Other than the #1 answer that it is fun computing (which I agree with on retro systems like Amiga and Atari and NeXT etc...), is there anything today that the Amiga platform, in this case Amiga OS 4.1 on any system that can run it, do anything better, faster, easier, in less time, etc.... than other platforms like Mac OS X or Linux or Windows 7? I can fully understand why people flock to and enjoy running the Amiga OS as I do it myself with other alt platforms but in this day and age for other than fun and hobby, can the Amiga OS do something that makes it stand out compared to the other platforms listed above?

Just curious is all. Amiga and some other platforms like Atari keep living on and mostly I bet for the fun of it but there are companies like Hyperion and A-eon that still see commercial value to the platform and just wonder if they do it just for the love of the platform or see something this OS and platform can still do better than others and that is their hope to bring this back to the masses.

I watch some OS 4.1 videos on YouTube and it is fun to see what the platform does but really, any other platform I use today does the same so was hoping that there is some killer app or process that is still kick ass compared to Windows and Mac OS, etc...

tj

@MacSociety

Not needing to have the active window on top is still quite unique.

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@MacSociety

Logical volumes! Simple, mostly logical volume layouts! Better window management! Screens! File comments! Datatypes! No registry!

Even Windows 7 with its "library" feature still doesn't have anything that really compares. The libraries are not usable from the command line.

Don't know about MacOS.

@tomazkid

Quote:

tomazkid wrote: @MacSociety Not needing to have the active window on top is still quite unique.

I'd kill for this in Windows.

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Back in my day, we didn't have water. We only had Oxygen & Hydrogen, & we'd just shove 'em together

@MacSociety

Smaller OS?
Quicker boot times?

@MacSociety

I am biased, but I find the Amiga makes a far more versatile MIDI hub.
CAMD.library lets me easily connect anything(s) to anything(s) in the world of
MIDI, including both hardware and software applications.

I have tried to do the same thing in Windows, and using Java, but nothing
is near as powerful, flexible, and easy as CAMD.

Since it's so easy to connect things, your studio becomes the product
of all your tools, instead of merely the sum of them, or the even lesser case
of individual tools that cannot interconnect.

But that's just my opinion, and I am obviously biased. :)

LyleHaze
maintainer of CAMD.library.
author of USB MIDI driver.
musical software enthusiast.
eagerly awaiting A1X1K

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@MacSociety

Things I like about Amiga.

No registry, which means I can do things like simply backing up my entire OS and programs by dragging and dropping the drives onto a USB stick.

Single user OS. It's my OS and it doesn't tell me what I can or can't do. More dangerous? It's ok I'm an adult, I trust myself to make decisions over the OS.

Not talking about boot speed, but simply shut down or when restarting, just the time it takes to get the system to close and get back to bios. I never have problems doing a reset which takes a fraction of second.


There are apps that are unique as well. Brilliance for example. Only paint program I know that lets you define what bit depth you are in. I can set it to maximum bit depth of 9bit for example. Gives me a total of 512 colors max to choose from. I can use 256 of 512. Great for doing graphics for PC Engine for example, where it has a pallet of 512 colors. Nothing else out there I have found does this.


Not a Windows hater here. I use it all day and Win7 just works and of course there are apps for everything. However, the Amiga shows me there is still a better way to do certain things.

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Back in my day, we didn't have water. We only had Oxygen & Hydrogen, & we'd just shove 'em together

@MacSociety

Responsiveness is something that my Amiga does a lot better than my windows PC.

Hans

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@AmigaHeretic

Quote:

AmigaHeretic wrote: @tomazkid Quote: tomazkid wrote: @MacSociety Not needing to have the active window on top is still quite unique. I'd kill for this in Windows.

Sorry, I've forgotten. what was that good for ?

Everytime I use AROS i tend to enable click to front most of the time.
I remember I used that alot with my A1200 also a decade ago.

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AmigaOS or MorphOS on x86 would sell orders of magnitude more than the current,
hardware-intensive solutions. And they'd go faster.-- D.Haynie

@MacSociety

No shut down procedure

You know what if you asked that question 25 years ago, this page would be full, even if you just asked it 15 years ago the Amiga still had a edge on some things like directory opus file management and multitasking but the market did catch up, the fact it took so long proved how advance some features where in the Amiga.

I think maybe Xmos (even though you can get a usb version) might still produce something unique and interesting for AmigaOne, we will have to wait and see what comes of it.

There are a few other unique traits in the OS, like the ability to completely remove the host OS while its running. Direct access to ram disk (although you can set this up in other OS), Intuition (screen dragging etc). weather these features are useful or more for just for fun of it is another debate.

I hope maybe one day Amiga can again claim to do something better than anyone else, I mean soon it might be able to claim to be the best PPC OS for whats that's worth. But Application wise is difficult as if you have a good enough idea then the competition will just copy it, you only have to look at how windows always seems to copy mac os, widgets / gadgets anyone?

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@Manu

Quote:

Manu wrote: @AmigaHeretic Quote: AmigaHeretic wrote: @tomazkid I'd kill for this in Windows. Sorry, I've forgotten. what was that good for ? Everytime I use AROS i tend to enable click to front most of the time. I remember I used that alot with my A1200 also a decade ago.

Well, I have ClickToFront set to two clicks to bring to front, I hate having to arrange windows in Windows so that I can see both at the same time, regardless of which one is active. Try work on a few different text documents with a help viewer and a few websites open - you'll soon appreciate the difference. It means I can copy & paste freely between loads of different windows without getting them lost in the depths.

There was a patch for Windows 98 which added this functionality, but I haven't seen it in the wild in years, and it wasn't nearly as elegant as the Amiga system. I don't think most computer users realise what they're missing :)

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@MacSociety

Let me prefix that with a short paragraph about Amiga users. This is generalization, so take it with a grain of salt (plus, I'm well known skeptic, right)

Amiga users tend to be a hagiographs of computer world. If Amiga did something very well in 80s and early 90s it's still consider as AmigaOS advantage even if everything in computer science is now executed much better. Current Amiga users are self selected group of fans. You can't just enter Amiga scene without extensive research or story reaching back to Amiga 500 days. This creates an illusion of exclusivity, a hive mind, a place where you can say "AmigaOS has the best multitasking" without backing it up with anything.

After Commodore died using Amiga turned into big "me too!" match. You could read in every magazine, on every usenet group a statement like that "Sure, the X OS has Y, we have AmiY". Since the software side started to degenerate, we moved our affection to AmigaOS.

My problem with Amiga users is their unhealthy ignorance about computer world. "Music died after 60s!", "Windows is crashing", "OMG! Register". In 4chan-speak they are "oldfags". Old not because of their age, old because they lost all curiosity that led them to explore AmigaOS in the first place.

Now, answering your question (long and boring post is boring and long), if your qualifier is "today" then my answer would be "nope". You can name things that are subjective (non-measurable, based on personal taste) but I can't think of real-world scenario where AmigaOID OS could deliver objectively better results. Maybe if we'd compare PIII without SSE and G4 with AltiVec and some specialized code (I'm thinking about Grzegorz Kraszewski's Reggae).

There's no "Amiga Magic" that makes software go faster. There may be few cases where software can reach better performance on AmigaOS due is simple design, but I think that's rare and since you can't buy anything faster than 1Ghz computer you're not going to experience it anyway.

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@gregthecanuck
Quote:

Windows: The libraries are not usable from the command line

rundll?

@amigang
Quote:

No shut down procedure

But only if your timing is right (nobody writes crucial info to disk) and/or if you can live with a disk-validator run or some data-loss...
Actually that's not much different to other OSes: you can perfectly just turn off a windows machine, if your timing is right and/or if you can live with a scandisk run or some data-loss...

@iggy
Quote:

Quicker boot times

Depends on many factors. My MorphOS on a G4 733MHz takes longer to (cold-)boot than my Windows7 on a QuadCore 3GHz.

@Hans
Quote:

Responsiveness

Also highly machine / application dependant. OWB on my MorphOS setup doesn't react as smooth as Firefox on my Windows machine.

The "active window not automatically in front"-feature is really pretty unique and awesome, but I bet there's a "commodity" for Windows already - just can't find it because the internet is full of crap :P
The filesystem with assignments, logical drives etc. is wonderful and unique indeed (as far as I know).

But at anything else I have to second opi, although it hurts.
Which does not change anything for me: I like Amiga most nevertheless, just cannot really pinpoint why. But it's obviously not because of unique features (anymore).

Last edited by Daytona675x on 02-Feb-2011 at 09:37 AM.

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AmigaOS 4.1 FE (sam460ex Radeon 9200 / RadeonHD), MorphOS 3.8 (PowerMac G4 733MHz Radeon 9000), AROS (x86), A1200 (060 80MHz Indivision MK2), A500, A600, CDTV
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@Daytona675x

Quote:

Which does not change anything for me: I like Amiga most nevertheless

That's the point of hobby.

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@MacSociety

Datatype handling. Not depending on extension of files.
Lowest memory and CPU footprint (resource consumption) of any existing OS.
Logical organization of OS files.
Draggable screens concept mixed with classic Windows style GUI, where WB can have its own res and each screen with fast switch (just drag it down!)

... and some more small unique features

However, no apps that are better

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@Daytona675x

No shut down procedure

But only if your timing is right (nobody writes crucial info to disk) and/or if you can live with a disk-validator run or some data-loss...
Actually that's not much different to other OSes: you can perfectly just turn off a windows machine, if your timing is right and/or if you can live with a scandisk run or some data-loss...

Well, if you don`t use swap file, disc activity is loading program, loading files, few moments to save the changes. If you single tasking (not loading program and reseting Amiga at the same time) you will not put your Miggy in danger.

Remember: Amiga is about full user control. So I like it. I am guilty for disk validiation.

In my experience Amiga would just validiate and contiue in worse, while PC can loose
a lot, even that OS sometimes doesnt boot or even files system or partition can be lost.

So, all in one, for me this is still unique feature.

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@vox

Quote:

Datatype handling. Not depending on extension of files.

Datatypes are OK.

Quote:

Lowest memory and CPU footprint (resource consumption) of any existing OS.

LOL.

Quote:

Logical organization of OS files.

Opinion.

Quote:

Draggable screens concept mixed with classic Windows

Quite useless and unintuitive for anyone who had no experience with AmigaOS.

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@vox

Quote:

Amiga is about full user control.

Oh, can you compile your own kernel? Yeah, I'm trolling. "Being in control" is not the same as "not wearing seatbelts or helmet". You may think you're daring and manly, people will think you're stupid. This does not make Amiga "better" in anything, just different. This thread is about Amiga being better at things, not Amiga not being able to use ACPI.

Last edited by opi on 02-Feb-2011 at 09:59 AM.

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@opi
Quote:

That's the point of hobby.

Right

@vox
Quote:

Datatypes

Yes, that's a good one!

@vox
Quote:

No shut down procedure

Well, it boils down to: an immediate shutdown is less likely to create problems on the Amiga, because there's less happening under the hood. But in case there IS something happening it may turn out bad just as everywhere else.
So the REAL feature is the still rather light-weight (feature-less?) OS.

Last edited by Daytona675x on 02-Feb-2011 at 10:04 AM.

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AmigaOS 4.1 FE (sam460ex Radeon 9200 / RadeonHD), MorphOS 3.8 (PowerMac G4 733MHz Radeon 9000), AROS (x86), A1200 (060 80MHz Indivision MK2), A500, A600, CDTV
Wings Remastered Development Diary

@MacSociety

It has completely independant screens that can be independantly displayed on any independant hardware at the same time at different resolutions etc.

The wide-spread arexx scripting that can connect programs in most unexpected ways with very little effort. Like getting AmigaAMP to display its currently playing song to SabreMSN for example. Or assigning the sleep button on the keyboard to a script that will change my IRC nick, lower the mixer volume, pause the music player and switch off the screen with one touch and very little effort. This is stuff I really like!

The plug'n'play of USB is much faster and doesn't require strange reinstall if you put something in a different port etc.

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