30 Oct
2012
30 Oct
'12
3:16 p.m.
On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 5:51 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
Compared to Linux on low-end modern ARM hardware, RISC
OS looks pretty
amazing. OK, so, no true memory protection, no multiuser support, no
pre-emptive multitasking (although there is a patch for this out
there, but it breaks a lot of compatibility), no virtual memory, etc.,
but it's fast as hell and does a surprisingly large amount of all you
might want.
Sounds like AmigaDOS minus (working) pre-emptive multitasking. I say
this not to start a flame war (really), but because it sounds like the
closest point of reference amongst the machines I know well.
On one other point, there's no true multi-user support in AmigaDOS
(UIDs, logins, filesystem permissions/ownership, etc), but I have hung
a VT220 off the serial port and fired off a CLI to it and had two
people using the same Amiga (my college flatmate was playing a game
and I was editing and compiling console-based (stdin/stdout) C
programs).
I know a number of people for whom it's still
their main OS today.
If it does what you need to get done, then there's nothing wrong with
that (though connecting to an Exchange server and running Outlook
seems to be the second favorite thing for folks to do outside of
running a web browser - that alone gives me more grief than anything
else in modern computing expectations except maybe OS-specific VPN
clients, my hassle of the week).
-ethan