What has attracted me to Amiga OS is the responsiveness of the OS. I click something, stuff happens right away. I see that positive in Amiga OS and the old BeOS. Same goes for Haiku.

Have you found other OS that is equally or even better than Amiga OS?

Also, for those that know the whys, why is it that OS like Amiga and Haiku seem more responsive that other mainstream OS? What tech or special coding is being used that makes these OS faster or more responsive?

Tj

@amigasociety

Always found the lightweight Linux distros hold their own well. Crunchbang Linux is my fave at the moment. Responsiveness in abundance.

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@amigasociety

Quote:

amigasociety wrote: Have you found other OS that is equally or even better than Amiga OS?

Simple and only possible answer = NO

Quote:

Also, for those that know the whys, why is it that OS like Amiga and Haiku seem more responsive that other mainstream OS? What tech or special coding is being used that makes these OS faster or more responsive?

Again a very simple answer... because unlike all other OS's the Amiga's OS was designed specifically to work with it's very specific custom chips and limited hardware resources, unlike today's bloated OS's where neither hardware or memory considerations really need to be taken into account by those who write them, leading to very inefficient and just plain poorly written operating systems...

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@amigasociety

QNX which was at one time going to be the basis for a new Amiga OS is classed as a Real Time OS. It pretty efficient code too. In the '90s you could boot the OS from a single floppy complete TCP/IP and a web browser.

I suspect the MenuetOS is pretty responsive although I havn't got around to trying it yet. It is written entirely in x86 assembly language and is also available to download as a single floppy with all the typical apps you'd expect to come with a modern OS.

@amigasociety

very difficult answer for me since i am an Amiga only user.

That said i was an IT admin back in 1999-2001 and i can safely say that the OS's we had there was utter crap!.

(Various linux distros like redhat etc, Windows 98se,windows 2000 and server along with 1-2 NT systems and Vax + terminals bla bla).

I have seen some incredible fast pc's with recent windows7 and that felt wonderful until one started installing and running stuff on it.

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@amigasociety

For me it is AmigaOS running from a harddisk.

That is for example AmigaOS4 on the SE or
AmigaOS2 on the A500 + harddiskcontroller.

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A1G3-SE + OS4.1 u1 iso (x2)

@amigasociety


For me, Amiga OS, its the most stable and responsive (was my main System for 25 years, and i still using).

The problem is that does not work for current works, becouse many aplications are limited.
Thats the sadly true.. at least for now.

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@amigasociety

Puppy Linux is the most responsive OS I have ever tried. The entire OS is loaded into Ram -- including browser, and common applications. Click on something and it opens immediately... sort of scary fast.

@amigasociety

Without doubt Amiga OS is the most responsive of all I have tried, Windows, OS9, OSX and some LInux distros. Only down side for me is lack of up to date programs but we have most angles covered 

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@Nameless

On a pretty fast (2Ghz) HW, yes.

Tried several light weight linuxes and I might return to puppy. (it has more to offer, others need hard core tinkering)


@topic

AOS3.1 (with executive task scheduler, virtual memory etc in use)

At it's best I could have 600% CPU load with heavy disk swapping and the GUI just flies around. (under heavy load, executive scheduling starts to slow some responsiveness of executive handled tasks)

For Amigalike user experience it's crusial that GUI gets enough CPU time.
Server OSs can never beat AOS on that. For desktop use, it's irrelevant if some heavy (non-real-time) processing gets a little bit less CPU cycles for a few milliseconds.

+ on windows systems task/process priorities does not function at all if processess stress the mammoth of OS kernells. Often there's 4cores idling and nothing seems to happen, user just has to wait and wait and hope that the GUI gets updated one day and perhaps tells what it's doing.
During past years when you click mousebutton on windows machine, you hear that the hard disk starts ticking and then you know the system is OK and windows responds to you one day. Now when there's silent hard drives (or the noise is surpassed by fan noice) you just sit and wonder.
I remember some of my friends being surpriced that when you click around in AOS you do not hear constant HDD noice. They prepare to wait and got surpriced when the thing they wanted already happened.

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- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
// "priest" is just the RED goaul in me
// The multicolor AmigaFUTURE IS NOW !!

@amigasociety

Quote:

[...] Have you found other OS that is equally or even better than Amiga OS? [...]

Nope. AmigaOS is the most responsive OS I've ever used. It feels the weight of years but it's still the most responsive thing I've ever used on a computer.

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@amigasociety

it has to be said, if you completely bog down an Amiga with something trying to use all available CPU then the responsiveness drops to "show wait pointer, then open a window, then slowly start to fill in icons". Icons slowly filling in a workbench drawer window also happens if you have either a lot of icons or very slow CPU or icons that are tricky to render or such reasons.

But this is still miles away from OSes with so called fairness algorithm schedulers (as opposed to the strict round-robin schedulers of AmigaOS and QNX), in which a low priority thread could end up delaying what a graphical user interface's PRIMARY concern should be, to show the user that it has reacted to input.

On Windows or Linux, I routinely come across situations where the machine will seemingly hang for tens of seconds and not even display a wait pointer. This is a direct consequence either of not using a strict scheduling algorithm with strict round-robin rules, or of having too much happening in kernel space (which cannot be interrupted by userspace apps). Windows is actually better than Linux here, but both are running the GUI at too low a priority compared to for instance disk IO. Very smart for a server, but really sucks for a single-user GUI system.

Remember that AmigaOS isn't a multiuser system, so things can be tweaked quite different from NT and Linux. Why Windows Home editions aren't tweaked similarly escapes me, that's a completely wasted opportunity in my opinioin.

So to sum up:
Amiga has a severe lack of throughput owing to having very slow CPUs compared to the latest and greatest out there.
But due to the single-user GUI-responsiveness focus of the scheduling (as in, the sum of algorithm and priority table), it still _feels_ faster.

Unfortunately I'm off the Amiga wagon currently, cannot get enough time and/or money to fix up any of my machines. Got a working 500, but not much more.

To summarize the summary: No, I haven't used anything as responsive. QNX is spot on but I haven't actually USED it for anything. Used some real-time extensions to NT and Linux, but these are sitting in the background, running the normal OS as a subsystem. So while it helps with responseiveness for embedded stuff it completely destroys responsiveness for the GUI.

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Anyone interested?

@amigasociety

MorphOS .

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@amigasociety

If i look at this tread, we can say that we have found the most
importend thing why we are using AmigaOS.

Maybe we can make a slogan:

Time is money, so use an Amiga, and win alot of money.

I know, i know, there are not that much updates progs as in the glory times.

But still, it is great fun to use AmigaOS.

Edit: or MorphOS, AROS, etc.

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A1G3-SE + OS4.1 u1 iso (x2)

@amigasociety

MacOSX It's fast, responsive and I like it's feed back when input is given.

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@All

AmigaOS is the most responsive OS togheter with MorphOS I ever used..

AmigaOS is best and most Easy to use OS, ever made! not only that is the finest and funniest OS to explore. You happy every time you boot up your machine, like a drug.


OS like Win, MacOS and linux makes you wanna cry! so ####ing boring and huge.....usch

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@olegil

Quote:

it has to be said, if you completely bog down an Amiga with something trying to use all available CPU then the responsiveness drops to "show wait pointer, then open a window, then slowly start to fill in icons". Icons slowly filling in a workbench drawer window also happens if you have either a lot of icons or very slow CPU or icons that are tricky to render or such reasons.

Very true, but even if the busy pointer is showing, you can still at least move and usually resize windows, even if it is that particular application that is busy.

Being able to get behind or shift busy windows out of the way means even if a particular application doesn't seem to be responding, it isn't getting in the way of anything else you might want to do. (unlike Windows, which blocks everything)

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@amigasociety

Yhea, for me it was the classic Amiga Os and Haiku. BeOS was also good...

I don't think Linux is too far behind as well...

Q!

"i am home"

@amigasociety

I have no direct experience with BeOS but expect I'll experiment with Haiku at some point. Still, I share your opinion that the Amiga operating system is very, very responsive.

I think it is because, way back when, its makers accomplished so very much with comparatively so little hardware. Compared to hardware that came later, I mean, as the Amiga hardware originally was way ahead of anything else on the market.

The Amiga way executed a sophisticated preemptive multitasking OS with multimedia capabilities before the mainstream systems could be bothered to make the attempt. And they got the job done with a computer that shipped with 512KB and NO HARD DRIVE. (Well, technically 256MB was the base, but really 512 was the minimum for practical use.)

Microsoft didn't get serious about such endeavors until Windows 95 (and Apple still later with Mac OS X), and by then the hardware was more powerful and the committees that designed OSes were much larger. The Microsoft way has always been about bigger and more bloated software that demands that hardware become more capable to maintain status quo. We all recognize that editing high-definition digital video and processing 18-megapixel images necessarily requires more powerful computers than what we had in years long past. But do we really need so more computing power to run a word processor as well as we ran them 20 years ago?

The Amiga way has been about maximizing for what we have. Given the slow or non-existent hardware development in Amigaland over the decades (despite starting so far ahead in 1985), that has kept the OS feeling responsive even on humble and in most cases outdated hardware.

It's quite a comedown that we started out years ahead of everybody with the hardware and the software. But it's a testament to the people who developed the operating system that it can still delight in 2012. I remain delighted anyway.

I'm looking forward to owning an AmigaOne X1000 and sticking around while the OS grows to take advantage of the new hardware capabilities. But I have no doubt that future versions will nevertheless fly on lower-spec hardware, such as an expected 400mhz netbook or my 667mhz Sam440ep.

In short, the Amiga operating system seems so responsive even today partly because it was tasked with doing big-time things (preemptive multitasking and multimedia) in 1985 instead of 1995 (Windows) or 2002 (Mac). The other part of it you can credit to the good sense and talents of people like Carl Sassenrath and his contemporaries and the capabilities in modern times of the brothers Frieden, among a few others.

Keep the party rocking.

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"Amiga with something trying to use all available CPU then the responsiveness drops to "show wait pointer, then open a window, then slowly start to fill in icons". "

This phenomenom is understandable if you run all processes on the same priority.
Exec makes sure every task gets CPU slice, but if the slice becomes very small and rarely available, system slows down.
Some attention put to process priorities solves the problem (with executive it was done semiautomatically), then everything flies again. Unlike on mainstream OSs.

As AOS4.2 is (officially) said to have several scheduler options (in executive style) it will be very interesting milestone, to finally bring AOS4 task/process handling to AOS3+executive -level. (with the SMP, very very interesting)
Executive preferences kind of tool is a must then. I want to be able to set exactly how a task/process is handled.
Being in control -feeling is another VERY IMPORTANT AOS speciality/feature.

Does MOS or AROS have executive kind of scheduler options yet?


@mbrantley
Those were kilobytes back then, not MBs.

But it was superb that we had 32 bit address space already in the 80's.
Still in middle 90's average home PCs could have 16...32MB maximum RAM, but Amiga could handle hundreds of megabytes.
IIRC, at work in 1997 the maximum RAM for my work desktop was still 32MB ... enough for the W3.11 though, LOL!
And in early 2000 NT had to have servicepacks to enable RAM above 256MB(otherwise the extra RAM was not L2 cached at all), etc...
AOS4.2 is planned to be able to use more than 2GB RAM (IIRC), hope it materializes.

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_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
// "priest" is just the RED goaul in me
// The multicolor AmigaFUTURE IS NOW !!