Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 205 posts

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

#171

Post by lproven »

jnaina wrote: post #160
lproven wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run, _everything_ got outsold by the PC, including the Mac. But in the long run we're all dead (as J M Keynes put it). Step back too far and everything gets lost in the noise. Archimedes was the reason RISC OS was created... and Acorn was the reason Arm was. But originally Acorn's ARM machines were to run ARX. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARX_(operating_system) Arthur outdid ARX, so ARX was cancelled and…

I thought the Amiga guys were the rabid fanbois...

Go on then. Falsify my numbers.

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

#172

Post by pjmlp »

lproven wrote: post #169
pjmlp wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple actually needed a little external help, as they were already on the red.

Selling its shares in Arm Ltd kept it afloat at one point, I believe. Who or what else?

https://www.cultofmac.com/567497/microsoft-investment-saves-...

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

#173

Post by pjmlp »

com2kid wrote: post #168
pjmlp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless one works for the games industry, does IT at big corp, embedded devices programming.

Games pays badly, big corp IT pays badly, and unfortunately despite the difficulty, embedded tends to pays poorly unless you are at one of the big tech companies.

And yet the reason why they pay badly is the endless queue of people trying to get one of those jobs.

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

#174

Post by sillywalk »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #127
xyzzy3000 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acorn bought-in a couple of GUIs for RISC iX (Motif mwm/twm in later versions, X.desktop from IXI Ltd in the earlier release), but I'm not sure if any were exclusive, and none looked like the RISC OS GUI - I wouldn't characterise anything about the RISC iX GUI as being particularly 'Archimedes'. There's a video of someone playing around with the GUIs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7vgQsuoT4 If only it had be…

Ah yes, Motif! Now I remember, I stand corrected. Before Gnome, Qt, KDE we of course had motif and X with it's license issues. If I remember correctly, early Slackware CD bundles came with motif as well.

IIRC, KDE was created because Motif/CDE were proprietary, but QT was free and had an open-source license, but wasn't compatible with the GPL. There was an agreement with Troltech, the creators of QT that would make QT available under a BSD-style license if they didn't release a free/open-source version after a year.

GNOME was created because of license issues with QT not being compatible with the GPL, so GNOME used GTK which was created by the GIMP project because Motif wasn't free.

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

#175

Post by jokab »

idle_zealot wrote: post #94
qwerty456127 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it You're describing a system webview, which is a thing on Android, Windows, iOS, and macOS.

Isn't Chrome OS a better fit for his description?

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

#176

Post by sillywalk »

_akhe wrote: post #158
sillywalk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? It's small - apps are hundreds of KB to a few MBs and it's fast/responsive. The question is what do you want to use it for ? There are apps for most things, but as it's not Unix or Windows it doesn't have a lot of ports of bigger open source apps.

> The question is what do you want to use it for? Exactly, people replied as if those apps and use cases are actually used today. So it's just nostalgia right?

It could also be that it meets its users needs and gets out of the way. Commercial software is still sold for Risc OS. The market is small, I imagine even smaller than the Amiga, but some people still buy it.

Is it nostalgia, or just if it aint broke don't fix it.

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

#177

Post by lproven »

pjmlp wrote: post #172
lproven wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling its shares in Arm Ltd kept it afloat at one point, I believe. Who or what else?

https://www.cultofmac.com/567497/microsoft-investment-saves-...

Oh not that tired old lie. :-(

It's bullsh1t. It's not true. It wasn't an "investment". Microsoft stole Apple code and used it in Video for Windows. It got caught. Apple took MS to court and was going to win, so it settled. The marketing-lizards span this as "investing" but it's not true.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-mic...

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

#178

Post by _akhe »

sillywalk wrote: post #176
_akhe wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question is what do you want to use it for? Exactly, people replied as if those apps and use cases are actually used today. So it's just nostalgia right?

It could also be that it meets its users needs and gets out of the way. Commercial software is still sold for Risc OS. The market is small, I imagine even smaller than the Amiga, but some people still buy it. Is it nostalgia, or just if it aint broke don't fix it.

> Is it nostalgia, or just if it aint broke don't fix it.

I see - yeah I get that, like classic cars, sailboats, SQL, etc.

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

#179

Post by pjmlp »

lproven wrote: post #177
pjmlp wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cultofmac.com/567497/microsoft-investment-saves-...

Oh not that tired old lie. :-( It's bullsh1t. It's not true. It wasn't an "investment". Microsoft stole Apple code and used it in Video for Windows. It got caught. Apple took MS to court and was going to win, so it settled. The marketing-lizards span this as "investing" but it's not true. https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-mic...

Not only I walk this planet since the 1970's, I lived through this "lie" on all key publications of the time, and I used the Cult of Mac site on purpose, exactly because I was expecting that reply of yours.

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

#180

Post by xyzzy3000 »

flomo wrote: post #97
VelesDude wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trivia at this point. But the Oracle Network Computer was a low-end x86 box running FreeBSD and a full-screen Netscape Navigator. Very much a product of its time. (WebTV, later purchased by Microsoft, was the more successful product in this space.)

Acorn did the reference profile NC for Oracle, and it was an ARM7-based machine with NCOS, a stripped down version of RISC OS. The Acorn-built NCs were then sold under a variety of brandings, including Acorn's own and Xemplar (the Acorn/Apple education collaboration in the UK). Was the Oracle Network Computer a later variant?
Post reply on HN