A couple of notes…

Some demoscene guys, commercial Amiga programmers fans started building MorphOS. There was no people connected with Commodore directly or OS3.x developers which is kinda weird

Actually, not weird at all.

Firstly, if you let someone who has seen the original source code of a piece of software work on what is supposed to be legally clean reimplementation of it, you are essentially asking to get sued.

Secondly, most of the Commodore software engineers working on AmigaOS were hired hands. They did it for a pay cheque, not passion. Even the original development team, who did some personal sacrifices to keep the project alive, were a lot less attached to Amiga and AmigaOS than the end users to who opted to stick around until today. If you read their work bios, they usually moved on very quickly and worked on all kinds of different platforms.

That said, it is worth mentioning that the original MorphOS team included developers who had previously provided essential system software such graphics card driver stacks (CybergraphX), Magic User Interface (GUI toolkit), the Voyager web browser, and others. These would normally be included with an operating system but had to be developed by third parties since Commodore was unable to do so.

There’s a myth that original non-public and some first public released were based off from OS3.x sources stolen from somewhere

Feel free to look up how much cleaning up the developers with actual access to the original source code had to do.

It is a silly idea that was primarily spread by an individual who set up a contract promising to port AmigaOS from 68k to PowerPC in a matter of months for a mere 25.000 EUR, failed to do so, then turned around and sued his client for several years, and was eventually granted the AmigaOS rights because Amiga’s only investor unexpectedly died and there was nobody around who had the money to keep paying expensive lawyers…

So, everyone, please consider the source.

The “blues” (MorphOS Team) got partnered with bPlan (later Genesi) which found MorphOS a nice target OS for their PowerPC G3/G4 boards: EFIKA, Pegasos I, Pegasos II and some R&D boards not publicly known. They pumped some serious money into project, hired some developers full-time for few years and generally accelerated the development

Actually, Thendic France spent a lot less on MorphOS directly than you might think. Lots and lots of unpaid bills. Also, the very few hired full-time developers that were there lost their jobs or outright quit after mere months, not years.

License is kinda expensive

As always with prices, this is subjective as well as relative. You can never please everybody.

However, I think it is worthwhile to add that updates have always been free. People who registered MorphOS 2.0 all the way back in 2008 have received a total of 20 free updates over the course of 10 years.

Even when Microsoft still allowed to upgrade to Windows 10 for free, that offer did not include 10 years old Windows versions. And this is a billion dollar company, not enthusiasts who have to buy their own development hardware to develop and maintain drivers, etc.

Even if the kernel can, OS can’t allocate more than 1 gigabyte of RAM (or maybe 2?) even when Amiga could theoreticaly allocate 4GB of RAM in 32-bit address space.

Commodore’s AmigaOS used a 31bit address space (2GB). Sadly, backwards compatibility depends on it.

I do not mean to sugarcoat this whatsoever but, based on user feedback, 2GB is actually still decent for the time being.

The system was built with GCC 2.95.3 to this day

That is incorrect.

Same for computers sold/transferred between users, you must rename your license.

Nobody needs to rename anything. There are some users who are apparently bothered by the fact that the registration information lists a different name than their own. Those have the option to get a new keyfile with their own name in it.

From all of my knowledge there’s only a single German company which bought about 30 licenses late 2000s for their work machines and nobody actually know what they really do

If that happened, it was probably a tax write off issue or so. Companies buy crazy things near the end of a fiscal year ;)

No supported office software exists.

If you take a look at the new Iris IMAP email client, its email editor is half-way there to a word processor…

No Vim or Emacs. This is ridiculous (…) I asked on MorphOS IRC channel for help, everyone turned off as “it’s a linux shit, get away with it”

Actually, there is a port of Vim 8.0.1… I do not recall anything but appreciative comments after its release.

That said, there is also Flow Studio, which uses the Scintilla engine and offers lots of handy features that make MorphOS development more convenient.

But it has some irrational design issues and the community is horrible when you can’t get their spirit of old grumpy Amiga user who’s angry at everything around and frustrated from 20 years waiting for “next Amiga” which never happened.

Before anybody takes this for gospel, please visit MorphZone and see for yourself whether the community is “horrible” or not.

I thought about linking to it but figured if mighg be too much for casual readers. I saved that one for when people ask about the deeper history. ;)

Thanks for that! Given that you say in the article that Hyperion shuttered days before you wrote it, who’s putting out new MorphOS versions? :)

Donations are crucial here. AFAIK donations fulfills the current needs, but the userbase is still growing so it might change anytime. If you use disroot, consider donating.

I agree. I want to donate too as I feel like I am obligated too as they run services that I run my life on.

As I miss low-level Ring0 debuggers like SoftIce,

It was hard to tell from the video what exactly was going on. The wikipedia page two links away describes it as

SoftICE is a kernel mode debugger for Microsoft Windows up to Windows XP. Crucially, it is designed to run underneath Windows such that the operating system is unaware of its presence. Unlike an application debugger, SoftICE is capable of suspending all operations in Windows when instructed. For driver debugging this is critical due to how hardware is accessed and the kernel of the operating system functions. Because of its low-level capabilities, SoftICE is also popular as a software cracking tool.

So, one main point for my project is to have a live editor for the process/program being “debugged”. I don’t know how machine-level inspection and control would help here.

Are we going to see any other software to interrupt your machine (and inspect/control however you like) in the future?

What do you mean by any other software? The idea was to make a debugger from scratch from syscalls and up (well, almost since a wrapper is used).

If instead you mean run multiple debuggers at once, currently ptrace prevent more than one from attaching to one process. I did think of attaching a debugger to the debugger itself though.

From your experience, is it quick to make machine level interrupts and inspectors? And then to get the desired macroscopic effects? (For me, assembly was already borderline

Better than slack.

How such BSD desktop solution would be appealing for some casual Ubuntu user who just clicks “ok” button and gets on with things?

I think we need to find a difference between a ‘desktop’ term for regular people (not IT related) and a ‘desktop’ term for technical IT people.

My guide is definitely for the second group, such FreeBSD Desktop is not suited for a regular user, the NomadBSD may be suited that way, the TrueOS Desktop may be suited that way but definitely such ‘custom’ setup.

I am sharing this knowledge as I use FreeBSD on the ‘desktop’ since 15 years and when I wanted to have FreeBSD desktop it was not such easy task as it is now, but still requires some configuration and that I wanted to share.

Is CentOS/RHEL better suited for the ‘desktop’ then FreeBSD? Depends, Linux has the advantage here that a lot of software out of the box supports these distributions, yet when you compare the freshness and count of packages between these system families its on the FreeBSD side - https://repology.org/statistics/newest - you have to configure many additional repositories with CentOS/RHEL like EPEL and on FreeBSD you just type pkg install so its more friendly here.

CentOS/RHEL has graphical installer on which You can select to install X11 desktop which is easier for less advanced users, that is the CentOS/RHEL advantage over FreeBSD, but when we compare it that way, OpenIndiana based Illumos distribution is even easier to use and install then CentOS/RHEL as its installer is more easy then the CentOS/RHEL one ;)

So its a long discussion without end really :>

How such BSD desktop solution would be appealing for some casual Ubuntu user who just clicks “ok” button and gets on with things?

The real selling point is “fearless upgrades”. Pushing the upgrade button in Ubuntu feels like russian roulette, you never know what’s going to break this time.

ZFS is nice - RAID-like resilience, LVM-like convenience, and filesystem snapshotting for history/“undo” for the same amount of admin effort it would take to set up one of those things on Linux - but the biggest feature of BSD for me is more of an anti-feature: they just don’t keep randomly breaking everything.

It’s been so long since I used it that it’s changed names, but TrueOS is the “I just want to have FreeBSD with a desktop and don’t want to learn how to edit kernel modules with vi” answer.

I think it might be beyond your feature scope, but I’ll be really interested in plugin which un-shorts links and displays their <title/> tags in buffer context (without logging or anything). The only plugin related to this case is a shortener which needs additional backend software running on your server with resolvable domain.

It’s available as a Docker image, if that helps (tho I doubt it if the env is locked down):

docker pull imiell/autotrace

I could look at unrolling to single python file somehow… would that help?

BTW, one thing I learned while doing this was that you can’t run strace and ltrace on the same pid. Or at least it looked that way to me. So I wonder whether you can run two straces?

There should be a way to contain whole dependency trail + interpreter of such package into single static binary to put in /usr/local/bin like they do.

try https://lobste.rs/s/os2xxj/exodus_painless_relocation_linux

I’m going to buy Ergodox EZ Shine next month (still undecided about switches, but looking towards MX Clear or Kailh Gold). Could you please write some words from the user (or, more specificaly, as this is a “pro” product – “power user”) point of view? Both on the mechanical and software side, as I’m also interested in hacking on their QMK FW or moving onto something else if it fits, like that Model01.

My Nexus 4 once broke. I reflashed the stock OS but I forgot to relock the boot loader. The store refused to warranty my Nexus 4 (fun fact, you can’t ship it to LG. The manufacture pushes the warranty to the store, which is fucking bullshit).

New Zealand has consumer protection laws and my coworkers told me I shouldn’t let the shop get away with it. I had to go to court, had two hearings, and eventually the arbitrator found in my favor and awarded me the $400 for the phone.

It’s pretty bullshit I even had to go through that process. You can install Linux, FreeBSD, etc. on your Windows laptop and not void the warranty. The US FTC reticently put companies on notice for their warranty stickers.

Its not about the warranty, the root or custom ROM are not allowed by owner of the phone, not allowed during my usage of it.

In other words - not my device not my rules ;)

because that’s what the developer uses?

Like most widget types that are poorly supported or unsupported in popular GUI toolkits, I see pie menus almost exclusively in games – since people writing games have the expectation that they’ll need to essentially roll their own GUI toolkit in order to make it sufficiently themable anyhow.

It’s an unfortunate state of affairs: widget functionality, once you’ve got past the initial learning curve, is proportional to the degree to which the widget behavior matches the user’s internal mental model of the task, and so expressive UI elements have the ability to make real work much more efficient; limiting the use of good GUIs to video game menus means UI design is limited in its capacity to make anything but our leisure time easier.

(As a side note: SAO is a bad example of UI design in anime – the titular game is, on many levels, not professional enough to make it to market, and the way the menus are laid out is no exception. Geoff Thew explains this in detail in one of his video essays. The way SAO uses pie menus is sort of a shallow copy of how pie menus have been used in games for the past decade, as understood by someone who has never played a video game. A good example of an interesting use of pie menus in a real game is the conversation system in Mass Effect – where segments have their size changed in order to make certain responses more likely, and where pie areas correspond to emotions or tactics.)

I just added this example to the article, which you may have missed (since it wasn’t there until a few minutes ago):

Spectacular Example: Simon Schneegans’ Gnome-Pie, the slick application launcher for Linux

I can’t understate how much I like this. Not only is it slick, beautiful, and elegantly animated, but it’s properly well designed in all the important ways that make it Fitts’s Law Friendly and easy to use, and totally deeply customizable by normal users! It’s a spectacularly useful tour-de-force that Linux desktop users can personalize to their heart’s content.

Gnome-Pie - Simon Schneegans

Homepage of Gnome-Pie, the slick application launcher for Linux. simmesimme.github.io

Gnome-Pie is a slick application launcher which I’m creating for Linux. It’s eye candy and pretty fun to work with. It offers multiple ways to improve your desktop experience.

Check out the project’s homepage @ http://gnome-pie.simonschneegans.de

https://vimeo.com/30618179

If that doesn’t blow your mind, check this out – there are so many great things about it:

https://vimeo.com/51073078

I used a great pie interface on Android for a while, though I cannot remember what it was called and am failing to find screenshots online. It helped considerably with one-handed operation.

I’m targeting ARM64 for my desktops now because it seems to be the future.

Nobody’s holding a sword to your throat and forcing you to use it.

You might want that intolerance looked at, it sounds like it’s reducing your quality of life.

Could you elaborate? I wouldn’t say most ST users are tolerating anything. They are in fact enjoying the experience with the editor, perhaps more than an open source editor. Unless you are one of the small minority who are forced to use an extremely esoteric development setup you have some degree of choice in how you work, which might even include using a proprietary editor if that’s what you prefer. FWIW I think ST has actually jump-started some of the wider interest and innovation in text editors in recent years.

My personal favourite closed-source editor is EmEditor (https://www.emeditor.com/). If I need to work in a Windows environment, it’s the first software I install, but it’s not the editor that I spend most of my time coding in. I often have to deal with huge CSV and other text files which the developer specializes in handling. They added features for opening CSV files in an Excel-like way which is a huge boon if you need that. It can open Visual Studio solutions and is extremely fast. It lacks all of the useful plug-ins that editors I prefer to code with have, but it really knows it’s niche. Perhaps there are equivalent capabilities with other open source products, but it doesn’t seem a problem that these proprietary products exist and innovate.

The dude might need money.

Yeah, I didn’t like the article’s fixation on said irrelevant details.

What made the old Mac work was its UI; the attention to detail that both Apple and third parties had. Things were consistent, and things felt direct in a way modern Mac OS lacks. You manipulate the actual control panels in the control panels folder; opening them, removing them, booting with them, etc. There’s no mental abstraction like there is on Unix.

Reading this it’s very clear that the author didn’t use an old Mac for their post. The desktop animation is pulled from archive.org.

Low End Mac has a great collection of articles for making use of aging Apple gear.

As for the article; yeah, it does go on quite a bit on the pixels, but I feel that the gist is true: That the limited hardware and the focus on inexperienced users pushed for a UX that had to convey its intentions and affordance clearly, and that the UI/UX design of today doesn’t primarily focus on usability. (Broad strokes, of coure.)

I’ve always loved the classic Mac OS interface (indeed, my avatar is a poor Susan Kare homage), but I’ve thought of it as nostalgia. When I think of it now, I know that it isn’t just a matter of fuzzy feelings, but that the original Mac OS design did a lot of things right.

I believe 7.6 is the first time they used the “MacOS” branding in the OS itself.

Really want to get a development environment set up for my Quadra. I have one for Mac OS 9 on a PPC, but it’s not quite the same, too easy to avoid the Toolbox by using good modern-ish libraries like SDL.