Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else • Hacker News Board

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#41

Post by VelesDude » Fri, May 03, 2024, 1:02 AM UTC

beeboobaa3 wrote: post #13

ajb wrote: post #12

Acorn was a curious company. It managed to get incredible amounts of work done, by assigning big projects to individuals instead of teams. My memory is not to be relied on at this lapse of time, but I seem to recall that in the final years there was a browser maintained by one guy, a port of Java by two, and an implementation of directX by another. Obviously all those projects were much smaller back then (around 98)…

From personal experience it's amazing how much more productive I am on solo projects vs working with other people. When you're solo you can just go, but in a team everything needs to be discussed or at least communicated.

Old joke but - Two engineers can do in two months what one engineer can do in one month.

But this sort of goes with the African proverb, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#42

Post by _akhe » Fri, May 03, 2024, 1:17 AM UTC

Raspberry Pi is amazing. Everything from the size and simplicity of hardware to that of Raspbian. Super moddable, modular, surprisingly performant. As a lot of others do, I use one for most of my sites and apps as a home server. 15+ apps, sites, and APIs running on this thing 24/7/365 over WiFi.

What would be the benefit of using RISC OS over Raspbian, or even Ubuntu Server? Is it pure nostalgia like running Windows XP on a Pi?

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#43

Post by tom_ » Fri, May 03, 2024, 1:41 AM UTC

ajb wrote: post #7

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…

A previous bit of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37796610

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#44

Post by VelesDude » Fri, May 03, 2024, 1:57 AM UTC

ajb wrote: post #39

fidotron wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall seeing a Macromedia Director player but never heard of a DirectX port. In any case the lack of hardware floating point in most of their machines was looking like a big mistake by the mid 90s. Their compilers were also way off the pace and that was getting to be a problem. Tbh I think I am slightly bitter about having stuck with Acorn a bit too much, and should have jumped away sooner. It is clear Acorn knew…

I'm not sure if the directX port ever saw the light of day. At that point the top brass were putting their hopes in the 'Network Computer' [1] and Set Top Boxes, so it may have shipped with one of those, or been intended to. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer_Reference_Pro...

The NC is one of those things that feels like it was simply to far ahead of where the technology and the mind set of users was. Nowadays it would have much more traction thanks to SaaS.

In tech, one step ahead is an innovator. Two step ahead is a martyr.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#45

Post by hedora » Fri, May 03, 2024, 2:00 AM UTC

dietr1ch wrote: post #11

ajb wrote: post #7

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…

Sharing code? I like my apps bundling a whole browser to render a couple buttons

The march toward systemd-electron continues.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#46

Post by VelesDude » Fri, May 03, 2024, 2:03 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #6

RISC OS has been limping on thanks to the efforts of some extremely hard-working volunteers, but a roadblock is coming. The Pi 5 drops support for 32-bit ARM code, in which RISC OS written, and since enormous chunks of it are written in assembly, there is no trivial way to port. Even so, it's heartwarming that people continue to put efforts into operating systems that aren't related to Unix or Windows. I'm happy to s…

BeOS/Haiku are surprisingly modern considering their age. They made a lot of technology choices at the time that short term were limiting (multi threading everywhere) but long term were very nice. It was just that the short term issues was one of many anchors of them when they needed everything to go their way.

Haiku is the closest of these to being daily runner ready but like a lot of systems, lack of driver support prevents it from that lofty goal. It is pretty much the only reason that Linux has been able to go so far.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#47

Post by qwerty456127 » Fri, May 03, 2024, 2:04 AM UTC

ajb wrote: post #7

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…

> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security

I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mostly preferred to disable the sign-in screen and share the whole environment.

Nowadays multi-user OS facilities definitely help to build security but they were not designed just for this. Modern security can be done better without an OS-level concept of a user.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#48

Post by jnaina » Fri, May 03, 2024, 2:05 AM UTC

Still remember viewing the Acorn Archimedes with the RISC OS for the first time in 1987, when it was launched. Someone wrote a 10 line demo that rolled down the current screen, using a curl motion using bitmap copy/transform, using Basic. Breathtaking performance/speed.

Never knew why it bombed in the marketplace.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#49

Post by qwerty456127 » Fri, May 03, 2024, 2:07 AM UTC

hedora wrote: post #45

dietr1ch wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sharing code? I like my apps bundling a whole browser to render a couple buttons

The march toward systemd-electron continues.

This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. As I understand Apple once built its entire GUI system around a flavour of PostScript which was designed for documents typesetting. Now the world just is doing a similar thing with HTML.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#50

Post by mikepurvis » Fri, May 03, 2024, 2:08 AM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #47

ajb wrote: post #7

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…

> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…

Modern multi-user paradigms also have very weird ideas of what’s shared. Like, installing or updating software is the same permission tier as accessing another user’s documents, wtf?