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You can run RiscOS, for free, without much effort, on a Raspberry Pi btw. Give it some time, it's strange and delightful. Last release was in October, as in un

You can run RiscOS, for free, without much effort, on a Raspberry Pi btw. Give it some time, it's strange and delightful. Last release was in October, as in under 2 months ago: https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2020/10/24/risc-os-5-28-now-available https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2020/10/24/risc-os-... Firstly, it's unapologetically super-british in way you can only experience in person (games for instance, live in the "diversions" folder, settings are called "choices", the desktop background is called the "backdrop", the media player is subscribed to the BBC by default. Instead of asking for localization, the clock goes to British time, the prices are in pounds, and you need to go out of your way to tell it you have a US keyboard. There's apps for british football news, unmounting disks is called "dismounting", etc... it's fun) It's also unique in its own special way, not really fitting clearly into the UNIX or DOS lineage. For instance you can press some key sequence and get a shell, but in this unique way: It first appears at the bottom of the screen and then the graphical buffer of the UX scrolls up with your interaction like so: http://www.riscos.com/the_archive/rol/productsdb/images/split.jpg http://www.riscos.com/the_archive/rol/productsdb/images/spli... - this isn't unix, it isn't dos, it's its own special snowflake, really, feels closer to VMS than anything: http://www.riscos.com/support/users/userguide3/book3b/book3_2.html http://www.riscos.com/support/users/userguide3/book3b/book3_... It also has this capability of fully interactive submenus with dialog boxes, icons, etc - it's kinda weird: http://timil.com/riscos/desktop_settings/menu.jpg http://timil.com/riscos/desktop_settings/menu.jpg You can just flash it onto a microsd card, pop it into the raspberry pi and boot it up. It's really easy. Give it a spin.

JNRowe 6y ago
> the desktop background is called the "backdrop" Hmm, non-British AmigaOS also used backdrop¹. Was that perhaps the common name back then? Plus, you can experience /some/ of the quirkiness of RiscOS on Linux by playing around with rox². rox-filer is packaged for Debian and it spits a Choices directory in to ~, even though it is now just a bunch of symlinks to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME³. ¹ https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Workbench_Menu_-_Backdrop https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Workbench_Menu_-_Backdrop ² http://rox.sourceforge.net/ http://rox.sourceforge.net/ ³ http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/book/export/html/163.html http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/book/export/html/163.html
- kristopolous 6y ago
  AmigaOS was Canadian. We all know that's like halfway to being british. :) Rox is a great theatrical production but I want to encourage people to spend some time with RiscOS ... it becomes less and less normal the more time you spend with it. You can do shell scripting with BBC Basic for instance and the coding styles honestly look closer to some elaborate preprocessor language than Basic. RiscOS is essentially what I think would happen if you took a bunch of programmers and threw them on an island in 1985, told them to write an operating system and that you'd be back in a few years. Meanwhile, an occasional soiled computer book would wash on the shore like tanenbaum's operating system book with 80% of the pages missing and the programmers pieced together incomplete passages based on conjecture and consensus like a bunch of biblical scholars with a torn ancient codex. I read a comment on a forum where someone said programming in it reminded them of GEM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)) but I haven't spent any significant time programming applications on either system so I can't really confirm.

JNRowe 6y ago

> the desktop background is called the "backdrop" Hmm, non-British AmigaOS also used backdrop¹. Was that perhaps the common name back then? Plus, you can experience /some/ of the quirkiness of RiscOS on Linux by playing around with rox². rox-filer is packaged for Debian and it spits a Choices directory in to ~, even though it is now just a bunch of symlinks to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME³. ¹ https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Workbench_Menu_-_Backdrop https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Workbench_Menu_-_Backdrop ² http://rox.sourceforge.net/ http://rox.sourceforge.net/ ³ http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/book/export/html/163.html http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/book/export/html/163.html

kristopolous 6y ago
AmigaOS was Canadian. We all know that's like halfway to being british. :) Rox is a great theatrical production but I want to encourage people to spend some time with RiscOS ... it becomes less and less normal the more time you spend with it. You can do shell scripting with BBC Basic for instance and the coding styles honestly look closer to some elaborate preprocessor language than Basic. RiscOS is essentially what I think would happen if you took a bunch of programmers and threw them on an island in 1985, told them to write an operating system and that you'd be back in a few years. Meanwhile, an occasional soiled computer book would wash on the shore like tanenbaum's operating system book with 80% of the pages missing and the programmers pieced together incomplete passages based on conjecture and consensus like a bunch of biblical scholars with a torn ancient codex. I read a comment on a forum where someone said programming in it reminded them of GEM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)) but I haven't spent any significant time programming applications on either system so I can't really confirm.