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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 dist

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.

amiga386 1y ago
I think you can categorise Amiga enthusiasts in various ways, this is my taxonomy: 1. Hardware enthusiasts who specifically love the Amiga's original hardware, its peripherals, and the early post-Commodore direction (PowerPC accelerators), and/or modding all of the above. These sort of people used WarpOS back in the day and probably use MorphOS or AmigaOS 4 today. The question is whether, for these people, modern single-board computers "count" as Amigas or not. 2. Nostalgic enthusiasts of the system that the Amiga was, who are happy with a real Amiga, or with an emulated one, or an emulated one running on some board in a box shaped like an Amiga. Possibly with a non-Amiga UI to boot some classic games. These enthusiasts may enjoy fake floppy drive sounds that remind them of booting disks in their youth. 3. Software enthusiasts of the Amiga's OS, and the directions it took that were different from its contemporaries, and the software ecosystem that came from it. These people have a longer user-startup than startup-sequence. They probably have most of Aminet downloaded. These people might be interested in other alternative OSes, e.g. QNX or BeOS. If they're still using Amiga hardware, or emulators, they'd be interested in AmigaOS 3.5/3.9 and 3.1.4/3.2. This can also include AROS and the work to get it running on native hardware, not just m68k but also x86 and arm... but it's unlikely that it will ever support as broad a range of hardware that Linux does, which limits how many people would want to use it, because it's unlikely to be able to drive a random modern laptop. 4. The reverse of 3, Amiga users that were big UNIX fans, e.g. Fred Fish, the sort of people who ran GeekGadgets and replaced their AmigaShell with pdksh. They probably just moved wholesale to Linux and didn't look back. There are probably other categories, but I think the one you're looking for is 5: enthusiasts of the Amiga's look and feel, but not its broader OS or its software. If they did care about that, they'd be in groups 2 and 3, and emulators or alternative AmigaOSes would satisfy them most. I can't say why there aren't many alternative desktops for Linux. Probably because it takes a lot of resources to build a full desktop environment for linux - a Window Manager, or even just an existing Window Manager theme is not enough. A file browser is not enough. Ultimately it takes the applications themselves to play along, which only works when have the clout to make people write software in your style (e.g. KDE, GNOME, Windows, macOS, Android, etc.). The only alternative UI taken from retro machines to Linux, that I can think of, is ROX Desktop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROX_Desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROX_Desktop) with its ROX-Filer... and even that doesn't look entirely like RISC OS, which you could be running instead of Linux.
- lproven 1y ago
  Interesting analysis. Thanks for that. I'm well aware of ROX Desktop and have used it in the past. I've written about it: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/14/the_end_of_absolute_linux/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/14/the_end_of_absolute_l... ROX's AppDirs provided the app format used in AppImage. I am sure I remember a Mac-like one, and I've asked -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937562 -- but to no avail. You say a WM isn't enough, and I agree, but in this case, amiwm is still right there. I own an Amiga and I'm interested and I try to cover Amiga news, but back in the 1980s, I was an Archimedes owner. I loved RISC OS and I never mastered AmigaOS. This is not something I personally want, although I'd love to write about it.

amiga386 1y ago

I think you can categorise Amiga enthusiasts in various ways, this is my taxonomy: 1. Hardware enthusiasts who specifically love the Amiga's original hardware, its peripherals, and the early post-Commodore direction (PowerPC accelerators), and/or modding all of the above. These sort of people used WarpOS back in the day and probably use MorphOS or AmigaOS 4 today. The question is whether, for these people, modern single-board computers "count" as Amigas or not. 2. Nostalgic enthusiasts of the system that the Amiga was, who are happy with a real Amiga, or with an emulated one, or an emulated one running on some board in a box shaped like an Amiga. Possibly with a non-Amiga UI to boot some classic games. These enthusiasts may enjoy fake floppy drive sounds that remind them of booting disks in their youth. 3. Software enthusiasts of the Amiga's OS, and the directions it took that were different from its contemporaries, and the software ecosystem that came from it. These people have a longer user-startup than startup-sequence. They probably have most of Aminet downloaded. These people might be interested in other alternative OSes, e.g. QNX or BeOS. If they're still using Amiga hardware, or emulators, they'd be interested in AmigaOS 3.5/3.9 and 3.1.4/3.2. This can also include AROS and the work to get it running on native hardware, not just m68k but also x86 and arm... but it's unlikely that it will ever support as broad a range of hardware that Linux does, which limits how many people would want to use it, because it's unlikely to be able to drive a random modern laptop. 4. The reverse of 3, Amiga users that were big UNIX fans, e.g. Fred Fish, the sort of people who ran GeekGadgets and replaced their AmigaShell with pdksh. They probably just moved wholesale to Linux and didn't look back. There are probably other categories, but I think the one you're looking for is 5: enthusiasts of the Amiga's look and feel, but not its broader OS or its software. If they did care about that, they'd be in groups 2 and 3, and emulators or alternative AmigaOSes would satisfy them most. I can't say why there aren't many alternative desktops for Linux. Probably because it takes a lot of resources to build a full desktop environment for linux - a Window Manager, or even just an existing Window Manager theme is not enough. A file browser is not enough. Ultimately it takes the applications themselves to play along, which only works when have the clout to make people write software in your style (e.g. KDE, GNOME, Windows, macOS, Android, etc.). The only alternative UI taken from retro machines to Linux, that I can think of, is ROX Desktop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROX_Desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROX_Desktop) with its ROX-Filer... and even that doesn't look entirely like RISC OS, which you could be running instead of Linux.

lproven 1y ago
Interesting analysis. Thanks for that. I'm well aware of ROX Desktop and have used it in the past. I've written about it: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/14/the_end_of_absolute_linux/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/14/the_end_of_absolute_l... ROX's AppDirs provided the app format used in AppImage. I am sure I remember a Mac-like one, and I've asked -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937562 -- but to no avail. You say a WM isn't enough, and I agree, but in this case, amiwm is still right there. I own an Amiga and I'm interested and I try to cover Amiga news, but back in the 1980s, I was an Archimedes owner. I loved RISC OS and I never mastered AmigaOS. This is not something I personally want, although I'd love to write about it.