AmigaOS 3.2 released!

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Originally Posted by BigD

Well if more Amigans actually introduced the children to the machines rather than just moaning on forums then there would be more chance that they'd remember the experience of using them! If you go to Amiga meets then take your children. If you mess around with DPaint...

Now it's my sons who take me around, now have 40 and 36 years old, when they were little they drew on DeluxPaint, they also created animations, now they are as a hobby they are 2D and 3D graphic designers and Amiga doesn't interest them anymore.

Look at the animations my children made when they were 9 years old:

After 39 seconds
[ Show youtube player ]

[BigD]

Really great! Thank you so much for sharing. This will inspire the next generation.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Of course Amiga was teaching, now my children do this inmemory of Amiga:


https://www.youtube.com/@daniele_spadoni_82/videos

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by shades_aus

HAIKU (a compatible BeOS that died a long time ago) is just as old and has managed to get much further up to date than AMIGA OS 3x.
I see no reason that AROS couldn't do the same with the constant development.
Maybe they have secret funding? Maybe their developers are just more active and there is more interest in the obscure BeOS
Maybe it's just that their developers are more passionate.
Either way, AROS certainly could get to the same stage.

BeOS is a creation of the 1990'ies, the Amiga operating system goes way back to around 1984/1985. The decisions which went into creating the respective operating system architectures were guided by what the hardware available at the time permitted, and at which cost.

For example, the contemporaries of the Amiga operating system were the operating systems used by the Apple Lisa and the Apple Macintosh. Both were, in terms of design, using established well-known concepts, such as that you would use a 68000 trap instruction to call an operating system function. RAM was expensive, so these machines had little to use (e.g. 64 KBytes, like a Commodore 64).

Also common at the time was the use of the first few "pages" of the adress space for operating system use, such as (I kid you not) was the case for the Commodore 64 (the "zero page"). The Macintosh operating system had a "zero page" and it took Apple years to wean developers off of its use.

Also "also common" was the use of a single shared address space for everything, code, data you name it. This is what the architecture flavour of the year was, as it was.

Fast forward some 10 years and you get BeOS, which did not use a shared memory space and offered POSIX APIs. It even had a Unix-style monolithic kernel to enable all of this. It could afford that because memory had become much cheaper during the past 10 years and the CPUs (yes: BeOS ran on the AT&T Hobbit, then the PowerPC, then the inevitable Intel offering of the day) had become more powerful and cheaper, too.

Unless a lot has changed since I last looked at AROS, it still shares the same early/mid 1980'ies advantages and limitations in terms of architecture which gave us the Amiga operating system. These lines are very hard to redraw unless you are prepared to abandon every bit of software ever written for the platform.

By comparison, BeOS had it "easier". Small bugs and errors do not bring down the operating system as swiftly as for Amiga OS, owing to memory protection and all those small but important foundational elements which Amiga OS lacks.

Sure, both AROS and Amiga OS still see development and incremental change, but it is much harder to build robust software. This is one of the major, major challenges to overcome in terms of "friction". You have to be exceptionally careful not to knock over something by accident, you have to be prudent to play within the narrow limitations of what is considered "safe" in terms of APIs and data structures.

This is 1980'ies style programming at its most sophisticated. Not everybody is cut out for that kind of task, to put it mildly. Passion will get you somewhere, but it will not get you everywhere and anywhere.

[OlafSch]

@shades_aus

as Olaf said AROS inherited the same advantages but also shortcomings of the old AmigaOS. You cannot overcome this without rewriting everything. And I would add... you still would have the same problems any niche OS has... not enough developer, driver and modern software. The idea to port important parts of Aros to a mainstream OS like Linux is much more promising (and that is what Deadwood is already doing).

Future will be in my view:
Aros 68k (including ApolloOS)
Aros X86 (VM and real Hardware X86)
Aros on Linux base (AMD64)

my personal favorites are the 68k branch for the amiga retro market and Aros on Linux

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by OlafSch

as Olaf said AROS inherited the same advantages but also shortcomings of the old AmigaOS. You cannot overcome this without rewriting everything. And I would add... you still would have the same problems any niche OS has... not enough developer, driver and modern software.

Worse. AmigaOs has tons of legacy applications which give users reasons why to play with it. AROS has no such pool of software. I hope nobody claims anything about "productive use" for either... (-;

Originally Posted by OlafSch

The idea to port important parts of Aros to a mainstream OS like Linux is much more promising (and that is what Deadwood is already doing).

Sorry, but I do not know what this should actually mean. You are either Linux, or not. What you can try is to port some AmigaOs APIs to user-level libraries on top of Linux, if this is what you mean, but you'll have the same drawback as above (lack of a sufficiently large software pool) and you are also in competition with much more modern toolkits that have a much larger developer basis, such as gtk or qt.

[OlafSch]

@Thomas

Deadwood is porting Scalos as a real linux desktop and also aros components like zune running on top of linux (also can be mixed, f.e. Zune GUI using linux components). More on https://www.axrt.org/

Progress video with Scalos and Intuition on Linux: [ Show youtube player ]

[AMIGASYSTEM]

@Tommaso Richter,

I agree with you that an Operating System should walk on its own feet a Linux host in my opinion does not make any sense, you might as well use Linux since it is on the same machine.

Running software via Host is like fooling yourself !

Regarding software, yes it is true that OS3 has a large software park, but on the new generation Amiga NGs, they do not work, work badly or are ugly to look at.

AROS has a decent software park on "http://archives.aros-exec.org/" and it is all software rewritten for AROS, thus native.

Thanks to Hollywood a lot of "modern" software works well, better than on OS3 "Too slow" for such software.

AROS when it has Hardware compatibility, it can handle a modern Browser (OWB Upgraded), it can gesstire any multimedia, game 3D, having said that, surely it could be productive, and that will happen when developers come back, already now some are coming back.

[OlafSch]

@Amigasystem

We agree to not agree like often

everybody can have his own opinion. We will see

[rutra80]

Originally Posted by AMIGASYSTEM

software rewritten for AROS, thus native.

Thanks to Hollywood a lot of "modern" software works well, better than on OS3 "Too slow" for such software.

The same software on the same hardware will be slower on AROS than on AmigaOS when using system calls - AmigaOS is, well, native. Much more mature and optimized. AROS being a rewrite (I'd say it's more alpha than beta) is focused on gettings things done at all, very far from being optimized yet.

Having said that, AROS is a very important branch and very welcome of course.

[OlafSch]

Originally Posted by rutra80

The same software on the same hardware will be slower on AROS than on AmigaOS when using system calls - AmigaOS is, well, native. Much more mature and optimized. AROS being a rewrite (I'd say it's more alpha than beta) is focused on gettings things done at all, very far from being optimized yet.

Having said that, AROS is a very important branch and very welcome of course.

how much experience with Aros do you have? My experience with amiga fans, the less knowledge the stronger is the conviction. On Aros 68k I can do anything I can do on AmigaOS. As I said for me Aros 68k and the future Linux based branch are relevant. Amigasystem is Aros purist and prefers to use Aros X86 and Aros dedicated software. Everybody what he likes...

but this general phrases like "Aros is alpha", "Aros is not even 3.1" or similar are nonsense (politely said). If you want the comparation we can start but then I compare it with my distributions...

[TCD]

Originally Posted by OlafSch

My experience with amiga fans, the less knowledge the stronger is the conviction

[OlafSch]

@TCD

No this nonsense that is repeated again and again is nerving. If people claim that then I ask about knowledge and start to compare

[TCD]

Originally Posted by OlafSch

@TCD

No this nonsense that is repeated again and again is nerving. If people claim that then I ask about knowledge and start to compare

I don't disagree with the statement, but usually I try to word it less blunt

[OlafSch]

Originally Posted by TCD

I don't disagree with the statement, but usually I try to word it less blunt

it was a little emotional

but that is my experience, expecially on forum discussions

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by rutra80

The same software on the same hardware will be slower on AROS than on AmigaOS when using system calls - AmigaOS is, well, native. Much more mature and optimized. AROS being a rewrite (I'd say it's more alpha than beta) is focused on gettings things done at all, very far from being optimized yet.

Hmm. No experience there, but remember that this is running on an x86 processor. If you want a comparison: "vamos" on Linux, emulated 68000, most important system libraries implemented in python (yes, a scripting language), compiling C source is more than twice the speed of my native 68060. Of course, you wouldn't want to use vamos as AmigaOs replacement, but as built system, it does have its merrits. It does everything it need to do, but it also opens the door for all Linux tools. AmigaOs development with emacs and subversion on top of Linux worked much nicer than compiling on the native platform.

Originally Posted by rutra80

Having said that, AROS is a very important branch and very welcome of course.

Branch? I hope it is not a branch. Otherwise, it would be vulnerably to all the license issues. Important? I do not know - what is the purpose? For something to be important, there need to be a use case. I personally do not have one.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Originally Posted by rutra80

The same software on the same hardware will be slower on AROS than on AmigaOS when using system calls.

Probably you have never used AROS, AROS totally takes advantage of PC Hardware when supported, and it is as fast as a PC, even with a modest VESA graphics mode it is much but much faster than an Amiga.

Regarding Hollywood programs, try it with the Amiga version if you can do what is shown in my video with RTunes, and then you will notice the differences !


[ Show youtube player ]

[rutra80]

I'm talking about m68k AROS (that's the only version I have experience with) with Amiga hardware, otherwise I wouldn't say "same software on the same hardware" because there's no way of natively running AmigaOS on anything else to compare.

By branch I meant branch of Amiga development. Every Amiga development is good (and wasn't some of AROS backported to AmigaOS4?). AROS is for Amiga what Debian is for Linux - it sets Amiga free from underlying hardware. Whether it's still Amiga then, is a debate that will find no definitive answer. To me Amiga is real hardware (today WinUAE) and AmigaOS. I personally have no use of PPC/AmigaOS4 or AROS.

My experience with m68k AROS is that if I run system software on the same Amiga or WinUAE configuration, it is slower than AmigaOS (significantly less compatible, less stable and incomplete). Really nothing to be ashamed of for something rewritten from a scratch with little development resources.
I use latest ROMs and releases from official AROS website.

Of course if someone runs carefully handcrafted (x86) AROS distribution with recompiled software the experience may vary.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Also AROS 68k is much faster than OS3, when the core is finished it will be even much faster, of course not on the current Amiga, loves you need a more powerful Amiga.

This is my new AROS One 68k:

[ Show youtube player ]

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Hmm. No experience there, but remember that this is running on an x86 processor. .

Thomas is a good opportunity to try my AROS One x86, I would love your evaluation even if it is negative.

AROS One x86 you can try it on the fly in two minutes with VMware, or in LivePendrive (there is a USB image)

https://sites.google.com/view/arosone