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[Web] Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI DesignANN.lu
Posted on 17-Jun-2003 18:03 GMT by Mike Bouma46 comments
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AmigaWorld.net has interviewed Matthew Kille, the founder of the software company Zeoneo and also the designer of the default AmigaOS4 graphical user-interface. His company developes both for AmigaOS4 and the AmigaDE.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 1 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Darth_X on 17-Jun-2003 16:11 GMT
Apart from Zeoneo, how many other companies have made cool games for this platform? :-)
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 2 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 17-Jun-2003 16:53 GMT
Very good interview. I wish it had been longer, but thanks are due to Mike for arranging it.

Mr Kille knows what he is talking about.

Wouldn't it be nice to have an interface with no hidden controls - never having to guess what might happen if you click on a buttton with ALT held down.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 3 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Olegil on 17-Jun-2003 16:54 GMT
Some very good answers there. Very good. Looks are ok, but cost of implementing AND running should always be considered. Anyone tried running Mac OSX (first version, not the .2 release) on a 300MHz G3? Right. Pretty, but just doesn't cut the mustard. At all. Don't want to see AmigaOS go there. At all :-)
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 4 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Remco Komduur on 17-Jun-2003 17:26 GMT
In reply to Comment 3 (Olegil):
I agree with that 100%.

Linux is also really slow. Can't run it decently on a Pentium 166 MMX laptop I have whilst Windows 2000 runs pretty good on it.

AmigaOS 4 should remain a fast, small OS.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 5 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Remco Komduur on 17-Jun-2003 17:27 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (Remco Komduur):
Oh.....by the way.

I'm typing this on my nice and shiny AmigaOne-XE G3 800 MHz system.

Debian with KDE 3.1 runs quite fast on it so AmigaOS 4 is going ta make a killing.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 6 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by tinman on 17-Jun-2003 17:33 GMT
Nice. Glad to see he has got knowledge in the field, unlike some of what the shouty trolls were claiming when it first came out that he was doing the UI design.

Never knew it was @ the Cybernetics dept at reading though. As ever, Fear Kevin: http://www.kevinwarwick.org.uk. Stay vigilent ;)
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 7 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by corpse on 17-Jun-2003 17:48 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (Remco Komduur):
" Linux is also really slow. Can't run it decently on a Pentium 166 MMX laptop I have whilst Windows 2000 runs pretty good on it. "

Xfree86 is slow not linux* , a commercial xserver like XiGs will outperform xfree easilly ... thats if you're willing to stump up the cash for it (its about $60 for the basic version)

*Linux isn't Mandrake or Redhat .. its a kernel god damn!
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 8 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Remco Komduur on 17-Jun-2003 18:01 GMT
In reply to Comment 7 (corpse):
For the normal user; Linux is KDE or GNome!!!

The normal user really doesn't care less if the kernel is called Linux. Even I don't really care.
Without a GUI, Linux is pretty useless for the average, biggest group there is and it's SLOW.

The average user will also not stash out money to make it go faster so if Linux wants to get anywhere in the future, it should get a fast XFree86 replacement.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 9 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Amon_Re on 17-Jun-2003 18:11 GMT
In reply to Comment 7 (corpse):
Hey, XFree is fast enough with a *good* WM, try XFree on a PowerBook 1400 (If youy get it installed... :P) and see the difference between IceWM & KDE... :)

Cheers
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 10 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Amon_Re on 17-Jun-2003 18:12 GMT
In reply to Comment 8 (Remco Komduur):
Install icewm or blackbox & edit your .Xclients-default to start that instead of KDE... see how well XFree runs then :)

(Ok, so it won't be as *pretty* as KDE, i can live without Eyecandy)

Cheers
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 11 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Jun-2003 18:16 GMT
Any bets when they are bankrupt? I give them another 3 months.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 12 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 17-Jun-2003 18:17 GMT
In reply to Comment 7 (corpse):
corpse wrote,
> Xfree86 is slow not linux* , a commercial xserver like XiGs will outperform
> xfree easilly ... thats if you're willing to stump up the cash for it (its
> about $60 for the basic version)

Actually, so far as I know, the performance differences between recent XFree86 and the commercial servers are slight. In some cases, the optimizations and improvements are enough to be noticable, in others not.

The real problem, if there is one, is that X11 is 'different' - considerations in writing a well-behaved, compatible and fast X program or toolkit are quite different from banging a... UI-oriented, I'd daresay? API, as most non-*NIX OSes are structured around. You can speed up your server as much as you want, but if the code has to, say, force constant redraws to do what it wants to do, it's.. A) not optimized for the X11 model, and B) probably never going to act as nicely as it would on another display system. If something's flickery and slow on XFree86, I'd doubt XiG would *really* improve it (though it might help make it that little bit more tolerable, which is why it's popular *in* commercial spaces where people have to deal with poorly-written software); on the other hand, you might get that extra 3 FPS in Quake.

A lot of people want to ditch X11 and start over. I wish them the best of luck, but on the other hand, X does allow certain complex features to be implementend elegantly- look at the concept behind 'xmove,' even if it breaks with the extensions all modern X11 apps require.

(If you're trying to run X on a P166- first of all, don't expect recent versions of Gnome or KDE to truck along (and Gnome-or-KDE-are-not-X, obviously), and secondly, remember to strip out all unneeded extensions if running a recent X server (I get the impression the 4.x.x series can actually be made leaner than 3.x.x, in some circumstances), and/or consider a yet-lighter server, like TinyX, SmallX, or whatever that project's called nowadays.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 13 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Hagge on 17-Jun-2003 20:36 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (Remco Komduur):
linux is only the kernel, and it's not linux fault.

Some people blame X, and it's not X fault either, X is ok.

Some people blame XFree86, but mine is fast as hell (it should be, xp2100+, 512mb pc2700 cas2, nvidia geforce2 ultra 64mb). The problem is probably that you don't have accelerated drivers for your graphic card, go get some decent (compatible )hardware and then compare them.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 14 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Kolbjørn Barmen on 17-Jun-2003 20:37 GMT
In reply to Comment 9 (Amon_Re):
KDE is not a windowmanager.

KDE comes with a windowmanager, which is called kwin, but it also more, a _lot_ more, spanning from system maintainance programs and utilities, text editors to games, multimedia players, CD-ripper, and internet software like browser, email client, address book, etc etc.

And all of them, and the desktop itself as well as the window manager, are all accessible through a common interface, DCOP, very much like ARexx ports works on amiga.

Now compare this with icewm... huh, no can do.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 15 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Amon_Re on 17-Jun-2003 20:55 GMT
In reply to Comment 14 (Kolbjørn Barmen):
Yea, you *are* right about it, but still, KDE as a whole is slow compared to icewm or blackbox, that was the point i meant to make.

I personally use icewm, it does the job needed for most things, and KDE (or Gnome) are just way to big for old machines.

Technicly, kde is the better one (more features, more eyecandy, etc etc) but icewm eg, has the advantage of being small, it's perfectly usable on a P75 with 64MB of ram eg (and no, i don't use that kind of machinery here, i'm making an example, so nobody needs to jump at me here ^_^), and most apps i've used work with it so, yea, it's good :)

Cheers
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 16 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Chris on 17-Jun-2003 22:44 GMT
In reply to Comment 3 (Olegil):
>Anyone tried running Mac OSX (first version, not the .2 release) on a 300MHz >G3? Right. Pretty, but just doesn't cut the mustard. At all.

Can I quote you when I have a meeting with one of my bosses who is in the proces of trying to fire me for not doing my work?! :-) Now, try running Quark (4.11 in classic), Suitcase (font management) and PhotoShop (10) with OS X with only 386M of memory and 1G free harddrive space on an iMac to work on book covers or to burn CDs to make backups of a server.

When a friend saw MOL running on my A1-XE G4, he noticed when moving the window around the movement was a little jerky because it's not using hardware acceleration. I told him this is blazingly fast compared my computer a work.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 17 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 17-Jun-2003 23:46 GMT
In reply to Comment 15 (Amon_Re):
If I recall, I've used icewm on a 486DX2-66 with 16MB RAM. It didn't survive too well loading Netscape, of course.

XFCE, Windowmaker and Afterstep are probably also worth considering if you're looking for something resembling an "environment" for a low-end *NIX machine. I'm personally still shopping for a filemanager I can learn to love (that doesn't come with 200+MB of dependency baggage).
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 18 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 18-Jun-2003 01:31 GMT
In reply to Comment 6 (tinman):
Well, reading between the lines he's some guy who dropped out of his PhD to write Amiga software. I think I'll wait to evaluate his real qualities until OS 4 ships. Right now it would be easy to conclude from the screenshosts (showing two or three apps with wildly different appearance) that "consistency" just isn't going to be delivered, leaving AmigaOS behind even Free Unix when it comes to UI.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 19 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 18-Jun-2003 01:35 GMT
In reply to Comment 18 (Anonymous):
Where the hell do you see that he's dropped out of his PhD? I'm doing one myself, and things like this are typical side-projects one does to

1) try out the theories you're trying to prove in your thesis in a "real-world" environment
2) earn some money - your typical students aren't rich!
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 20 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 18-Jun-2003 04:46 GMT
In reply to Comment 16 (Chris):
"Suitcase (font management)"

That was always an insanity on the Mac. I don't know if it's still a problem on OS X.

Basically, they used an array to list the fonts, so only a small number can be in use at one time. The Amiga OS uses linked lists as its standard data structure, so there is no limit on how many fonts (or similar resources) you can have.

Never ever have a fixed limit on how many wotsits there can be in the OS. Some have a limit to how many files can be in a partition, or how many partitions there can be on a drive (hence nonsense about "logical partitions").
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 21 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 18-Jun-2003 04:53 GMT
In reply to Comment 18 (Anonymous):
"Right now it would be easy to conclude from the screenshosts (showing two or three apps with wildly different appearance) that "consistency" just isn't going to be delivered, leaving AmigaOS behind even Free Unix when it comes to UI."

Bear in mind that programs were shown running on the Workbench which would normally be running on their own screens, such as IBrowse or the PDF viewer. So long as the functions and positions are the same, I see no reason why the window gadgets should have the same appearance on different screens, or the same fonts be used in every program. On the contrary, a changing look from screen to screen gives you an instant visual signal that you are in the world of a different program.

A DTP program should not have the same look as a MIDI sequencer or a game.

So IMO it is fine if MUI programs look slightly different from Reaction programs, so long as basic functions like having the Close button top left in a window, or standard menu items on the first menu, are observed.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 22 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Olegil on 18-Jun-2003 06:49 GMT
In reply to Comment 7 (corpse):
Agreed. I used to run MetroX on my 486. Quite snappy, at least when I was also using Opera 5 and Afterstep. But XFree86 supports more cards (except for the damn onboard one in my RS/6k. It's a PPC, so must run XFree86. But only 3.3 supports my chipset, and it doesn't support that card in the mode it's been set up for. Damn)

Anyway, choosing the right X server can be a good idea. But how many commercial X servers support the G4?
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 23 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Olegil on 18-Jun-2003 06:56 GMT
In reply to Comment 16 (Chris):
Sure. There was a 300MHz G3 iMac at the office when I worked for Opera. One dude had to do bug verifying on it (you check out a bug, then verify that it's actually a bug in Opera before assigning it to a programmer).

Cheesus frelling christ, that was a slow bugger :-)
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 24 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Olegil on 18-Jun-2003 07:05 GMT
In reply to Comment 20 (Don Cox):
Do you know how many partitions can be in an RDB? I think it's 16, but have never ever tried to _use_ more than 14. There might not be a limit. Hmm, maybe I should just test it? Anyway, amiga-fdisk under Linux only supports 16 partitions in an RDB, I would expect there's a reason for that. Still, that's a bloody big number compared to 4...
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 25 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 18-Jun-2003 07:50 GMT
In reply to Comment 19 (Anonymous):
"I spent four years as a member of the ISRG"

That's past tense. Unless Mr Kille is very unusual his PhD research was sponsored by the British government, via a research council, who pay a substantial tax-free income for three years. The usual time to convert an MPhil/PhD application to PhD and finish writing up a thesis is 36 to 48 months. After that research councils apply a financial penalty to the university, which will have made Mr Kille rather unpopular with senior academics.

If a PhD student leaves the university without a final draft the odds of him ever completing his thesis and returning to defend it are not very good. His "Ph.D. thesis in progress" is therefore a more comfortable way of saying that he dropped out.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 26 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by samface on 18-Jun-2003 08:12 GMT
In reply to Comment 25 (Anonymous):
But for christ sake listen to yourselves! Geesh...

Great interview, BTW.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 27 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Peter Gordon on 18-Jun-2003 08:27 GMT
In reply to Comment 25 (Anonymous):
Hmm.. The pedantic nature upon which you seek means to discredit matt, no matter what, are an indication that you are probably an asshole.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 28 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 18-Jun-2003 08:30 GMT
In reply to Comment 8 (Remco Komduur):
Speed of the X depends highly on it what window manager you use. Try other windowmanagers, it should help.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 29 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 18-Jun-2003 08:31 GMT
In reply to Comment 11 (Anonymous):
Who are bankrupt ? Hyperion is coding OS4 not Amigainc. And Amigainc is not bankrupt either.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 30 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Kjetil on 18-Jun-2003 08:35 GMT
In reply to Comment 7 (corpse):
The most common problem is memory suffocations, check the amount arable to Linux, it might be that Linux kernel have not detected all your ram,

Add the line in lilo “append mem=256M” if you have 256MB of memory, one more thing you can do it reconfigure the serves started when Linux boots, turn off every thing you don’t commonly use like samba, ftp, http (apache), etc server applications, this thing use lots of chase as well, make shore you install an official version of gfx driver from the gfx card provider, do not use the GPL’ed version it not fast, on slow and old computer make shore to install an old version of Linux it more tuned to the performance and memory usage of an old computer.

Check that you have compiled all the drivers for your hardware inn to the Linux kernel, enable DMA for your harddrives, make shore that you have V1.0 or better of you Linux hardware drivers and not the alfa/beta version. Read the kernel documentations.

Type ‘xman lilo’ some x-windows terminal,

Try different Linux distributions some versions of Linux are slower then otters I’m not kidding you.

PS. There large book about issues like this start reading the howto files and man files, and stop writhing clue less bullshit.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 31 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 18-Jun-2003 08:43 GMT
In reply to Comment 24 (Olegil):
How many physical partitions in the RDB?

I checked with Joanne Dow, who said:

"There is no theoretical limitation beyond that of your disk.
It gets silly to have partitions that are 15 blocks long or something."

If you set up a very large number you need to reserve extra cylinders for the RDB.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 32 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 18-Jun-2003 10:26 GMT
In reply to Comment 24 (Olegil):
I would not split my harddisk to 16 partitions :) If you do that you need to write on paper what's on which partition :)
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 33 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Kjetil on 18-Jun-2003 10:46 GMT
In reply to Comment 32 (Anonymous):
If you name your partisans it not so hard.

1: Workbench
2: Tools
3: Progs
4: MP3
5: Music Mod
6: Games
7: Pictures
8: Temp
9: Music films
10: Films
11: Porn
12: Linux ‘/’
13: Linux /usr
14: Linux swap
15: Linux /User
16: Mac System 7.x.x shapesifter
--
17: Demos
18: Intros
19: Family pictures
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 34 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 18-Jun-2003 10:57 GMT
In reply to Comment 32 (Anonymous):
"I would not split my harddisk to 16 partitions :)"

OTOH now that drives are up to 120 Gigs or more, if you have fewer partitions they are very big.

If you are doing audio work, with files several hundred Megs each, it could be handy to put everything for a project in its own partition, maybe about 5 Gigs in size. Same for big graphic design/DTP projects with lots of big images.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 35 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by John Block on 18-Jun-2003 13:10 GMT
In reply to Comment 23 (Olegil):
Yes, there was a demo imac customers could play with in a store when they first came out

I opened an art program and started the process of loading a picture.

Ultra slow.

Did not bother trying to play with the picture after that.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 36 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 18-Jun-2003 16:41 GMT
In reply to Comment 35 (John Block):
What's fun is going into an Apple store, attempting to run Apple System Profiler, and watching machine after machine lock up.

They've probably fixed this for Jaguar.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 37 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by koan on 18-Jun-2003 17:03 GMT
In reply to Comment 25 (Anonymous):
> His "Ph.D. thesis in progress" is therefore a more comfortable way of
> saying that he dropped out.

You know only a fraction about what you are talking about, which is
probably why you had to post anonymously.

UK PhD grants are not "substantial". Most people do not manage to do all
their research *and* write it up in a coherent manner in 4 let alone 3 years.

If you knew anything about Reading, you too would want to move away as soon as
possible.

The prospect of a Cyberneticist designing the AmigaOS4 GUI does not inspire
me with confidence but he seems like he's quite with it from the interview
so I'll wait and see.

koan
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 38 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 18-Jun-2003 17:41 GMT
In reply to Comment 37 (koan):
You don't think ten thousand pounds a year TAX FREE (and I really mean tax free, no income tax, no council tax, no VAT on things bought through the university...) is substantial ? Maybe you should talk to some real students.

"Most people do not manage to do all their research *and* write it up in a coherent manner in 4 let alone 3 years."

Every[*] single RC-funded student who does not submit a thesis within 48 months costs the University where he is based 0.5 students in future funding. If what you were saying was true, which it isn't, Reading and other universities like it would only have one state-sponsored PhD student, and presumably their research groups would shrink dramatically.

All the people I know who've obtained PhDs in the last few years (and that's dozens) took between 3 years (or slightly less) and 4 years to submit. Those who got close to the 48 month mark were under great pressure to work harder in order to ensure they submission was "in time". I also know a couple of people who "suspended" and got jobs in the real world, asserting as Matt does that they would return to complete their thesis when they got a chance. Needless to say they haven't gone back yet...

[*] Yes, even if he is ill or dies. That's just considered bad luck.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 39 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by tinman on 18-Jun-2003 18:15 GMT
In reply to Comment 38 (Anonymous):
You realise he only says he spent four years there. Nothing mentioned about whether he was doing a PhD for all that time. No mention of full or part time. No mention of government funding. You're picking holes in a situation you don't know about.

Now, had you mentioned the fact that his only UI design experience seems to be academic...
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 40 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by tinman on 18-Jun-2003 18:29 GMT
In reply to Comment 39 (tinman):
And if you really want to pedant it up, have a poke around the ISRG website. Killie seems to have been on a National Grid scholarship (therefore not RC funded, but by a company (although I can't remember if the NG is public/private)) between 1999 and 2002. This is 2003. Still within your 4 years.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 41 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Ben Hermans/Hyperion on 18-Jun-2003 21:07 GMT
In reply to Comment 38 (Anonymous):
Give it a rest Matt.

You're making a fool out of yourself again.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 42 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by koan on 19-Jun-2003 01:51 GMT
In reply to Comment 38 (Anonymous):
> You don't think ten thousand pounds a year TAX FREE (and I really mean tax
> free, no income tax, no council tax, no VAT on things bought through the
> university...) is substantial ? Maybe you should talk to some real students.

Maybe I have been a "real" student and know *exactly* what I am talking about.
Have you ?

The number of students who started their studies 4 years ago working on a PhD
and have been getting 10k a year through a research council are less than
0.1% of all UK PhD students.

> Every[*] single RC-funded student who does not submit a thesis within 48
> months costs the University where he is based 0.5 students in future funding.

That does not make it any easier to do the research and write a thesis.
Many students at top universities in the UK take much longer than 3 years.
I know several people who are right now going through this process.

> If what you were saying was true, which it isn't,

Right, Mr. Anonymous.

> Reading and other universities like it would only have one state-sponsored
> PhD student, and presumably their research groups would shrink dramatically.

Reading and other universities take a large number of foreign students who pay
a lot more than home students.

Many students run out of funding and simply can't afford to work full time
on their theses and therefore take a job in order to be able to finish.

koan
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 43 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by gz on 19-Jun-2003 08:30 GMT
"Even under heavy load, an Amiga still feels responsive -- something which certain other operating systems with modern hardware can still fail to achieve."

I have to disagree with this one because you really cannot compare an amiga workload to a modern software workload on a pc. Should you ever try burning a 750mb file to cd while watching a dvd or divx movie along with winzip packing a file on the background and still be able to reasonably switch between windows or even drawing with a paint program, you would instantly see amigaOS crashing down in flames. This however can be done on a pc system albeit with the side effect of loosing some of the responsiveness but heck! That's just NORMAL when an os is under heavy tasks.

The respnsiveness we are used to get from amigaOS is partly due to the simple fact that there are usually no such heavy tasks run simultaneously on an amiga than people have got to used with doing at work with a pc. When working on a wintel system I leave programs open and running in the background all the time and at the end of the day, there are tens of windows open (webpages, programs, spreadsheets, archives, professional software etc.) and the machine still feels responsive enough for me to work on, even while it's not lightning fast anymore.

I'm not denying the fact that windows is bloatware of the maximum kind and lacks all sorts of optimizations. But It's also unfair to compare amigaOS to it and proud ourselves with the speed difference since there are no similar tasks and software enough to REALISTICALLY do this kind of comparing. I find my os3.5 very fast and I like using it, but if I would perform the aforementioned operations on it it would stop being responsive right there like a car to a brickwall and that's a fact.

I think that the exaggeration of the speed of the amigaOS is also partly due to the fairly low selfesteem of amigans. Lets face it. Our selfesteem has been running low ever since the pc scene started taking over. I remember myself being out there touting how amiga is superior to a pc because it has blitter and copper, etc and that it can have 4096 colours, while on the back of my head knowing that even while everything about blitter and copper were true, the pc still had doom running on it with 256 colours and me having shadow of the beast3 with 16 REAL colours and about 160 maybe onscreen at once at best.

Same thing goes to amigaOS. We want to think it's somehow far superior to other os's because we are emotionally attached to it. Yet at the same time we complain lacking features that exist on other os's and when such features are ported we again praise how we can do this and that with amigaOS and that how amiga like it is.

There are very good merits on amigaOS, but it has serious flaws aswell and due to the above mentioned reasons I don't find a realistic speed comparison between amigaOS and other Os's possible (at least not at the moment).
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 44 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Olegil on 19-Jun-2003 11:12 GMT
In reply to Comment 33 (Kjetil):
Would need another "porn 2" and "porn 3" at least.

Ooops. Did I say that out loud?

Anyway, my point is that some tools used to manage RDB doesn't support an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters, for various reasons. I think the limit of 16 partitions in amiga-fdisk can stay for another day or two while I look into fixing OTHER major bugs (like no checking for overlapping partitions. classical DOH situation, that)
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 45 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Olegil on 19-Jun-2003 11:17 GMT
In reply to Comment 43 (gz):
Uhm, sorry. But that's simply NOT true. Statistically, Linux or Windows will work ok for time critical things (CD burning is one, unless you have burn-proof enabled), but now and then it WILL break, because it just HAD to do something else. You don't see that in AmigaOS. Much stricter priority scheduling actually helps for some things.
Interview with Matthew Kille - AmigaOS 4.0 GUI Design : Comment 46 of 46ANN.lu
Posted by Olegil on 19-Jun-2003 11:19 GMT
In reply to Comment 43 (gz):
I also note that you're comparing something that sounds like a 68040 against a modern PC and demand the same throughput (not responsiveness, but actual work load) from both. Get real. AmigaOS and Windows or Linux on the same amount of hardware is two VERY different worlds, but AmigaOS doesn't provide the safety you have in the other two. This is what costs...
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