What is it with Amiga that people keep tinkering with it and HN is full of Amiga articles? I once had an Amiga 1000 but for me that's just a sweet memory. Why is it different for other people, and why Amiga and not Spectrums or the like?
Much older and you lose all of this. Much newer, and you just end up replacing a PC with a crap PC.
Amiga was a computer that was way ahead of its time with its hardware AND software and provided so much fun until it was deemed obsolete - and it was a long time. Nothing like that existed for a long long time. But all of it doesn't matter - it is like the classic car analogy, it is just a hobby of some people, to reminisce on their childhood etc.
>challenge to make it do something it couldn't do
This is another hobby altogether. You can do it with retro computers, or with modern computers and artificial limitations (think of the demoscene and their 4k or 64k competitions) and actually this mindset does not even require a computer. Making things do things they are not supposed to do is just a fun time for some people, a creative outlet.
But of course, my bad. To be honest it never occurred to me that it could be. But the comparison with classic cars makes perfect sense.
But mostly just games. I didn't really play games from roughly 1995-2010 for various reasons, so Amiga (and megadrive) are still where a lot of my old favourites are. Thanks to Catalina, my desktop can't play civ5 anymore. But my Amiga can still play civ1!
There's also a minimalists/efficiency mindset at play. If I confine youtube to the living room, can I satisfy my daily desktop needs with an older system? Is that older system actually faster (because of less software bloat) even though it's running on much more constrained hardware? Do I actually need an operating system that supports multiple logged in users for my desktop use cases? Are modern UIs more distracting and actually an impediment on productivity?
I can't speak for others but these questions are interesting to me.
The big limiting factor with using a vintage computer for a daily driver is that very few of them have a browser that supports modern web standards, have relatively low resolution screens and are painfully slow doing modern crypto (TLS & SSH), so much of the modern internet is inaccessible or unusable.
The OS is pretty decent considering its age and there are plenty of decent applications to use.
I don't find 8bit computers particularly interesting. I had a BBC Micro and a Tantung Einstein (hand me downs) and they are extremely primitive compared to the Amiga. The Amiga is very much like a modern computer.
I really wish there was Amiga OS for a PC computer (I believe MorphOS is being ported) as even the aging OS 3.1 with some extensions is in some ways better than Desktop Linux. But that is highly subjective.
What do you find better? I'm curious
https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Intuition_Screens
Also it is just a decent desktop OS. One of the problems with Linux (and OpenBSD / FreeBSD etc) is that the OS really isn't a desktop Operating System. It is a Unix operating system with a desktop.
Never used it (neither did I use MorphOS) but doesn't AROS fit the bill?
AROS runs both hosted on top of Linux, and natively, on PCs.
Some people also run UAE and run real AmigaOS...
AROS on top of Linux for me is missing the point as a OS enthusiast. AROS is okay, but MorphOS (which I run on a G4 cube) is much better IMO.
But for someone who wants to just run an AmigaOS-like OS, it's a convenient option as it makes it irrelevant whether AROS supports your underlying hardware as long as Linux does, and so makes it easy to install; it also makes it easy to run it alongside a regular Linux desktop for someone who doesn't want to just run an AmigaOS-like OS, which frankly still has lots of limitations.
MorphOS to me is to divorced from AmigaOS to be particularly interesting, and the fact it isn't open source is another dealbreaker.
Yep. I did have AROS running on a real machine (which has died). I have a real Amiga though so I rather use Amiga OS.
> But for someone who wants to just run an AmigaOS-like OS, it's a convenient option as it makes it irrelevant whether AROS supports your underlying hardware as long as Linux does, and so makes it easy to install;
Yes I am aware. I don't like Linux.
> it also makes it easy to run it alongside a regular Linux desktop for someone who doesn't want to just run an AmigaOS-like OS, which frankly still has lots of limitations.
I just don't see the point of running Linux with a Amiga like DE (which is really what you are doing). I am sure it suits many people's needs. It just not something I am interested in.
> MorphOS to me is to divorced from AmigaOS to be particularly interesting, and the fact it isn't open source is another dealbreaker.
Not everything has to be open source.
What makes the Amiga interesting, though, is that it represented a transition from the 8-bit environment to modern machines that is modern enough to resemble modern systems (GUI, multitasking, reasonable graphics, lots of people had harddrives etc.) and that was revolutionary at the time.
At the same time around 5 million Amigas were sold, making it one of the most successful lines of home computers ever; not that many of the alternatives have as large a pool of potential supporters, and many of the rest are "too old" in that their users had one of the earlier ones and moved on to one (or more) of the later ones, and their nostalgia may have another focus.
E.g. we first had a VIC-20 briefly, but I really started with a C64, and while I love the C64 too, you can't imagine the C64 as a replacement for a PC. But my Amiga stood up very favourably to PCs for years, even after Windows gained traction. It was faster for a while. It had better graphics. It had proper pre-emptive multitasking. It had better sound. More of my nostalgia is focused on the Amiga.
Part of it is probably also down to what and how you used them. For the first years we had a C64 I mostly used it for games. I spent more time on my Amiga on creative endeavours, from writing code to drawing in Deluxe Paint, and writing.
And in retrospect there are still aspects of the OS that feels ahead of today. E.g. one of my favourites includes pervasive scripting. OS X comes closest to that with AppleScript, but on the Amiga AREXX become so integral that some applications have their central event bus built around AREXX to they point where every keypress and every menu action gets passed through the same mechanism as the AREXX commands. Another is datatypes: You'll find Amiga applications published in the 90's that happily supports WebP images for example, because someone wrote a datatype library for it, and so every application that supports datatypes can load WebP without modification or recompilation or anything.
But of course there is an element of rose tinted glasses and all that, which I think largely comes down to how big a part of your life it was, and to what extent it was part of your formative years. For me, my computing interest dominated my life (and still does), and so the Amiga dominated my life from I was 13 until I was around 20, and it was practicality more than anything that made me switch (to Linux): I moved to a smaller flat, and I could only fit one machine and needed a Linux machine due to work, and it had to take preference.
As a result Amiga sales in the US were small and driven by things like the Video Toaster on the high end where people for some time bought Amigas for the Video Toaster rather than the other way around, while sales in Europe were far higher volume and more focused on the low end models that there just wasn't a decent dealer network to handle in the US.