Simple Workbench Features Missing In Modern Distros?

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Yes, daily. Things like:

- Not having windows snap do the front as soon as they're clicked on;

This, 100 times over.

Also, having a reliable way to send a window to the back. (Middle-click-on-the-titlebar does this on some Linux WMs - unless of course the window uses client-side decoration...)

- Consistent keyboard shortcuts for editing text (e.g. Shift+right arrow to move to the end of the line, Shift+Delete to delete to the end of the line, Shift+left arrow to move to the start of the line, Shift+backspace to delete to the start of the line...);

To be fair, home/end in combination with shift offers most of that convenience, and is reasoanbly consistent these days.

- Assigns (most OSes have a vague approximation but nothing quite the same);

"Assign Add" in particular is a superb facility.

- UI elements that react when they're clicked, regardless of whether the application is ready to accept the input or not (separate, high priority task for GadTools etc.);

The feeling of responsiveness this offers is why I always described the Amiga experience as "feeling like you have the computer's full attention."

It's also what's missing in MUI applications.

[OlafSch]

@Arne

Windows is a work horse used in most offices. People there get in trouble if something changes. Compatibility with old software is mandatory. So I do not think they will change much. And if you use a system for work it is nerving if you have to look around to find functionality you need. You are more happy if basically all stays the same. Never change a running system is also true for useability. If we talk about something people use at home there is a higher chance that people invest time to explore something. In my view a big difference. And yes amiga or inspired systems are much more simple and easier to control. But the higher complexity of modern systems is also related to the much higher expectations people have today. And also partly heritage needed for compatiblity reasons.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

Standardised system of command line parsing. Eg readargs never seen this anywhere else and it's great that every command that uses it you can just pass a ? to get the template.

Genius

So much this. Some people may be fooled to believe that Linux is »newer« than AmigaOS, but bear in mind that AmigaOS is 15 years newer than Unix.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Geordie-Jedi

I just get a real Amiga vibe from the Linux scene.

I don’t, just as I don’t get a welcoming vibe from »mv -Rflvb --options /dev/ttr /usr/bin/frgf«.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by DisasterIncarna

its a shame that http://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html doesnt get more love

It doesn’t work since there is no sense of what is a gadget, what is a menu, what is a file selector in X11. A window manager on Unix basically amounts to »decoration« around window contents where the windows themselves are responsible for laying out everything inside them, even including menus.

[malko]

Originally Posted by derSammler

I see the removal of useful features in modern operating systems since Windows 8. I switched from 7 to 10 two years ago and can still hardly work with it as so many features from 7 were simply cut. [...]

Don't forget to mention this new "feature" that prevent a multi-OS boot.
When I was a kid, people liked to say "if you want a bird to feel free, leave the door cage open".
The more we go, the more doors close everywhere and always the same reason is invoked.. security . Was really the world less secure before all those "security" ?

Originally Posted by derSammler

[...]It seems modern operating systems are tailored to stupid people...[...]

Sad, but I quite agree.

Originally Posted by derSammler

[...] I also wish we had a simply GUI with powerful features instead of a fancy GUI that can hardly do anything useful.

At the end they are just heavy empty shell with eyefull design and colours.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by OlafSch

Windows is a work horse used in most offices. People there get in trouble if something changes. Compatibility with old software is mandatory.

And yet it isn't always compatible. If you have problems you are told to upgrade your app to the latest version, which doesn't always fix it.

For example, we bought a new HP tablet to control our drone. It was stuck in a screen resolution so high that you couldn't reliably select objects in the drone app. Windows 10 has a feature where you can increase the font size, but the app didn't increase the box sizes to match it. So the whole reason we bought the tablet turned out to be a bust.

I do not think they will change much. And if you use a system for work it is nerving if you have to look around to find functionality you need. You are more happy if basically all stays the same.

So why did Microsoft keep changing changing the UI? I was very happy with how XP did things but they had to introduce different ways in Vista, Windows 7, 8, and 10, as well as change many of the menus in Office apps.

And yes amiga or inspired systems are much more simple and easier to control. But the higher complexity of modern systems is also related to the much higher expectations people have today. And also partly heritage needed for compatiblity reasons.

Amiga OS has some serious UI limitations when used in modern machines. Some things can easily be fixed, others not. But modern Windows has its own foibles. Linux too.

I run Linux Lite on my internet PC so I can use the latest Firefox (essential if you want most web pages to work properly). It's set up to mimic Windows, which it does reasonably well for most things. But every now and then something trips me up. Yesterday I wanted to copy some files onto a floppy disk. Oh no, says Linux, you can't do that. You don't have permission! WTF?!? Yet it's perfectly happy with copying stuff to a USB stick.

Another problem is that Linux Lite's window view settings are global - change to eg. list view by date in one window and now they all are. Very annoying! When in list view it always makes the name field very wide, so I keep having to reduce it to see the date etc. Of course it shows all the lower case names after the upper case ones, so you need to know both the name and its case to find it in the list, and the file requester mixes folders with files making it harder to find the folder you want.

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

The feeling of responsiveness this offers is why I always described the Amiga experience as "feeling like you have the computer's full attention."

It's also what's missing in MUI applications.

MUI's not so bad compared to a modern PC. There's so much bloat that on a 'low-end' machine (ie. 'only' 4 gigabytes of RAM and a 3 GHz CPU) it can take several seconds for the OS to bother indicating that you clicked on something. If a program has been gobbling up memory it gets even worse. For some reason it can't just free all that virtual memory in an instant, and while it's unwinding it (at the lowest level that can't be interrupted) everything else slows to a crawl.

On this Linux box Firefox sometimes loads the system so much that the mouse pointer freezes up - and there's nothing I can do about it except wait, sometimes for several minutes! I would rather have the system tell me there isn't enough memory available than hide it from me and then essentially lock up for 10 minutes or more.

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

The problem with a RAM disk is that it is inherently less efficient than a RAM backed page file. And all the good use cases for it can be better handled in that way too, for example Windows won't necessarily actually persist a temporary file to disk, so it'll behave like it's in a RAM disk without having to reserve RAM space for it.

The advantage of a RAM disk is that it's a disk, so you can see what's in it and use it like a normal disk - without worrying about having to clean up afterwards.

On the Amiga I usually download files to the RAM disk, unarchive them to the RAM disk, and then perhaps mount them if they are ADFs etc. A game might be several lha files zipped together which have to be extracted in a two step process. I also use the RAM disk for creating archives and files for temporary use, eg. code that I am testing. On my Amiga this all happens in RAM. On the PC it clutters up my hard drive. I currently have 13 GB in my downloads folder, most of which I will never use again.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by DisasterIncarna

Another thing is the old faithful RAMDISK, Linux does have it and can/does use it or something like it but unless you know its there (/dev/shm/ tmpfs),

This is the biggest problem with Linux. A lot of the good stuff isn't accessible in a friendly way.

It's the 21st century and computers are powerful enough that we shouldn't have to type in arcane commands to get stuff done. If the system has something worth using then it should be in the GUI, either by default or in a context menu or the settings manager. But Linux gurus think GUIs are for the clueless masses who don't deserve those features.

[DisasterIncarna]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

This is the biggest problem with Linux. A lot of the good stuff isn't accessible in a friendly way.

It's the 21st century and computers are powerful enough that we shouldn't have to type in arcane commands to get stuff done. If the system has something worth using then it should be in the GUI, either by default or in a context menu or the settings manager. But Linux gurus think GUIs are for the clueless masses who don't deserve those features.

thats pretty much the biggest issue i have whenever i have issues with any linux distro, i typically do a few online searches and pretty much every post tells you to type tons of cryptic overcomplicated terminal commands which "may" or may not work, or when it does work its only for older distros.

My worst example for this would be me trying to get audio out of dual monitors and trying to get programs to use/remembering to use specific monitor for audio output, originally i could only get audio out of 1 monitor (i got it working ok now tho), at the time however when i did not know how to get that working, oh dear god, the amount of posts all with different potential solutions but all of them wanting you do edit pulseconfig settings, add/delete this and that and its all pretty much guesswork.

As you said, its the modern day, i cant believe many things which amount to common problems havent been made simple, stuff like that is probably why many dont want to tackle anything other than windows.

[meynaf]

So many things i regret...
- Ram disk, of course. Those on windows aren't dynamic and have their contents saved on disk when the machine is switched off...
- Simple console windows with /AUTO, /WAIT options. Dunno for linux, but windows is very poor in that area.
- Arexx, our program remote control.
- Installer with 3 levels (beginner, intermediate, expert).
- Intuition screens. All with different size, resolution, number of colors, autoscroll.
- Ease to get a simple 2D framebuffer (how many lines to do this with directx already ?).
- Fast start and stop. Start is a handful seconds ; stop is immediate.
- Won't lock a file when it's not necessary (e.g. you can delete an executable file while it's running).
- A window still reacts when the program is busy. Under windows, you can't even move them.
- When the mouse pointer goes a little off a scroll bar, the Amiga won't stupidly return to the old position.
- Shift-backspace and shift-delete to immediately remove start/end of the current line.
- Relative ease to do accentuated caps (À, Ç, etc) and symbols such as ¼, ½, ¾, « ».
- Not part of the WB, but one big thing missing is SnoopDos. Sure, there are system monitors on windows, but they get flooded by events in a handful seconds.
- It's easy to have some routine called each frame or after a specified interval, down to sub-millisecond (usually with an interrupt but it doesn't have to be one).
- The Amiga won't connect to the internet when you don't want it to.

[DisasterIncarna]

oh dear god yes, a simple no bs tool like SnoopDOS would be invaluable on windows and linux but the few ive seen as mentioned get filled with junk making it hard to find what you need and as you typically arent sure of what your looking for that mass info dump just makes narrowing down issues that much harder. Most of the time you run a program, it doesnt work and if it doesnt tell you why its not working or has a convenient log containing useful info then you just want a nice SnoopDos type of program to look at and think "ah yes, there we go, its trying to open these files/dependencies and they arent available, ill go fix that now", instead we end up having to trawl through years and years of old online search results and try everything till something works.

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by DisasterIncarna

oh dear god yes, a simple no bs tool like SnoopDOS

...Ehh strace?

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

MUI's not so bad compared to a modern PC.

Oh I agree, certainly - MUI holds up pretty well (no hamburger menus, at least!), and there's a lot about it that I like. But it still has a slightly alien "feel" on the Amiga, due to lacking that characteristic instant feedback even when the mainloop is busy.

For some reason it can't just free all that virtual memory in an instant, and while it's unwinding it (at the lowest level that can't be interrupted) everything else slows to a crawl.

Indeed. Even disabling swap doesn't help - and in fact makes it worse - because it's not just working RAM that's affected. Chunks of each executable file can be mmap()ed into RAM, so when RAM's tight the OS will simply discard them, and re-load them from disk when needed. That reloading is where much of the swap-storm comes from. And because there's no clear separation between user-interface code and application code there's no way to ensure that anything required for interactivity is protected from being swapped out.

[Twiggy]

Originally Posted by DisasterIncarna

its a shame that http://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html doesnt get more love, yeah it looks like a basic workbench with no visual improvements and perhaps sticks a bit too much to imitating workbench rather than simply taking "some" workbench stuff and importing them to a modern linux environment but damn is it a starting good effort. A good mix of nifty Workbench features mixed with modern nix would be amazing, with the impossible wishlist being something similar to what WINE does for Windows Programs but for running Amiga programs native on such a linux system.

This looks more promising - https://hotdoglinux.com/

[DisasterIncarna]

Originally Posted by Twiggy

This looks more promising - https://hotdoglinux.com/

n1, not actually seen that before, quick look shows plenty of videos about it, looks like i have a few videos to watch.

[haps]

Originally Posted by Locutus

...Ehh strace?

Exactly. Lads in the workshop who don't know how to use the tools supplied.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by Locutus

...Ehh strace?

Originally Posted by haps

Exactly. Lads in the workshop who don't know how to use the tools supplied.

This is linux only, and strace only works for single process. It won't survey the whole system. How can it possibly help when one process does something bad and you don't know which ? To me this looks like castrated snoopdos.

[paul1981]

I have a laptop which uses Windows 10, and what strikes me about Windows 10 is how poor the English is - it's like it's designed for babies or people who don't really know English, or dumb people. Unfortunately, this pi*s-poor English has infiltrated everything now including most of the proper sites you'd have to log in to to pay your bills etc. WTF?! Sometimes the English used is so poor I sometimes wonder what they're trying to convey and I get the wrong end of the stick and make a mistake myself (which is there mistake really due to poor use of English).

I wonder, has the same thing happened in France and Germany, or Australia, or USA etc...?

[malko]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

The problem with that is that you don't really know it did anything when you did push the button... [...]

But it has to, otherwise it is a bug that has to be corrected asap.

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

[...] But it's very much a generational thing, I suspect. When saving had to be manual, we expected it and can't get used to the idea it could be entirely automatic. [...]

I don't see it as a generational thing but see the collateral damage of taking away people's sense of responsibility. And companies tend to communicate in a way it reduce their responsibilities. So yes, I largely prefer control to the user.

[Geordie-Jedi]

On a modern OS, when clicking options to change settings, I'm not a fan of the old -
clicking "Apply", then clicking "Save"

I understand that there are some use cases for it, but I just want to change a setting,
click save once and then be on my way.

The Apply, then Save just seems unnecessary.