Simple Workbench Features Missing In Modern Distros?

[paul1981]

Originally Posted by van_dammesque

I dislike the 'personal' style of writing, "We're updating things for you". WE? A non-living piece of silicon? Just say updates in progress.

Quite right, I forgot to mention that - it annoys me greatly too.

Another thing that annoys me is the lack of a hard drive access light on my laptop (now 10 years old). I suppose Windows is happy about that as it covers-up all the B$ drive access it does non-stop. And, how many millions of hard drives have been destroyed by excessive drive access by Windows? How many Mega Watts have been expended? How many perfectly functioning computers and laptops have been disposed of in land fill because of this? How highly efficient...

Someone mentioned bloat. The word is not nearly strong enough these days. Bloat to me is a 30KB Amiga executable that could be less than 10KB. Now what would it be in modern world? 300MB instead of 1MB! Or if it's an installed program/suite whatever...maybe 30GB instead of 300MB! There are no words... OK, I exaggerate a little here. Perhaps 3GB not 300MB!

[andy2004]

think of it like a game..
a double DVD game.. which when run looks like it could have been on one CD..
and most pc games are now more than 30gb. bigger hard drives = bigger games/ apps / etc
i remember using on my pc a small 3mb application for burning a cd/dvd.. which is now 80mb.. i looked recently at malwarebytes used to be a download of less than 10mb including the defs which is used to for malware.. now almost 200mb

the more space = the bigger the apps will get.. instead of staying the same.

[Dunny]

I wrote a BASIC interpreter. The executable is 5 Megs. I shit you not.

[malko]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I wrote a BASIC interpreter. The executable is 5 Megs. I shit you not.

With or without .net dependencies ?

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by andy2004

the more space = the bigger the apps will get.. instead of staying the same.

It's amazing how hilariously backwards and hyperbolic some of the things said in these kinda threads are. I mean, given that many/most people here are not only pretty experienced users but also industry professionals, who really should know better.

Like, a low specs, outdated machine is expected to somehow run the latest and greatest software in a super smooth manner? Hmmm, yeah, right. I guess, just like my A500 with ACA500+ which chokes when it has to digest more than a handful of dirs in a drawer. Tsk, tsk.
(Btw, I actually ran Win 10 on a similar low spec laptop and it was mostly a pretty good experience...within reasonable limits, aka not opening 10 RAWS in Lightroom of course....so I suppose this one we'll have to chalk down to user error).

Or trying to blame the inability to use Delete key to get rid of unwanted files on the OS design, and suggesting that "solving" it by using something as volatile as Ramdisk would be a good solution for mass market users.

But this latest one I quote here really takes the top spot. I mean, sure, application bloat is a thing. How did GPU drivers ended up weitghting up half a gig? I don't know, it seems really silly - though I suppose at least some of it is really needed, for GUI or whatever

However saying that games get bigger only because the storage is bigger, like they are somehow artifically puffed up and not because that the space now enbales the devs to push gfx/sfx limits is really bizzare

[giantclam]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

It's amazing how hilariously backwards and hyperbolic some of the things said in these kinda threads are. I mean, given that many/most people here are not only pretty experienced users but also industry professionals, who really should know better.

Many of the 'features' mentioned that are/were part of Amiga desktop, can in theory be done on the linux desktop... for example, a little while back I was able to run amiberry, with SoundsofGnome loaded, and using that as my animated, 'live' desktop background, and be able to access the linux start menu, open apps ontop of that background... the real trick was to use a highly configurable window manager (IceWM), that let the user tweak all the configuration settings...which tends not to be the case with 'mainstream' window managers....

...that said, and efforts in this direction in the past, were necessarily based upon the x11 windowing system, which has it's own faults/limitations that define what you can and can't do. Now, is an unfortunate time to discuss such things, as x11 is being deprecated and replaced by the wayland windowing system. A quick example of the complications this causes, is like wanting the feature to be able to 'snapshot' a window location/size, and have it always start & present that way ; this is considered to be a security vulnerability in wayland, and is thus unsupported (and the XDG specs don't define a way of doing this either). It could however still be done, in the usespace of the desktop compositor...in theory at least...

What I'm suggesting is, once wayland is widely adopted (almost the case now), and given the fact it's all open source, someone might revisit the idea of a linux desktop with Amiga Workbench traits...but come at it from the compositor manager angle, instead of trying to teach new tricks to x11... that it was never really designed do =)

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by malko

With or without .net dependencies ?

Heheheh

Actually no .net dependencies (only OpenGL and BASS audio used). It's all just code - the editor and all the graphics are created at runtime. It's bloody ridiculous.

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Heheheh

Actually no .net dependencies (only OpenGL and BASS audio used). It's all just code - the editor and all the graphics are created at runtime. It's bloody ridiculous.

We don't know the scope of your BASIC interpreter, but if you are pulling in OpenGL and streaming audio libs then you might ofcourse also have a bigger feature set then say GW-BASIC from back in the day....


If you really want to be minimalist you could just write a BASIC interpreter that just uses stdio.. fwiw, i just took a peek at how big yabasic would be as included in Debian:

Package: yabasic
Version: 1:2.90.3-1
Priority: optional
Section: interpreters
Maintainer: Graham Inggs <ginggs@debian.org>
Installed-Size: 999 kB

And then take note that this is compiled for AMD64, where binary sizes are larger then m68k due to 64bit pointers.


The bottom line is as always, these straight comparisons with 80's software are completely bogus; You can only compare for 'bloat' when feature size is equivalent.

[a/b]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I wrote a BASIC interpreter. The executable is 5 Megs. I shit you not.

Those are rookie numbers, you should use Denuvo to balloon your .exe to 500MB+.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Locutus

We don't know the scope of your BASIC interpreter, but if you are pulling in OpenGL and streaming audio libs then you might ofcourse also have a bigger feature set then say GW-BASIC from back in the day....

At the risk of running wildly off topic, yeah you're right - it's vastly more capable, though OpenGL is only used for displaying the output surface, I don't use any actual 3D capabilities - what graphical abilities it has is done entirely in software.

BASS is used for pcm output and mp3/mod etc support though. It's a fun toy to mess around with in my spare time.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by pixie

the simplicity and integration of kingcon is something I am yet to find elsewhere

Yes, especially since AmigaOS makes no hard distinction between CLI and GUI. You can tab-complete graphically to a file in KingCON, but not a single shell on Linux, Windows or MacOS lets you do this.

You can run the same program both as a one-shot CLI command or as a fully interactive GUI.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Locutus

Drag-and-drop icons to terminals, I don't know who does that. Konsole or such? I don't use a desktop environment so dunno

MacOS does.

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Yes, especially since AmigaOS makes no hard distinction between CLI and GUI. You can tab-complete graphically to a file in KingCON, but not a single shell on Linux, Windows or MacOS lets you do this.

You can run the same program both as a one-shot CLI command or as a fully interactive GUI.

As i said, Fish has something very similiar to this but rendered inside the terminal like so:


https://imgur.com/bX4Ij03


Even works for command line arguments:

https://imgur.com/DkDmQAq

It would be perfectly possible to implement popping this up as a GUI window using Gtk/Qt/whatever if the shell detects it runs on X/Wayland/Whatever.


However, as with many 'why doesn't this old feature not exist anymore?' the answer is likely, because it makes little sense.


The above examples pop up straight at the location of context and provide what is needed, opening up some GUI file selector (or more complex, argument selector) would be a disconnect from the main terminal, either require switching to using a pointing device or use keyboard shortcuts which makes it as a modal window superflous again.


I really liked KingCON back in the day and thought the tab completion window was cool, bit thinking back about it I don't think it was an efficient mechanism.


The reason I think why KingCON did it that was was probably because the Amiga Terminal/Shell doesn't allow too complex terminal control at sufficient speed to make something like the Fish completer feasible. Anyone porting some reasonably complex UNIX originating Curses application to Amiga probably knows.


So i suspect a simple Intuition UI might have been the simplest solution for the developers, not actual user experience design.

[KONEY]

I wrote two articles back in 2017 on this exact topic!

Sorry, italian only:
https://www.retroacademy.it/2017/02/...ancano-1/4837/
https://www.retroacademy.it/2017/03/...ancano-2/4844/

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Yes, especially since AmigaOS makes no hard distinction between CLI and GUI. You can tab-complete graphically to a file in KingCON, but not a single shell on Linux, Windows or MacOS lets you do this.

You can run the same program both as a one-shot CLI command or as a fully interactive GUI.

PowerShell ISE will do that (since PowerShell is independent of the environment hosting it, you'll get slightly different tab complete when hosted in a purely console window).

You can even do things like pipe command line output through a graphical tool and have the resultant output feed into a command line tool, e.g.

ls *.txt | Out-Gridview -passthru | % { cat $_ }

To list all text files, let you pick a bunch graphically, then cat the contents.

It'll also do things like ASSIGN with New-PSDrive. And it's method of passing things around as structured objects is probably the closest thing to DataType like behaviour I've seen in years. It's not quite as ubiquitous as AREXX was for adding commands to applications, but it's not that hard to do and a lot of systems utilities do support it

[Locutus]

PowerShell looks like someone mashed DEC DCL together with Pipelines and the .NET CLR (in a way quite analogue to how DCL exposes most of the OS API).

It's super cool on paper, probably nice to write scripts in, but as an interactive shell it's utterly terrible. Like all the QoL stuff you'd expect in a shell nowadays seems to be super primitive.

[malko]

Originally Posted by Locutus

PowerShell, [...] probably nice to write scripts in, [...]

Maybe for some, but I personaly don't like it.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Locutus

It's super cool on paper, probably nice to write scripts in, but as an interactive shell it's utterly terrible. Like all the QoL stuff you'd expect in a shell nowadays seems to be super primitive.

It's a very different paradigm, which I think throw people used to more primitive tools like Bash, but once you get the hang of it then it works great as a interactive shell.

[malko]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

It's a very different paradigm, which I think throw people used to more primitive tools like Bash, but once you get the hang of it then it works great as a interactive shell.

lol.
Like all langages, as soon as you get used to them they work great ...

[Reminds me another thread... Which one ? Ah, yes : "C is better since asm is too primitive/complicated." ]

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by malko

lol.
Like all langages, as soon as you get used to them they work great ...

Well it was more the suggestion that it's "utterly terrible" as an interactive shell is an opinion you might get if you've used it for 5 minutes and expect Bash. Whether it's something you personally want to use is another matter...