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To me, Linux lacked a lot of the aesthetic aspects of the Amiga. It had no games scene, the culture was older, more academic or "heavy industry" and didn't have

To me, Linux lacked a lot of the aesthetic aspects of the Amiga. It had no games scene, the culture was older, more academic or "heavy industry" and didn't have multimedia in its blood like the Amiga scene did. One thing that made the Amiga special, that can't really be replicated is that it occupied a sweet spot in the history of computer hardware. You could make like a C64 programmer, kick out the os and write pure ASM to the hardware (which was strange, complex and fascinating, unlike PC hardware), or you could go in the other direction and write object oriented (using BOOPSI) GUI apps in a true multitasking environment. And to top it off, it was a system that one programmer could completely understand, more or less. There was a real feeling of power and elegance when you programmed an Amiga. I probably spend too long thinking about this :) It was the "Amiga feeling" that got me into computers when I was younger, and I keep trying to replicate it :)

yodsanklai 12y ago
> To me, Linux lacked a lot of the aesthetic aspects of the Amiga. It had no games scene, the culture was older, more academic or "heavy industry" and didn't have multimedia in its blood like the Amiga scene did. Sure, nothing comparable with the Amiga. But coming from Windows 95, Linux was at least programmer friendly. My biggest frustration coming from the Amiga was that I wasn't able to display anything on a PC (at least, not with the limited knowledge I had at that time). With the Amiga, it was easy, no need to worry about system calls, you just wrote at the right place into the RAM et voila. And it wasn't complicated to make things move using the Blitter and the Copper. It was something a kid could do. EDIT: talking about the aesthetic aspect of the Amiga, I think it was a beautiful computer too. People always praise Apple for making computers beautiful. But to me, my Amiga 500 was much better looking than an Apple II or a mac from that era.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  > But coming from Windows 95, Linux was at least programmer friendly. Depends. I came from the ZX 80, Amiga and PC. My first UNIX was Xenix on 1993, followed by DG/UX in 1994 and Slackware 2.0 in 1995. Never found out an environment similar to Devpac, Amos, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, Borland C++, Turbo Assembler back on those days. Sure I did learn a lot from UNIX, but the spirit wasn't really the same.
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  When I first moved to the PC from the Commodore 64, I was appalled that you couldn't write and execute code on the command line. You had to open up a whole different program just to write programs! What foolishness!
pjmlp 12y ago
> To me, Linux lacked a lot of the aesthetic aspects of the Amiga. It had no games scene, the culture was older, more academic or "heavy industry" and didn't have multimedia in its blood like the Amiga scene did. Yes. I ended up loosing a few years trying to meet demosceners in GNU/Linux, only to finally reach the conclusion that everyone that moved away from Amiga was either on Windows or Mac. Back then the demoscene culture, games and making each group cool demo secret, were the opposite of the GNU culture driving Linux development.

yodsanklai 12y ago

> To me, Linux lacked a lot of the aesthetic aspects of the Amiga. It had no games scene, the culture was older, more academic or "heavy industry" and didn't have multimedia in its blood like the Amiga scene did. Sure, nothing comparable with the Amiga. But coming from Windows 95, Linux was at least programmer friendly. My biggest frustration coming from the Amiga was that I wasn't able to display anything on a PC (at least, not with the limited knowledge I had at that time). With the Amiga, it was easy, no need to worry about system calls, you just wrote at the right place into the RAM et voila. And it wasn't complicated to make things move using the Blitter and the Copper. It was something a kid could do. EDIT: talking about the aesthetic aspect of the Amiga, I think it was a beautiful computer too. People always praise Apple for making computers beautiful. But to me, my Amiga 500 was much better looking than an Apple II or a mac from that era.

pjmlp 12y ago
> But coming from Windows 95, Linux was at least programmer friendly. Depends. I came from the ZX 80, Amiga and PC. My first UNIX was Xenix on 1993, followed by DG/UX in 1994 and Slackware 2.0 in 1995. Never found out an environment similar to Devpac, Amos, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, Borland C++, Turbo Assembler back on those days. Sure I did learn a lot from UNIX, but the spirit wasn't really the same.
PhasmaFelis 12y ago
When I first moved to the PC from the Commodore 64, I was appalled that you couldn't write and execute code on the command line. You had to open up a whole different program just to write programs! What foolishness!

pjmlp 12y ago

> To me, Linux lacked a lot of the aesthetic aspects of the Amiga. It had no games scene, the culture was older, more academic or "heavy industry" and didn't have multimedia in its blood like the Amiga scene did. Yes. I ended up loosing a few years trying to meet demosceners in GNU/Linux, only to finally reach the conclusion that everyone that moved away from Amiga was either on Windows or Mac. Back then the demoscene culture, games and making each group cool demo secret, were the opposite of the GNU culture driving Linux development.