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Certainly that is how I read it. It divides effort, spreads it too thinly among too many disparate projects with essentially the same goals, and as a result, t

Certainly that is how I read it. It divides effort, spreads it too thinly among too many disparate projects with essentially the same goals, and as a result, they all advance much more slowly. Examples: how many successors to C are there now? Hare, Odin, Joy, Zig, Nim, Crystal, Jai, Rust, D... And probably as many again that are lower-profile or one-person efforts. For a parallel example, consider desktop environments on FOSS xNix OSes. I have tried to count and I found about 20. A "desktop" here meaning that it provides a homogenous environment, including things like a file manager and tools to switching between apps, plus accessories such as text editors, media viewers, and maybe even an email client, calendar, and/or address book. I am trying to explicitly exclude simple window managers here. The vast majority are simply re-implementations of the Windows 9x desktop. Taskbar along 1 edge of the screen, with buttons for open apps, start menu, system tray, hierarchical file explorer, a Control Panel app with icons for individual pages, etc. This includes: * KDE Plasma (and Trinity) * GNOME Flashback (AKA GNOME Classic, including the Consort fork) * Cinnamon * Xfce * Budgie * MATE * LXDE (including Raspberry Pi PIXEL) * LXQt * UKUI (from Ubuntu Kylin, openKylin, etc.) * DDE (from Deepin but also UOS, Ubuntu DDE and others) * Enlightenment (and Moksha etc.) * ChromeOS Aura And more that are now obsolete: * EDE * XPde * Lumina That's about 15, more if you count variants and forks. There are more. The main differences are whether they use Gtk 2, 3 or 4, or Qt. That's it. It's easier to count the ones that aren't visibly inspired by Windows >= 95: * GNOME Shell, ElementaryOS's Pantheon, Ubuntu's Unity. Arguably: GNUstep (whose project lead angrily maintains is not a desktop after all), and the long-dormant ROX Desktop... So, arguably, 3 you can run on a modern distro today. CDE is older than Linux or Free/NetBSD so doesn't count. I only know 1 distro that offers it, anyway: Sparky Linux. MAXX Interactive Desktop looks interesting but it's not (yet?) FOSS. All that effort that's gone into creating and maintaining 8-10 different Win9x desktops in C using Gtk. It's tragic. And yet there is still no modern FOSS classic-MacOS desktop, or Mac OS X desktop, or GEM desktop, or Amiga desktop, or OS/2 Workplace Shell... it's not like inspiration is lacking. There are at least 3 rewrites of AmigaOS (AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4.x) but despite so much passion nobody bothered to bring the desktop to Linux? Defenders of each will vigorously argue that theirs is the best and there are good reasons why it's the best, I'm sure, but at the end of the day, a superset of all of the features of all of them would not be visibly different from any single one. That's rather sad, IMHO.

js8 1y ago
I feel the same, too many people doing similar stuff in slightly different syntax, too few people looking at how things are similar and could be unified. I think it's time to look beyond syntax in programming and untyped lambda calculus is the simplest choice (that is universal and can easily express new abstractions). Mathematics suffers to some extent from a similar problem, but recent formalization efforts are really tackling it.
amiga386 1y ago
> There are at least 3 rewrites of AmigaOS (AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4.x) but despite so much passion nobody bothered to bring the desktop to Linux? The passion is there for the whole AmigaOS, of which the desktop metaphor, Workbench, is just a part. What fun is AmigaOS without Exec, Intuition and AmigaDOS? The passion is to see AmigaOS run, not to see Linux wearing its skin. GUIs for manipulating files a-la Workbench are readily available, nobody seems to have built an Amiga-skinned one when a Win95 one will do. DOpus is already a clone of Midnight Commander, and there are clones of that aplenty, the most DOPus-like one I've seen is Worker (http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/ http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/) The rest of the Workbench metaphor is available via AmiWM (https://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html https://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html), or requires apps to play along (e.g. Gadtools, MUI, Commodities, ARexx)
- lproven 1y ago
  Well, you do you, and indeed, the entire community is free to do as it wishes. What I find surprising is that there are multiple entire Amiga-themed Linux distros – for example: https://www.commodoreos.net/CommodoreOS.aspx https://www.commodoreos.net/CommodoreOS.aspx I reviewed it. I was not very impressed. https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/06/commodore_os_3/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/06/commodore_os_3/ And ones which put an Amiga emulator front and centre: https://cubiclenate.com/pimiga/ https://cubiclenate.com/pimiga/ https://wilkiecat.wordpress.com/2025/05/31/pimiga4-by-chris-edwards-how-to-install/ https://wilkiecat.wordpress.com/2025/05/31/pimiga4-by-chris-... (Which I looked at, but decided that there wasn't enough here to review.) And new hardware like the A1200NG: https://www.a1200.com/index.php/the-a1200-ng/ https://www.a1200.com/index.php/the-a1200-ng/ Which is an Arm board running Linux running a full-screen Amiga emulator. And AROS Portable: https://arosnews.github.io/aros-portable/ https://arosnews.github.io/aros-portable/ Which I also reviewed: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/22/aros_live/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/22/aros_live/ Given this visible interest in running Amiga stuff on Linux and integrating AmigaOS (and AROS) I am very surprised that in ~30 years, nothing has progressed beyond a simple window manager. Intuition isn't that big or complicated. It's already been recreated several times over, in MorphOS and in AROS. I am so tired of seeing Linux desktops that are just another inferior recreation of Win95. I want to see something different and this seems such an obvious candidate to me.

js8 1y ago

I feel the same, too many people doing similar stuff in slightly different syntax, too few people looking at how things are similar and could be unified. I think it's time to look beyond syntax in programming and untyped lambda calculus is the simplest choice (that is universal and can easily express new abstractions). Mathematics suffers to some extent from a similar problem, but recent formalization efforts are really tackling it.

amiga386 1y ago

> There are at least 3 rewrites of AmigaOS (AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4.x) but despite so much passion nobody bothered to bring the desktop to Linux? The passion is there for the whole AmigaOS, of which the desktop metaphor, Workbench, is just a part. What fun is AmigaOS without Exec, Intuition and AmigaDOS? The passion is to see AmigaOS run, not to see Linux wearing its skin. GUIs for manipulating files a-la Workbench are readily available, nobody seems to have built an Amiga-skinned one when a Win95 one will do. DOpus is already a clone of Midnight Commander, and there are clones of that aplenty, the most DOPus-like one I've seen is Worker (http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/ http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/) The rest of the Workbench metaphor is available via AmiWM (https://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html https://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html), or requires apps to play along (e.g. Gadtools, MUI, Commodities, ARexx)

lproven 1y ago
Well, you do you, and indeed, the entire community is free to do as it wishes. What I find surprising is that there are multiple entire Amiga-themed Linux distros – for example: https://www.commodoreos.net/CommodoreOS.aspx https://www.commodoreos.net/CommodoreOS.aspx I reviewed it. I was not very impressed. https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/06/commodore_os_3/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/06/commodore_os_3/ And ones which put an Amiga emulator front and centre: https://cubiclenate.com/pimiga/ https://cubiclenate.com/pimiga/ https://wilkiecat.wordpress.com/2025/05/31/pimiga4-by-chris-edwards-how-to-install/ https://wilkiecat.wordpress.com/2025/05/31/pimiga4-by-chris-... (Which I looked at, but decided that there wasn't enough here to review.) And new hardware like the A1200NG: https://www.a1200.com/index.php/the-a1200-ng/ https://www.a1200.com/index.php/the-a1200-ng/ Which is an Arm board running Linux running a full-screen Amiga emulator. And AROS Portable: https://arosnews.github.io/aros-portable/ https://arosnews.github.io/aros-portable/ Which I also reviewed: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/22/aros_live/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/22/aros_live/ Given this visible interest in running Amiga stuff on Linux and integrating AmigaOS (and AROS) I am very surprised that in ~30 years, nothing has progressed beyond a simple window manager. Intuition isn't that big or complicated. It's already been recreated several times over, in MorphOS and in AROS. I am so tired of seeing Linux desktops that are just another inferior recreation of Win95. I want to see something different and this seems such an obvious candidate to me.