Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 21st Nov 2007 22:44 UTC
"AROS has gained lots of bugfixes and improvements in the lastest weeks. For istance, Neil Cafferkey has corrected some important bugs is his beloved AROS Installer; Nic Andrews has worked on his RTL8139 network driver; and Robert Norris has fixed file notifications, which previously broke preferences, just to name three."
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Member since:
2007-11-22
AROS has been lacking developers (and therefore users) for quite some time, I think the reason for this is not so much because former Amiga users have lost whatever amount of passion they had for the Amiga but more because a near identical clone of AmigaOS running on top of x86 hardware is just not enough for those that have been touched by the experience that the Amiga provided. While AROS may be a good reimplementation of the AmigaOS API, the x86 hardware lets it down. I'm not saying that any new or improved AmigaOS should run on the original hardware, but x86 just doesn't do it for us Amiga users.
See, the thing about the Amiga, the thing that made the Amiga such a brilliant computer was actually many things, I'll give a few examples:
Adding new hardware to the Amiga just worked. Plug the hardware in, maybe you'd have to copy some files into one of the OS directories and away you go. It just worked, no messing and it was always simple to install. As far as I'm aware no other consumer computer system in world has ever got this to work *correctly*. It was called autoconfig. In the IBM PC world it's called plug n play, and it doesn't work properly.
AmigaOS was *small*. You could look at every file that made up the os (with the exception of the libraries on the one or two 512K ROMs) and know what every file was for. You might be able to do this with UNIX or a UNIX-like system, but even then you're still talking a few thousand files, at least. Oh and the entire AmigaOS (not including the stuff on the roms) would fit on about three PC floppy disks).
Repairing a broken AmigaOS installation was really easy. Doesn't matter even if it was a device driver, the recovery procedure was almost always the same: reboot, insert orignal workbench disk and copy damaged/missing files across, reboot again and voila you got a working system.
Unlike the IBM-PC market (aka Wintel) companies that created hardware and software for the Amiga actually cared about the platform and continued to do so long after the demise of Commodore. You think if Microsoft announced that they were going to drop support for all versions of Windows and replace them with Singularity or something that software/hardware vendors would continue to support Windows?
Software that ran on the Amiga was small. Let me introduce you to MUI (Magic User Interface), a GUI toolkit that took somewhere around a meg of diskspace and provided all the common GUI widgets and was almost fully user configurable. It's still going today I believe on MorphOS.
The Amiga hardware was *very* well designed, so well designed that it was possible during the mid-late ninties to add a PPC accellerator card which provided the user with a way run to 68k software side by side with PPC software. This was years after commodore too and probably wasn't even envisioned by the team of people that designed the Amiga. (I could be wrong but I think this was also probably the first successful consumer implementation of a multi processor computer).
These are just a few of the things that made the Amiga what it was, great hardware, great software, and a great community. Not all of these things can be had with just new hardware/software because the Amiga was not just a computer, it was a *fun* experience, it was sex, or extreme sports, or taking your M3 for a spin on the Nurburgring. Where the experience provided by other computer systems is more like getting up in the morning after a few to many bevvies the night before and finding you only got brown bread to eat and bovril to drink. At least that's the way it's always seemed to me and probably other Amiga users too.
As for your point about people losing passion for the Amiga, we've still got the passion burning inside us, and it will continue to do so until a new computer system comes along that manages to do or have all the things that made the Amiga a fun experience. We're all still here, were just keeping quiet and using computer systems that provide us with the least amount of discomfort until the above actually happens.
Did I inject enough passion into that? 'cause If I didn't I've got *plenty* more.
Edited 2007-11-22 05:22