexH [snip] my XP with two disk raid 5 still boots in times measured in whole minutes

There is no such thing as two disk RAID5!

Originally Posted by tin

Multitasking - I still maintain I have seen NOTHING that can genuinely multitask as well as the Amiga OS, although I am REALLY not sure why that is.

I just remember it being crap as almost everything in the GUI was a blocking operation. Not being able to do anything until the GUI had finished reading a directory and drawing the current folder.

Originally Posted by tin

As a small example, look especially at the apps that do graphics/video. You will see stuff running at 50fps and NOT juddering, jerking, pausing for thought.

Probably cos it had 50Hz video output. Setting a 50Hz video output on your PC does wonders also. WinUAE at 50Hz = Smooth scrolling

Originally Posted by tin

Even video display systems run by very fast PCs as so often the case these days will run at 33 1/2 fps or something slightly out, and every now and again they'll pause briefly for a little think when something complicated happens - like maybe accessing a file on a share or something

I do think that games do suck on the PC without VSync enabled. I hate screen tearing. I'd much rather use a lower resolution with VSync on and AA enabled running at 50fps than 1600x1200 at 33.3

Talking about video apps (i.e. watching movies) any stuttering is more likely to be the software trying to keep the video and audio in sync, compensating for a 75Hz screen refresh and a 23.9Hz video source. Windows does "scratch" itself now and again but I would say it is more likely to be crappy video replay software coupled with unfriendly screen refresh rate.

Originally Posted by exoticaga

Vitual Memory kills the pc for multitasking still, and causes many video playback glitchyness that has been mentioned here.

You think that is what it is? I think it is more likely poor software. I do wonder why windows uses any VM when I've got 4GB of RAM!

Originally Posted by exoticaga

Use every pc without vm, and you will have no such video problems.

Except things crash all the time cos you're not supposed to switch off VM?

[cane]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

I really like the idea of icons only for the 'important' files for the user and that you can 'thin' the OS to your needs pretty much as you like it

And I'll add to that I like icons of different sizes, and that the normal state and clicked that can be totally different icon. That can look quite neat, even with only 4 colors.
It has some nice and advanced features, especially for 80ies, already mentioned by ppill and others. But it's obsolete today and I can't see any reason to compare it with modern OS.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by cane

And I'll add to that I like icons of different sizes, and that the normal state and clicked that can be totally different icon. That can look quite neat, even with only 4 colors.

Oh yes That is a feature that I haven't seen in any other OS yet and it's really a nice one The different size of the icons is something I actually really miss in current OSs

[AmigaFriend]

Originally Posted by alexh

You think that is what it is? I think it is more likely poor software. I do wonder why windows uses any VM when I've got 4GB of RAM!


Except things crash all the time cos you're not supposed to switch off VM?

Yes indeed I've upgraded from 2Gb to 8Gb last month and when my system boots I have exactly the same amount of used virtual memory when i had 2Gb

When I use Reason with my default starting rack it uses the same 300mb of VM.

Any Windows program is VM dependent. Linux is more elegant using VM. The Mac is totally VM dependent.

Amiga OS till 3.9 was not build to work with VM. When i used VMM in WB3.0 it was slow as hell. But at least you knew when the programs were using it.

Regarding the subject of this thread everything was already said. AmigaOS was ahead of his time on the glory days. Now is a hobby. It's very elegant, configurable and easy to use once you know the basics. But no real alternative to Windows or Mac OS X.