"It certainly feels like physical media is dying right now. Maybe more reason to switch to investing in it over streaming services, not that an individual's budget decisions in this vein will affect the company's bottom lines enough that they will notice."
That would be relevant when a Debian/Ubuntu/whatever upgrade switched those users to Sway. That's the problem: The Gnome 3 users wanted to create something different but instead of doing just that they changed a project that already had existing users.
"But it's a lot of small stuff like you copy / extract a file then no more window just a small indicator in the corner of the file explorer which cannot stay on screen so i can track the progress easily, and what happen if I close the explorer ? Does it continue in the background or stop because everything is closed i'll never know."
This is Hacker News. You can just try and see what happens.
Oh yeah I could absoluetly, but I just moved on gnome already lost me so I see no point to since I'm now used to another software and I won't come back
But by torrenting you are participating and engaging with that culture...
I get it, the big brands etc aren't very palatable. And some things get lost with no way to purchase because the companies don't care. But for things that are readily available I find it just as easy to buy if for a few bucks on ebay / local library sale / etc.
AROS is not AmigaOS, but it's a FOSS recreation of AmigaOS which started out on x86. It reached a usable level some years ago, and it's been used in some of the projects that have launched modern Arm-based hardware Amiga emulators, such as the THEA500:
Now it has reached some of those goals, the developers are branching out. In recent years, there have been...
• a Live USB key
• an x86-64-bit version
• an SMP version
And so on.
But bear in mind what AmigaOS is: This is an OS which appeared the decade before Linux (or NetBSD/FreeBSD).
Linux is a protected-mode 32-bit multiuser OS, which expects to run from a hard disk, and even when new really wanted a few MB of RAM. It has no native graphics, which is why today the X11 graphics system is being removed and replaced with a new one, Wayland.
AmigaOS is from the previous generation of computers. On the original Amiga 1000 it ran in 256 kB of RAM on a machine with only a single floppy drive. It really shone on a machine with 2-4 MB of RAM and twin 800kB floppies; a hard disk was an expensive luxury upgrade.
The core of Amiga OS was 3 tiny components:
• Exec, a minute (13 kB) message-passing kernel by Carl Sassenrath
• AmigaDOS, a port of TRIPOS, a message-passing multitasking single-user OS written in BCPL, the typeless ancestor of C, ported by the late Tim King -- I just wrote an obituary for him:
All 3 fit on a single 800 kB floppy with room for apps.
This is an OS that's something like 1% to 10% of the size that Linux was in the early 1990s and which is focused on being a single-user multitasking GUI OS. No networking, no server functionality, no virtual memory, no hardware memory management, no memory protection (all processes in 1 memory space), but heavily optimised for raw performance.
Linux got usable when CD-ROM caught on: you needed a few hundred MB of space to fit the OS onto 1 distribution medium.
AmigaOS fit onto a few floppies: it needed a few MB.
This is a much smaller simpler OS. And yes it crashed, a lot.
But in 1985 it was the first ever multitasking OS for personal computers which let people do full-colour graphics, stereo sound, in multiple apps running at the same time... when the Mac supported 1- bit mono graphics at 384*256 pixels, and ran on a single 400 kB floppy.
AROS is not the same OS. It is more like a FOSS clone of what AmigaOS grew up into after 3 major releases, and modernised.
What I'm getting at is that this is not the same sort of beast as Linux or a BSD.
They are passenger cruisers which can take a few thousand people in great luxury across an ocean.
Minix or the GNU Hurd are a bus: a big transcontinental tour bus with a bathroom and a kitchenette.
> the first ever multitasking OS for personal computers which let people do full-colour graphics, stereo sound, in multiple apps running at the same time
I think the most impressive thing I ever saw on the Amiga was accidentally launching Wing Commander twice and having both instances just work, switching every couple of seconds or so. I very much doubt the dev ever tested that; why would they?
You mean that if I experience a call of nature with AROS I have to stop, dismount, and go behind a tree? :)
(BTW, I had uptimes of many hundred days with a regularly used Amiga machine. So crashes were possible, but if you run only quality software eventually (you'll eventually get to the point after a few years) it could be really, really stable. Eventually memory fragmentation would hit you though.)
All right. I write and have written a bit about enterprise distros, but because all 3 of the main vendors are just remarkably unhelpful -- I think more from sheer incompetence than malice -- I do not look at them much. It is not very germane to what I do: no competent finance director would base their choice of enterprise OS on reviews in the Register. :-)
I don't know enough to even dispute the timing, so I will let it go.
But the core point here is that Linux has no kernel-integrated GUI, so it is possible to rip and replace it.
Whereas in the comments on my obit for Dr Tim King...
... there are people discussing how it was impossible to completely disable the GUI in AmigaOS 1... it fired up with a CLI in a window because the windowing system is in the ROM. King used it to replace terminal sessions in TRIPOS, if I understand it correctly.
(I was using a Sinclair ZX Spectrum back then myself, and after a while on an Amstrad PCW, moved to an Acorn Archimedes. When AmigaOS 1.x was current, an Amiga cost as much as a small car in the UK, and I had just gone to university and could not afford a bicycle let alone a car.)
Although they were written by different teams, you could no more disable the Amiga's GUI than you could boot a Mac Plus into text mode: it didn't have a text mode to boot into. The GUI was an integral core part of the OS.
AmigaOS was better structured, with kernel, multitasking layer, and GUI layer... but they were still one inextricable whole.
This is the reverse of Unix, including Linux, which is a 1960s minicomputer OS design. Its inextricable core concepts are dumb terminals on serial ports, and a filesystem, and it barely has any built in idea of "networking" or "a GUI" -- they are bolted on extras that came a decade or 2 later.
You can boot any Linux into single-user mode with no networking and no GUI.
Modern PCs no longer have a text mode. It's just a pixel-based framebuffer and a bitmap font in firmware. Machines built before 2020 had an emulation layer that intercepted writes to a "text console" and had the firmware render pixels to the framebuffer. Before that, that same emulation resided in the firmware running on the display device. Real text console has been dead since something like early 1990s.
You can build Linux without ttys or serial ports. You can't disable VFS and a root fs (initramfs or noinitramfs, but either one is there), but Linux is surprisingly modular.
What is an ocean if not a million drops?
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