Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 13th Sep 2002 20:26 UTC, submitted by Gareth
Amiga & AROS AROS, the AmigaOS clone which is being developed by Amiga enthousiasts, and who many regard it as the real future of the AmigaOS, now includes a simple WorkBench clone. Screenshots are available.
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Well...
by ctkrohn on Sat 14th Sep 2002 02:10 UTC

I find it interesting that there are so many AmigaOS projects. Certainly, there is some effort being wasted.

I'll just take Mike Bouma's points one-by-one:

"- AmigaOS is small, efficient while still offering a featureful environment. "

Like QNX? Like Linux+X11+Blackbox?

"
- Screens: With only the press of a mouse button you can switch between different screens with independent resolutions and color depths on the fly. Think about being able to test your websites in different resolutions on the fly. Think about old applications opening up in full screen windows, instead of becoming tumbnails on your currently much higher resolution desktop. (Often also possible if you prefer that, but most people won't)"

This sounds rather cool, but I'd think it would take a few seconds for the monitor to adjust to a new color depth. I'm a big fan of virtual desktops (I have 16 on my GNOME2 and KDE3 desktops), but I don't really see the point of having virtual desktops with different color depths and resolutions.

And anyway, in X11, you can quickly change the resolution and color depth by doing CTRL-ALT-(Numeric Keypad + or -), if I remember correctly.

"- Completely modular desktop OS - Do you hear monopolistic companies claiming that integration of 3rd party applications like browser, multi-media applications, etc make the OS faster. Well AmigaOS proves this to be nonesense, on AmigaOS you can take out almost anything and replace it with an alternative and both the application and OS will fly. "

You can do this with Linux. Especially the part about ripping out anything and replacing it with something else.

"- Completely customizable environment - Do you hate having a Dock? Why not delete it and install a Startbar instead? Do you want your OS to look like MacOS X or QNX or do you want to design the ultimate desktop yourself? Possible without too much effort. "

Again, I can do that with Linux/X11. I can choose between dozens of WM's, and some of them can be extremely customized.

FWIW, I'd really like to have a desktop that looks like QNX, but I don't want to write my own WM. Also, I doubt that you can get a desktop that looks exactly like QNX in Amiga, without doing any coding.

"- Screen Dragging (offering you the ability to see different screen resolution/color depth screens within one display). Will be possible to implement in software but will then be very slow instead of realtime and seamless on classic Amiga hardware."

Can't you do this using Xnest or VNC?

"- Advanced floppy controller (the Amiga diskdrive controller is far more advanced than "modern" PC diskdrives (unable to read 880kb/1720kb Amiga diskettes due to the lack of sector gaps, etc) but a third party solution may become available later on."

People still use floppies? I can understand why this might have been an advantage 15 years ago, but now?

" - Genlockable graphics, simply combine movies with computer generated graphics, example is Disney's Dinosaur animation. More advanced graphic cards may properly support this feature again in the future."

Cool, but not important for me since I don't make movies.