AROS is a lightweight, efficient, and flexible desktop operating system | Hacker News Reader

AROS is a lightweight, efficient, and flexible desktop operating system

aros.org

180 pointsdoener84 comments

Another Amiga OS clone is a cute retro project, but this is not forward motion.

Nobody seems to want to clone QNX, which is a better architecture. QNX was a great technology lost to bad marketing. Blackberry has it now, and it's used industrially and in automotive systems. But Blackberry dropped the desktop version and the hobbyist version, and you have to cross compile from Windows now.

It was open source for a while, and was suddenly made closed source when Blackberry bought it. Sadly, no one seems to have saved the open source version. I wish I had. I didn't have enough disk at the time.

Funny that you mention this. You are actually the reason I know QNX. I spent a decent amount of time some years ago pouring over code code you wrote for the Overbot. Thanks for donating that to UCSC :)

I enjoy how sometimes you'll see people recognizing each other on HN despite the use of pseudonyms. Gives a sense of a tight-nit community.

nit: knit

nit: knit: nitpick

Edit: knitpick

Out of curiosity, what makes QNX a better architecture than AmigaOS? I had a Blackberry Playbook back in the day but that's the extent of my exposure to it.

Used QNX 15+ years ago. The supposed best value is micro-kernel. Kernel is very small, all the device drivers, file system, TCPIP stack are run in user space outside the kernel.

I have not used AmigaOS and no clue if it has the same micro kernel design.

We have Fuchsia now.

As great as Fuschsia’s architecture (the Zircon kernel) may be, I’ve yet to see any devices that come with it.

Sort of, but AmigaOS didn't have memory protection so the distinction doesn't mean much as the distinction between supervisor and user mode on a plain m68000 is very minor.

Is this helpful? There is a folder called "repository" in this torrent.

https://thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=6545894

It wasn't meant to be forward motion. It was started shortly after Commodore's bankruptcy as a way of providing continuity

In fact there was a split between factions at the time who wanted continuity vs. something new. Nothing came of the attempts to create something new, but AROS persisted.

It wasn't retro when it started.

(Also this is the difference re: qnx: AROS persisted because of the then large, committed Amiga userbase and nostalgia... How many people have used QNX knowing they were using QNX?)

I seem to recall when Amiga was bought by that PC clone company (their ads always featured lots of cows and the founder) they had QNX onboard to develop a new AmigaOS.

But then the Amiga curse struck and it all went south like all the companies who got involved in the Amiga IP.

He is dead Jim.

PS It was Gateway.

Look into Genode, and their dynamic scenario, Sculpt.

Note it is not QNX's architecture. It is a better one.

I wonder if this is a copy of the open source version https://github.com/aogrcs/qnx-opensource

No. There are two files there. The first file is the source code to some drivers but not to the whole OS. I don't believe posting it on GitHub like that complies with the license agreement either:

    * Copyright 2010, QNX Software Systems. All Rights Reserved.
    *
    * You must obtain a written license from and pay applicable
    * license fees to QNX Software Systems before you may reproduce,
    * modify or distribute this software, or any work that includes
    * all or part of this software.   Free development licenses are
    * available for evaluation and non-commercial purposes.  For more
    * information visit http://licensing.qnx.com or email
    * licensing@qnx.com.

The second file is the binaries (not source code) of a QNX port of XFree86.

> It was open source for a while, and was suddenly made closed source when Blackberry bought it

It was never strictly speaking open source. It was a "shared source" model in which people could download the source code, but you had to pay QNX money to use it in production. And you weren't free to redistribute it.

Originally they'd let anyone download the source code so long as they agreed with the license. Then they changed the policy so only paying customers could get it.

> Sadly, no one seems to have saved the open source version. I wish I had. I didn't have enough disk at the time.

Even if someone has saved it, they aren't legally allowed to redistribute it, since it was never open source, just shared source.

Have you looked at/into https://genode.org ? Seems more likely to get something widely usable out of it.

I met Mr. Aros himself at scale in LA a couple years ago.

Every now and then I meet people who do pretty remarkable things that are so humble that it genuinely surprises me.

Aros, VLC and Inkscape devs are the people that come to mind on this one.

The debian people are also remarkably sane and modest for the levels of responsibility and complexities they have to deal with

Edit: gosh, it was 10 years ago already (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale9x/exhibitors/aros.html). I think I still have the disc he gave me

Have you had the pleasure of meeting Terry A. Davis?

Yeah. It wasn’t pleasant.

Yes, I wrote an article about it over 10 years ago.

It made the front page of a number of social media sites like reddit. Then, nearly simultaneously they were all removed.

I didn't even post the article. It spilled there from I think a Google plus post.

My candor was apparently off.

I'm certainly not a psychologist. I meant no harm but clearly I did something wrong. There's probably tripwires to his condition I simply don't know. I might have crossed them. I never got an explanation but it's fine. Lesson learned: people with any kind of disease/disability should be added to things to stay away from writing about without the proper co-authors. Sorry about that, internet.

I voluntarily pulled it shortly after. I'm not going to hurt someone for imaginary internet points.

The interesting thing though was the implied coordination between the platforms. It may have been a coincidence, may have been real,

I wouldn't be surprised if somebody with administrative power from all the major ones are on some chat server together. There's certainly a spillover effects between them.

Honestly I haven't tried that kind of journalism in a while. Apparently I'm pretty good at, well at least the "making stuff popular" part.

Funfact; AROS is also the name of a Danish art museum http://aros.dk/. AROS means River mouth in old Danish and is the old name of the second largest city in Denmark, Aarhus.

Same with Swedish city Västerås with original name West Aros. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4ster%C3%A5s

West Aros. Like... Westeros? Is that where they got that from for GoT?

It’s all a pastiche. Even the map is just Great Britain on top of Ireland: https://brilliantmaps.com/westeros/

I am in awe of the museum's website. With so much of animations I expected it to be a terrible experience but it is implemented brilliantly and functions so smooth.

Bit off topic. Anyone remember LiteStep? An amazing easy way to customize and skin your Windows OS.

http://litestep.net/

Heck yes, I remember LiteStep.

There was also the (commercial) WindowBlinds[1] by StarDock, and; for 10.3/10.4 OSX versions, ShapeShifter by Unsanity.

I used to be obsessed with desktop customization...

[1]https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/ [2]https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/unsanity-shapeshifter

Before I got into Linux, I spent about half a year customizing the crap out of my Win98 PC using LiteStep. I must have tried about half a dozen alternative desktop shells for Windows back then.

Fun times... Thanks for reminding me!

I wrote a popular shortcuts plugin for Litestep (EasyCuts) and eventually ended up on the core team for while.

Working on Litestep taught me so much about Windows internals - and I know a few people ended up being poached by Microsoft to work on the Windows shell proper due to their work on LS :)

You know what I'd really like to see? A desktop focused BSD distro that is easy to use as Ubuntu was in it's hayday (and arguably still is). Now that we see most hardware manufacturers allow for or even maintain open source drivers for Linux users I do not see why this is not a thing.

I'm an avid Linux user that has wanted to get into BSD and other Unix like operating systems but just can never muster the energy and time and patience to build a BSD system from scratch. IMO the potential from BSD is greater than Linux but the effort to create easy to install and use BSD desktop systems is just not there.

NetBSD/amiga 1.0 was my first unix. It was much harder to install, update and admin than most contemporary OSes, but, wow, it was multi-user and open-source before the term open-source had been popularized.

Years later, when I switched to Linux, I was surprised by how much more usable it was. Early Linux distributions put effort into enabling color ls, virtual consoles and readline. Then came package installers, etc.

The BSDs lagged behind Linux in usability because they kept focusing on other aspects of operating system design, dismissing things like graphical installers as unnecessary frill. "man tar" was the canonical advice.

New users getting stuck in the middle of the installation procedure were being welcomed by the BSD community with internal jokes like "RTFM!" and "man man". Development mailing-lists were also filled with comments ridiculing Linux as bloated (due to having bash with readline as /bin/sh) and not a real UNIX (due to not being a direct descendant of the AT&T sources). Not to mention all the attacks on the GPL and GNU as not being sufficiently free.

It was a cult, essentially. Hopefully the BSD community has grown up since then, but it has already lost most of the mind share to Linux and macOS, which is arguably the only usable BSD desktop available to users who couldn't figure what to do with the "man man" advice.

Sadly it hasn't, it's still stuck in 2005 era flame war cult-like attitude.

PC-BSD and to a lesser extent DragonFlyBSD do that. But there's just not enough people willing to put the work in (and in fairness why should they?).

FWIW I found installing FreeBSD pretty straightforward as soon as they started supporting normal disk partitions. It's closer to Slackware than Ubuntu, but that's also the appeal of FreeBSD - it doesn't have a whole lot to offer someone who wants something automagic like Ubuntu IMO.

I think that you will greatly appreciate the desktop distribution helloSystem : https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/index.html. From their own documentation : "[.…] desktop system for creators with a focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. Its design follows the “Less, but better” philosophy. It is intended as a system for “mere mortals”, welcoming to switchers from the Mac. FreeBSD is used as the core operating system."

If you prefer a video walk-through: https://youtu.be/MomHU2tP8fU

For a desktop operating system, I was hoping for some more (recent) screenshots. While this seems to be under active development, the last screenshot is from 2017.

(Obviously, screenshots really don't tell too much...)

https://vmwaros.blogspot.com/2020/12/icaros-desktop-23-now-a...

Don't forget about Commodore OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_OS

Linux based OS with Commodore Amiga UI look and feel.

Also Anubis OS: https://www.osnews.com/story/20516/former-aros-developers-st...

Still under development but one day they will be ready and Linux based and AmigaOS emulators built in.

Why does all of these have such tiny and low-res screenshots?

Old, but: http://nixon-development.com/guis/aros.html

Just buy my real Amiga and get it over with.

Real Amigas aren't made anymore since Commodore went out of business. The Amiga One is a PowerPC version but too expensive. It is cheaper to buy a $50 used PC with AROS on it.

There are some hardware replacement projects to fix existing Amiga computers but it is still easier to go thr AROS PC route.

Who is the target audience for this operating system? What use cases does it seek to address?

EDIT: is this a current project? References to running in a VM on Mac OS 9 with Virtual PC seem awfully dated.

“aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS at the API level”

It is upstream for other OS projects in the far alternative side of retro- and exotic- side of computing.

Recent Github commits from this week, so I'd say it is active.

The target audience is mostly a subset of former Amiga users, and the occasional person curious about retro-computing who is more focused on the software than hardware side.

Yes, it's a current project - the mailing list is more active than it has been for a long time, though the number of developers active at any given time is probably in the single to low double digits (for a very generous definition of "active" - people sometimes pops up for a single patch and then disappears for years; this is a niche project).

[I wrote most of the scrollback support for the console handler about a decade ago. Haven't done much with it for years.]

Given the legal turmoil it's been adopted/forked for use on the Vampire series of Amiga accelerators/clones.

See also: reactos (Windows2k) and haiku-os (BeOS)

To be clear, the legal turmoil in question is over the current ownership of the original Amiga brand and IP, not AROS itself. AROS is published under a license that is not OSI approved but is actually a fork of the MPL with the word "Netscape" changed.

I wondered if the parent comment was actually talking about the Vampire folks distributing an AmigaOS image with programs/games pre-loaded, without having the rights to do so?

The ApolloOS distribution of AROS that Apollo ship still has plenty of proprietary software on it. In the Discord they’ve discussed that the problem they had with CoffinOS/Amiga Coffin was the rights to Amiga OS.

Ah, sorry for not being clearer. Yes this is what I was talking about.

One big difference is AROS only aims for essentially source compatibility with Amiga, while both ReactOS and Haiku aim for binary compatibility[0].

I've only toyed around a little bit with AROS back when I was a teen, but my impression is it's something a bit different than just a clone of any Amiga OS. It's sort of Amiga-like, but does things differently, and targets very different hardware. Which I think is pretty cool :)

[0] I believe Haiku intends to drop binary compat with BeOS at some point, maybe they already have? It's why Haiku still uses (used?) a version of GCC from 2003, for binary compat

I think the M68k version does aim for binary compatibility where practical, but outside of M68k it doesn't really make much sense as AmigaOS4 on PPC deviates quite significantly from older AmigaOS, and for the other architectures there of course isn't any AmigaOS software.

Huh, this is further along and more ambitious than I remembered! https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Aros/Platforms/68k_support

Looks like it's pretty far along. Shame that old Amiga hardware is more and more unavailable nowadays, looks like this would be fun to hack on.

If I were to get an m68k-ish machine to play with today, it'd almost certainly be a Vampire V4 Standalone. It's of course not acceptable to those who insists on classic hardware, but it feels like a close-enough evolution with sufficiently fun improvements.

There are a bunch of hardware clones (usually need genuine custom chips). I think there are a500 and 1200 replacement mother boards (and cases!). There is a replacement a1000 motherboard (just announced) and a Mini-ITX Amiga MB.

There are of course a bunch of FPGA options including the Vampire v4sa which I would pick up, but is a bit on the costly side (~800CAD)

There are two builds of Haiku right now, one using the legacy compiler for binary compatibility and a new one that updates the compiler at the cost of binary compatibility.

MS-DOS was programmed using CP/M API calls for the DOS Interrupts. AROS uses AmigaOS 3.1 API calls for the DOS Interrupts.

Anyone interested in this legal turmoil should visit https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/

I wonder if anything would have been different if the Amiga IP was opened to the public. Perhaps nothing...

People who don't use HTTPS apparently. :P

you can build openssl on AROS: there is a port on Aminet of OpenSSL 1.1.1i that _will_ build (the maintainers only build for AmigaOS 3/m68k and AmigaOS 4/PPC but it'll work on MorphOS and AROS too), and of course aminet is available over HTTP which is how we avoid the bootstrap problem :).

Aside: pretty much anything that will build on a BSD will build on an Amiga/AROS with ixemul.library, but some people think that's cheating.

I think it's a jab at how AROS's site doesn't offer HTTPS. Personally I don't understand why some people are so bothered by this, but I guess conversely it's really easy to add letsencrypt to about anything nowadays...

Two obvious points where leaving it unencrypted is a problem: 1. downloads - which is mostly mitigated by not actually having software downloads on their own site, although of course now the links are subvertable, and 2. they have a paypal donation form on http://www.aros.org/download.php - I assume that clicking into that sends you to the real paypal page, so at least they're not sending credit card details in the clear, but again leaves them open to a nice little tweak to change where the money goes.

They cater to what's left of the old Amiga community. It is a re-implementation of AmigaOS 3.x, so it's probably not for everyone. :)

It’s a toy for developers who are building it. No real target audience, other than maybe some extreme Amiga geeks, who will launch it once every few months.

True, but it has been ported to other platforms, including ARM, which makes it interesting as graphical OS for embedded systems. I mean control panels showing data, graphs etc. rather than desktop applications. To me it would make sense to experiment with AROS on small boards where a full fledged Linux GUI would require too much beer to be usable, or simply to get the most performance from the available CPU/RAM/storage.

It could be cool toy for cases like that, but you need to do a lot of work yourself to get it to behave like embedded system, build custom ui, etc, aka, toy for developers.

It’s very dangerous to be used for real production. It’s AmigaOS at the core, which means that it’s fairly complex (compared to other embedded systems) and at the same time, comes with literally 0 security (shared address space for everyone for a start, before you go anywhere deeper with what’s wrong with security). While it may not be a biggest concern for non internet connected devices, it makes it inherently unstable system (there are embedded systems without memory protection, but they’re much simpler).

Don’t get me wrong, I love playing with toys like that (was involved in a broader Amiga community for a long long time), but for modern times, it’s just a toy.

Furries? No thanks.

I was hoping there was a rpi port. It seems this is x86 only.

Definitively not x86 only.

There are targets for ARM, x86, m68k, PPC.

There is a target specifically for rpi, but I have no idea if it is currently functioning.

I presume you didn't get to have a look at http://www.aros.org/nightly1.php which contains links for multiple versions include rpi.

Oh, nice! thanks

Why every new OS seems like a bad skin of MacOSX or Windows 95 UI?

Please innovate...

There's no need to innovate on perfection.

That's how you get the current mainstream operating systems that have minimalized to the point of uselessness and cleaned to the point what is a UI element and what is decoration.

My thoughts exactly.

In my opinion, the mid-1990s to mid-2000s were the pinnacle of GUI design, specifically that of stacking window managers, in terms of usability.

It's a reimplementation of the Amiga OS, which predates both of the systems you mention by many years.

Microsoft and Apple copied AmigaOS GUI and OS/2 Warp GUI features. Even BeOS had a start menu of sorts.

AROS is anything but new OS. It started in 1995.

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