Earlier quoted context omitted.
The older I get, the more our devotion to the CLI feels like gatekeeping.
Gatekeeping from what? Linux is a server OS.
Finally given up on "Year of Desktop Linux"?
Little Things That Made Amiga Great
101–110 of 198 posts
Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
It just means you don’t have to type cd before the path to change directories. It’s not a big deal at all, especially in the context of the DOS shells of the day or modern *nix shells. eg: > Quarantine/Trojan Will dump you into the Trojan directory relative to the current path. Unless.... Trojan is a binary, then it will run it. Oops.
The second is no different than any other shell.
The point is that you might mean to change directories but accidentally execute a file instead.
Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like you missed the whole systemd and cgroups thing. The two are huge and novel developments in OS design, and much more significant than the GUI flimflam you pine for. (Yeah, Linux is a server OS, not news.)
Systemd is nothing new, Linux copying comercial UNIXes and Windows/VMS, with the community dumping hate left and right on the authors. cgroups has been a thing on mainframes for decades.
Everything "has been done before" in computing. The difference is a matter of degree and attention to detail.
And your comment about it having been a thing on mainframes underscores my point.
The server story for Linux is evolving (and maturing) greatly, and very quickly. The Linux of today is not at all like the Linux from 2010. To say that Linux is stuck in some sort of legacy UNIX quagmire is just silly.
Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
SystemD is like Solaris service manager, but far worse. And, on cgroups, I think AIX has something like that but much, much, MUCH better.
It’s even worse. Systemd, dbus and journald are basically service manager, DCOM and Event Log from windows, but worse! It’s not the wrong type of solution but systemd is somewhat stinky compared to what we could have had.
D-BUS ideas actually trace back to ToolTalk on Solaris.
Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Systemd is nothing new, Linux copying comercial UNIXes and Windows/VMS, with the community dumping hate left and right on the authors. cgroups has been a thing on mainframes for decades.
SystemD is like Solaris service manager, but far worse. And, on cgroups, I think AIX has something like that but much, much, MUCH better.
Systemd does a lot more than just manage services. The underlying architecture is a generic resource and dependency management system.
Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> revealing them only on interaction but you can't interact with them except by bringing the mouse over the right side, and you can't see them so you literally have lost a visual cue of the very thing you want to interact with. It's just amazing.
Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people use. Touchpads with two finger scroll and mouse with scroll wheels have turned scrolling into a gesture that doesn't necessarily require UI element, in pretty much the same way that a physical keyboard is just there for you to type on and doesn't pop up in existence when you have a focused input field
But this is partially missing the original point about proportional scrollbars, which is that they illustrate how large the scrollable content is at a glance. With hidden scrollbars or, as I believe you're describing, simply not even looking at the scrollbar, there's no indication of where you are in the content or how large the content is. I would argue this is one of the chief grievances I have when consuming content on a mobile device (among an armada of other grievances with mobile consumption, at least on the web).
Those of us who like knowing contextual information such as document size at a glance are sad to see (proportional) scrollbars go.
Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great
#107A big "Yes" to proportional scroll bars. I didn't have an Amiga, but rather an ST. The ST also had proportional scroll bars and for years, I could not understand why the major platforms (Windows, MacOS) did not. It was a pet peeve that really bothered me when I would sit down to use someone's Mac or PC of the time. I should have realized it could be worse. With the modern era's "mobile first" UX regime, we now have m…
It’s even weirder when you realize how much more resolution we have now. A favorite implementation of mine was 4dwm on SGI. You could middle-click on the trough and it would go directly there, rather than the normal paging by left-click. Still try to use it everywhere and am disappointed.
Option + click on Mac…
Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does exist in Windows, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wic/-wic-lh https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions//dd443207... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/customi... and in macOS, https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Gr... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Mu... Although, yes I do concede it is more complex to implement, the w…
That seems limited to specific types of media, though. Datatypes is a general purpose framework for creating a hierarchy of parsers for file formats. It can be images or sound, but also text, or anything else. E.g. here's a small sample of datatypes from Aminet, excluding anything sound and graphics related: * Datatypes for transparent decompression * Datatypes for syntax highlighting * Datatypes for parsing document…
I just didn't want to list everything, hence why I added the remark "the way to do it depends on what kind of data type we are talking about", and yes I do not mean it was as exhaustive as DataTypes, as I don't know all use cases.
Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great
#109As expected, most of the features were rare on home computers at the time, but have become ubiquitous (or unnecessary) on modern computers. HOWEVER, the `Datatypes` feature is really cool and would actually be a nice feature that still doesn't exist in Windows, macOS, or Linux. https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Datatypes_Library
It does exist in Windows, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wic/-wic-lh https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions//dd443207... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/customi... and in macOS, https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Gr... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Mu... Although, yes I do concede it is more complex to implement, the w…
I'm possibly missing something but that Image Unit thing seems to be a filter rather than a decoder?
The Core Audio stuff is definitely datatypes though - converting things to a common backend format for apps to use.
Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Windows equivalent is/was COM and in particlar OLE ("object linking and embedding"). With appropriate DLLs you can make a new file format and drag-and-drop a file into Word and open it inside Word. The peak of this was ActiveX; in Microsoft's world around 2000, they really wanted you to be able to embed controls and programs in web pages and then put those web pages everywhere, including on the desktop background…
> The Windows equivalent is/was COM and in particlar OLE [...] it tends to crash badly The mistake was implementing this stuff in C++, which is way too fragile on its own. Had they built a separate VM to manage requests for these objects, it would have been no problem: VM crashes, host app just restarts it. But Java did not exist yet and VMs were not really a thing, resources were too scarce. I do think the ideas beh…
UWP is COM + .NET type system, and the basis of modern stuff like WinUI and React Native on Windows.