O, give me a break. There might be other reasons he doesn't work at Microsoft. Haven't you noticed that Microsoft itself is egomaniac and anti-social? How much does Mister Shaft pay you to troll Slashdot?
"..the best solution for exactly one problem -- entering text..."
Yead, nice try but you overlook one very important fact..
Text is ultimately a representation of the spoken word.
The spoken word (and its graphical representation - text) is our preferred method of communicating ideas, instructions and information. It has been for a long, long, long time. The image will grab our attention - oooo pretty colours!, but it is the words that convey the meaning. Diagrams? Very few diagrams make sense without some words to label and explain the meanings (and that also applies to your examples of graphical IDEs). Church stained glass windows had instructive uses, for teaching the illiterate masses. But you still needed a preacher to explain the meaning (using words). Many many many learned and informative books have no pictures. Few have no words.
GUIs are a marketting success. That is not the same as a good idea. Novice users feel comforted by the deceptive simplicity of a GUI. That is not the same as a useful tool.
If one tenth of the amount of effort went into CLI design as goes into GUI design, then we could make some meaningful comparisons between the two. But all that we get from the GUI crowd is "the best of Macintosh is so better than the worst of vi." It is a bit of a fashion to "turn our back on 'old school' text, and 'move beyond'." Why not say ('say' - get it?) 'we've been writing for 5000 years, its time to move beyond "xykloctal zeb a gob" (with slight differences depending on the language).' (Off-topic - if you think all programming languages are the same, except for slight differences in syntax, then you need to learn some new languages. Compare Lisp to APL to FORTH to Smalltalk to Parrot to C to Prolog. These languages don't just have differences in syntax, they have differences in conceptual framework.)
So when you try to dismiss keyboards by saying they only have one use (editing text), you fail to appreciate the important of text (and the irrelevance of images.) I didn't notice any images in your comment, do you notice any in mine?
cheers.
Afterthought: I just re-read your comment - more carefully. You use emacs! Sort of a text-based thing isn't it? Why are you still using it? You also seem to be suggesting towards the end that you can have a Graphical Programming Language (GPL). I don't deny that diagrams can be helpful in designing an application or a system, but you haven't proved to me that the keyboard is a neccessarily poorer tool for drawing such diagrams. We are not talking here about artwork or graphic design, we are talking about a finite set of pictograms, with finite connectivity between them. I shudder at the thought having to use a programming tool that had no keyboard input. And it's NOT because I'm stuck in the stone age.
PPS. Keyboards have a second use other than entering text. Some of the keys specifically initiate actions. Examples are Enter, F1 and the arrow keys. Even a mouse has keys! So there. I win.:|
But for precise control, I find a keystrokes the best tool. You can get sub-pixel one-shot movement in as many dimensions or directions as you want. Your app needs to support it, of course.
"Put your feet back on the ground before you type."
same to you, Anonymous COWARD.
How about YOU get a grip before you write? So the GNOME/KDE wars killed GNU/Linux, did they? The XFree vs. X.org wars killed FOSS did they? Seems to me that F/OSS has gone from strength to strength and those wars are history as far as most people are concerned.
Oh, and the old, old argument about the 'poor user', you know, the one that doesn't know KDE from his own arsehole, for whom it all gets so very very confusing that said poor user curls up into the featal position. The same poor user who can't tell Beta from VHS, CD from DVD, Playstation from GameCube from Xbox, PC from iMac. Poor, poor user, how confusing it all must be for him. That explains why we don't have a flood of new technology, from MP3 players, to digital cameras, to mobile phones - and a dozen brands of each to choose from. It's all those poor stupid users that you like to champion.
"Pissing wars". You're a fine one to talk about pissing wars! From the tone of your comment, that's exactly what you are trying to start. "My opinion is better than your opinion.."
The only thing that might conceivably 'kill' F/OSS is this bullshit about having a 'one true solution'. Won't ever work, of course, because the F/OSS paradigm won't ever support the 'one true solution'. Which is why killing F/OSS is harder than you had hoped.
The fact is that F/OSS cannot ever be killed because it only takes a single person at any time in history to keep it going. Even if you destroy all F/OSS source code on the entire planet, the whole movement can be restarted from scratch with whatever technology is at hand. Much easier to kill MisterShaft, you fool.
Aaaahhh! Feel much better now, isn't it great to sprinkle gratuitous insults in a posting!
Firstly, thank you for your excellent essay on the ramifications of vendor lock-in.
Maybe you can also explain to me why USA is the only country on the planet that still uses the Emperial system of weights and measures.
You have raised a lot of good points, and I especially liked your last paragraph where you talk about the psychology of the user. Much of your essay was about how Windows works differently from every other OS, and uses secret file formats that are incompatible by design. You also dismiss the fact that Open Office works 99% of the time and focus instead on the fact that the world will come to an end when you hit the 1%. You talk about the fact that users think computers are fragile and don't understand them, so they phone up the Help Desk and get a counselling session. You raise lots of points, different scenarios, all to prove that you cannot - simply cannot - ever ever ever move away from Microsoft.
Have you ever heard of the "Yes but.." game? It is where someone presents with a problem, and then responds to every proposed solution with "Yes but.." Have you heard of the "Can do" attitude? It is where someone sees a problem as something to be solved.
It seems to me that you have a lot of experience in the IT world. You seem to know both Windows paradigms and UNIX paradigms. You also seem to understand the inner workings of the stereotypical user. You write well, and you're probably intelligent. Maybe if you shut your eyes for a minute or so, took some deep breathes, and imagined a better world, things could start to look a little different. Maybe you would start to see solutions instead of problems.
Okay, open your eyes again. Back to the grind. Back to the 'real' world...
The point about GNU/Linux is that is is based on UNIX. If you look at 'every OS under the sun', you will find that most of the real contenders are UNIX-like. You are absolutely correct in saying that there is a learning curve associated with learning GNU/Linux, but having learned the stuff you mentioned, you are now in a strong position to also administer Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, QNX, and so on. All these operating systems, and more besides, share a huge common base of concepts and toolsets. Windows, on the other hand is like an antisocial kid at a party playing 'dickhead in the corner'. 'Dickhead' is all caught up in being difficult and different, whilst everyone else gets on with being normal, enjoying the party, and asking "who invited the dickhead".
"The more you know about Windows, the less you know about computers."
Windows appologists are really fond of saying stuff like "my hardware didn't work with linux so I gave up on (GNU/)linux", whereas it makes just as much sense to say "that hardware doesn't support (GNU/)linux, so I gave up on the hardware."
I have seen someone try out Ubuntu on a Laptop, and declare almost gleefully that the win-modem or whatever wasn't detected. I got the impression he was actually relieved that he could give up on it. It gave him an excuse to do nothing. This is the same guy who prides himself on being able to fix really tricky problems under Windows. I guess he doesn't want to say goodbye to all that useless Windows-centric knowledge. The reality is that he knew very well when he acquired the laptop that the on-board modem would be a problem for GNU/Linux, so in a way it was just a self-fulfilling prophesy.
"The more you know about Windows, the less you know about computers".
Yeah, well when you've come up with the code that actually does what you're talking about (won't bother rehashing that old tripe about bloat and speed), let us all know.
In the meantime, I will continue to use something that works, from people who know what they're doing, rather than listen to the half-baked thoughts of an ill-informed lazy arabica ("too archaic to be fast" - yeah, like 'ls') . X11 will die when something better replaces it (.. and everyone stops using X applications).
The answer is that
1. hitting Ctrl-C stops it, but what is gone is gone (I don't know about restoring from inodes or whatever), and
2. how much you loose, and what gets lost depends on how quickly you realise, and what you have placed in that directory.
The problem is that you are never really sure what got lost! What did I have in that root directory? Didn't I put something important there 3 months ago when I was doing... ? Luckily, I kept backups:(.
I have done this. It is all too easy, even if you are consistently careful.
That isn't a problem for/home, because the directory you want to browse is/home/you.
There is no need for anyone to be browsing/home, and this fix makes the whole system more secure.
I hadn't thought of this as a solution to the problem of running "rm -rf/" by mistake, but it is a really good solution. Dispite being pretty careful with such things, I did recently run "rm -rf." whilst in/, and I DID breathe a sigh of relief when I realised I was a normal user. I hit Ctrl-D pretty darn fast, believe me. The only thing that saved me was the fact that I was running as a normal user.
"If all the effort devoted to these hobbyist projects were aimed at commercially viable projects, Linux might stand more of a chance in the mainstream."
Three points come to mind.
1. GNU/Linux is doing well in the mainstream. The desktop paradigm is living on borrowed time, and that is the only place that Windows dominates. GNU/Linux has a strong presence in lots of areas (embedded devices right through to supercomputers) and in some areas has a good-sized chunk of the pie. Microsoft is mainstream on the desktop and just about nowhere else. When people finally stop focusing on the desktop, they will find GNU/Linux everywhere. Remember when UNIX first evolved? There was maybe one computer in the organisations for everyone to use. That meant that UNIX needed to be multi-user and network-smart right from day one. Also, you didn't have a GUI to restrict you, so it there was a strong emphasis on scripting. Then the masses discovered computers in the form of stand-alone, single-user machines and all the strengths of UNIX became invisible for a while. Now we have multiple computers for every person, networks of embedded devices, PDAs and phones that require access to internet services (using BSD socket technology). Looks like we have come full circle. GNU/Linux is in its element again. On top of which, it has matured a lot by its neccessary focus on desktop applications and GUI interfaces. Microsoft may seem like an unstoppable monster on the desktop at the moment, but in the bigger picture it has many things going against it. It has yet to pass the test of time, for example.
2. Computer-savvy people like using *nix, enjoy hacking it, enjoy tinkering with it - and have done for decades. The GNU project made this possible for anyone by providing Free-as-in-Freedom OS and tools, and the Linux kernal provided a Free-as-in-Freedom kernal. For me, the fact that GNU/Linux (or NetBSD) is available on so many platforms is a reminder about how cool UNIX is, as well as sign of the underlying strength of the original design. People do this for the pleasure of it. That says something. Just imagine an article about someone porting Windows XP to - well anything. Who would want to? What have you got for your effort? On the other hand, there are dozens of ports of Unix - both community based and proprietory, and on dozens of architectures and platforms. Again, that says something.
3. I think it really does help GNU/Linux advocacy that GNU/Linux runs on gaming systems like this. The more systems that we can say - oh, GNU/Linux runs on that, the more people get to hear about it. Lots of people own these systems, have them at home. Eventually everyone not only hears about GNU/Linux, but understands that it is amazingly portable and adaptable. That is a good thing.
That might really be four points, I don't mind.
I know it didn't address your point about buying a PDA, but I still think it's relevant.
Maybe the vast majority of Slashdot users don't want any other competition in the "lets kill off MicroSoft" market. They feel so insecure and uncertain about Linux's future that they feel truly threatened by the existence of any other OS at all. AmigaOS isn't the only target, you will have noticed.
One person's shameless plug is another's useful information. AROS is indeed an OpenSource answer to AmigaOS. You, on the other hand have something worthwhile to contribute?
Amiga appeared before Linux. Linux was based on 20 year old technology when it started. The GNU technology was already in place when the Linux project started, and - like Linux - emulated old technology. That makes GNU/Linux older than AmigaOS.
If you mean that Linux has been developed since it started, I think you will find that AmigaOS is STILL under development too.
"..and it's still pretty useless."
As mentioned elsewhere, Amigas were widely used commercially for all kinds of multimedia work. Amigas were used where I work at a scientific research institution to do satellite imagery because no other machines at the time were capable of doing that. They were in their day well ahead of their time.
They are not toys if you use them as tools. But you do need a use for them. Just like GNU/Linux. Otherwise, do what everyone else on the planet does - use Microsoft Windows. (Now, that's not a toy OS, is it?)
"There are like, 45334534534 OS projects out there, and nothing especially interesting about AmigaOS."
The same can be said about Linux. Nothing to see here, folks. Now if you want something interesting, take a look at something innovative like Hurd or DragonflyOS. Or QNX. But not Linux (GNU or otherwise), FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OSX or MS Windows XP.
But anyway, you're wrong. There is interesting stuff in AmigaOS. You just have to take of your Linux fanboy goggles to see them.
Like a previous uninformed poster asked: "What does AmigaOS offer that GNU/Linux doesn't?" I would say Datatypes and REXX integration are two very powerful examples. But these things are only obvious when you have actually made use of them. Otherwise it is like telling a MS user that he is missing out on "Multi-user remote X access like Linux offers" or "Multiple workspaces on the desktop". What does he care. Doesn't sound very powerful to him. All he is going to be interested in is can it play his proprietory games and read his proprietory datafile formats. Like Flash, or Java applets.
Slashdot Mirror
wtf are you talking about, and wtf is your point?
O, give me a break. There might be other reasons he doesn't work at Microsoft. Haven't you noticed that Microsoft itself is egomaniac and anti-social? How much does Mister Shaft pay you to troll Slashdot?
One could even argue that that attitude - "elitists of all flavors deserve to be ignored and marginalized" - is itself a flavour of elitism.
Yeah, I know, You can draw some really awesome shapes using just your mouse. Oh wait... you can't.
"..the best solution for exactly one problem -- entering text. .."
:|
Yead, nice try but you overlook one very important fact..
Text is ultimately a representation of the spoken word.
The spoken word (and its graphical representation - text) is our preferred method of communicating ideas, instructions and information. It has been for a long, long, long time. The image will grab our attention - oooo pretty colours!, but it is the words that convey the meaning. Diagrams? Very few diagrams make sense without some words to label and explain the meanings (and that also applies to your examples of graphical IDEs). Church stained glass windows had instructive uses, for teaching the illiterate masses. But you still needed a preacher to explain the meaning (using words). Many many many learned and informative books have no pictures. Few have no words.
GUIs are a marketting success. That is not the same as a good idea. Novice users feel comforted by the deceptive simplicity of a GUI. That is not the same as a useful tool.
If one tenth of the amount of effort went into CLI design as goes into GUI design, then we could make some meaningful comparisons between the two. But all that we get from the GUI crowd is "the best of Macintosh is so better than the worst of vi." It is a bit of a fashion to "turn our back on 'old school' text, and 'move beyond'." Why not say ('say' - get it?) 'we've been writing for 5000 years, its time to move beyond "xykloctal zeb a gob" (with slight differences depending on the language).' (Off-topic - if you think all programming languages are the same, except for slight differences in syntax, then you need to learn some new languages. Compare Lisp to APL to FORTH to Smalltalk to Parrot to C to Prolog. These languages don't just have differences in syntax, they have differences in conceptual framework.)
So when you try to dismiss keyboards by saying they only have one use (editing text), you fail to appreciate the important of text (and the irrelevance of images.) I didn't notice any images in your comment, do you notice any in mine?
cheers.
Afterthought: I just re-read your comment - more carefully. You use emacs! Sort of a text-based thing isn't it? Why are you still using it? You also seem to be suggesting towards the end that you can have a Graphical Programming Language (GPL). I don't deny that diagrams can be helpful in designing an application or a system, but you haven't proved to me that the keyboard is a neccessarily poorer tool for drawing such diagrams. We are not talking here about artwork or graphic design, we are talking about a finite set of pictograms, with finite connectivity between them. I shudder at the thought having to use a programming tool that had no keyboard input. And it's NOT because I'm stuck in the stone age.
PPS. Keyboards have a second use other than entering text. Some of the keys specifically initiate actions. Examples are Enter, F1 and the arrow keys. Even a mouse has keys! So there. I win.
Keyboard is hopeless for drawing, mouse is too.
But for precise control, I find a keystrokes the best tool. You can get sub-pixel one-shot movement in as many dimensions or directions as you want. Your app needs to support it, of course.
Oh, yeah. Didn't think of that.
:wq
Sorry, can't help you with either.
Why don't you just send him a Word document, and then copy and paste from the reply he sends you?
I've heard the name before. This time I read the article. Then I read another from the same site. What a jerk!
The guy is a FUD-merchant. Nothing worth reading here.
My advice:
Don't visit this site.
Don't read his writings.
Slashdot - don't review his articles.
Not only is this a good idea in theory, it also epitomises a UNIX ideal. Good luck.
"Put your feet back on the ground before you type."
same to you, Anonymous COWARD.
How about YOU get a grip before you write? So the GNOME/KDE wars killed GNU/Linux, did they? The XFree vs. X.org wars killed FOSS did they? Seems to me that F/OSS has gone from strength to strength and those wars are history as far as most people are concerned.
Oh, and the old, old argument about the 'poor user', you know, the one that doesn't know KDE from his own arsehole, for whom it all gets so very very confusing that said poor user curls up into the featal position. The same poor user who can't tell Beta from VHS, CD from DVD, Playstation from GameCube from Xbox, PC from iMac. Poor, poor user, how confusing it all must be for him. That explains why we don't have a flood of new technology, from MP3 players, to digital cameras, to mobile phones - and a dozen brands of each to choose from. It's all those poor stupid users that you like to champion.
"Pissing wars". You're a fine one to talk about pissing wars! From the tone of your comment, that's exactly what you are trying to start. "My opinion is better than your opinion.."
The only thing that might conceivably 'kill' F/OSS is this bullshit about having a 'one true solution'. Won't ever work, of course, because the F/OSS paradigm won't ever support the 'one true solution'. Which is why killing F/OSS is harder than you had hoped.
The fact is that F/OSS cannot ever be killed because it only takes a single person at any time in history to keep it going. Even if you destroy all F/OSS source code on the entire planet, the whole movement can be restarted from scratch with whatever technology is at hand. Much easier to kill MisterShaft, you fool.
Aaaahhh! Feel much better now, isn't it great to sprinkle gratuitous insults in a posting!
Firstly, thank you for your excellent essay on the ramifications of vendor lock-in.
Maybe you can also explain to me why USA is the only country on the planet that still uses the Emperial system of weights and measures.
You have raised a lot of good points, and I especially liked your last paragraph where you talk about the psychology of the user. Much of your essay was about how Windows works differently from every other OS, and uses secret file formats that are incompatible by design. You also dismiss the fact that Open Office works 99% of the time and focus instead on the fact that the world will come to an end when you hit the 1%. You talk about the fact that users think computers are fragile and don't understand them, so they phone up the Help Desk and get a counselling session. You raise lots of points, different scenarios, all to prove that you cannot - simply cannot - ever ever ever move away from Microsoft.
Have you ever heard of the "Yes but.." game? It is where someone presents with a problem, and then responds to every proposed solution with "Yes but.." Have you heard of the "Can do" attitude? It is where someone sees a problem as something to be solved.
It seems to me that you have a lot of experience in the IT world. You seem to know both Windows paradigms and UNIX paradigms. You also seem to understand the inner workings of the stereotypical user. You write well, and you're probably intelligent. Maybe if you shut your eyes for a minute or so, took some deep breathes, and imagined a better world, things could start to look a little different. Maybe you would start to see solutions instead of problems.
Okay, open your eyes again. Back to the grind. Back to the 'real' world...
Your point is half correct.
The point about GNU/Linux is that is is based on UNIX. If you look at 'every OS under the sun', you will find that most of the real contenders are UNIX-like. You are absolutely correct in saying that there is a learning curve associated with learning GNU/Linux, but having learned the stuff you mentioned, you are now in a strong position to also administer Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, QNX, and so on. All these operating systems, and more besides, share a huge common base of concepts and toolsets. Windows, on the other hand is like an antisocial kid at a party playing 'dickhead in the corner'. 'Dickhead' is all caught up in being difficult and different, whilst everyone else gets on with being normal, enjoying the party, and asking "who invited the dickhead".
"The more you know about Windows, the less you know about computers."
I agree 100%.
Windows appologists are really fond of saying stuff like "my hardware didn't work with linux so I gave up on (GNU/)linux", whereas it makes just as much sense to say "that hardware doesn't support (GNU/)linux, so I gave up on the hardware."
I have seen someone try out Ubuntu on a Laptop, and declare almost gleefully that the win-modem or whatever wasn't detected. I got the impression he was actually relieved that he could give up on it. It gave him an excuse to do nothing. This is the same guy who prides himself on being able to fix really tricky problems under Windows. I guess he doesn't want to say goodbye to all that useless Windows-centric knowledge. The reality is that he knew very well when he acquired the laptop that the on-board modem would be a problem for GNU/Linux, so in a way it was just a self-fulfilling prophesy.
"The more you know about Windows, the less you know about computers".
Yeah, well when you've come up with the code that actually does what you're talking about (won't bother rehashing that old tripe about bloat and speed), let us all know.
In the meantime, I will continue to use something that works, from people who know what they're doing, rather than listen to the half-baked thoughts of an ill-informed lazy arabica ("too archaic to be fast" - yeah, like 'ls') . X11 will die when something better replaces it (.. and everyone stops using X applications).
The answer is that
... ? Luckily, I kept backups :( .
1. hitting Ctrl-C stops it, but what is gone is gone (I don't know about restoring from inodes or whatever), and
2. how much you loose, and what gets lost depends on how quickly you realise, and what you have placed in that directory.
The problem is that you are never really sure what got lost! What did I have in that root directory? Didn't I put something important there 3 months ago when I was doing
I have done this. It is all too easy, even if you are consistently careful.
Yes, it does.
/home, because the directory you want to browse is /home/you .
/home, and this fix makes the whole system more secure.
/" by mistake, but it is a really good solution. Dispite being pretty careful with such things, I did recently run "rm -rf ." whilst in /, and I DID breathe a sigh of relief when I realised I was a normal user. I hit Ctrl-D pretty darn fast, believe me. The only thing that saved me was the fact that I was running as a normal user.
That isn't a problem for
There is no need for anyone to be browsing
I hadn't thought of this as a solution to the problem of running "rm -rf
"If all the effort devoted to these hobbyist projects were aimed at commercially viable projects, Linux might stand more of a chance in the mainstream."
Three points come to mind.
1. GNU/Linux is doing well in the mainstream. The desktop paradigm is living on borrowed time, and that is the only place that Windows dominates. GNU/Linux has a strong presence in lots of areas (embedded devices right through to supercomputers) and in some areas has a good-sized chunk of the pie. Microsoft is mainstream on the desktop and just about nowhere else. When people finally stop focusing on the desktop, they will find GNU/Linux everywhere. Remember when UNIX first evolved? There was maybe one computer in the organisations for everyone to use. That meant that UNIX needed to be multi-user and network-smart right from day one. Also, you didn't have a GUI to restrict you, so it there was a strong emphasis on scripting. Then the masses discovered computers in the form of stand-alone, single-user machines and all the strengths of UNIX became invisible for a while. Now we have multiple computers for every person, networks of embedded devices, PDAs and phones that require access to internet services (using BSD socket technology). Looks like we have come full circle. GNU/Linux is in its element again. On top of which, it has matured a lot by its neccessary focus on desktop applications and GUI interfaces. Microsoft may seem like an unstoppable monster on the desktop at the moment, but in the bigger picture it has many things going against it. It has yet to pass the test of time, for example.
2. Computer-savvy people like using *nix, enjoy hacking it, enjoy tinkering with it - and have done for decades. The GNU project made this possible for anyone by providing Free-as-in-Freedom OS and tools, and the Linux kernal provided a Free-as-in-Freedom kernal. For me, the fact that GNU/Linux (or NetBSD) is available on so many platforms is a reminder about how cool UNIX is, as well as sign of the underlying strength of the original design. People do this for the pleasure of it. That says something. Just imagine an article about someone porting Windows XP to - well anything. Who would want to? What have you got for your effort? On the other hand, there are dozens of ports of Unix - both community based and proprietory, and on dozens of architectures and platforms. Again, that says something.
3. I think it really does help GNU/Linux advocacy that GNU/Linux runs on gaming systems like this. The more systems that we can say - oh, GNU/Linux runs on that, the more people get to hear about it. Lots of people own these systems, have them at home. Eventually everyone not only hears about GNU/Linux, but understands that it is amazingly portable and adaptable. That is a good thing.
That might really be four points, I don't mind.
I know it didn't address your point about buying a PDA, but I still think it's relevant.
Is an ATI Radeon driver worthwhile?
Of course it is! I salute you.
Maybe the vast majority of Slashdot users don't want any other competition in the "lets kill off MicroSoft" market. They feel so insecure and uncertain about Linux's future that they feel truly threatened by the existence of any other OS at all. AmigaOS isn't the only target, you will have noticed.
No, for $700 dollars you will supply the hardware, the OS and THEN set it up the way I want it.
Can't see how you're going to get Datatypes and AREXX working, however.
One person's shameless plug is another's useful information. AROS is indeed an OpenSource answer to AmigaOS. You, on the other hand have something worthwhile to contribute?
"AmigaOS is older than Linux"
Amiga appeared before Linux. Linux was based on 20 year old technology when it started. The GNU technology was already in place when the Linux project started, and - like Linux - emulated old technology. That makes GNU/Linux older than AmigaOS.
If you mean that Linux has been developed since it started, I think you will find that AmigaOS is STILL under development too.
"..and it's still pretty useless."
As mentioned elsewhere, Amigas were widely used commercially for all kinds of multimedia work.
Amigas were used where I work at a scientific research institution to do satellite imagery because no other machines at the time were capable of doing that. They were in their day well ahead of their time.
They are not toys if you use them as tools. But you do need a use for them. Just like GNU/Linux. Otherwise, do what everyone else on the planet does - use Microsoft Windows. (Now, that's not a toy OS, is it?)
"There are like, 45334534534 OS projects out there, and nothing especially interesting about AmigaOS."
The same can be said about Linux. Nothing to see here, folks. Now if you want something interesting, take a look at something innovative like Hurd or DragonflyOS. Or QNX. But not Linux (GNU or otherwise), FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OSX or MS Windows XP.
But anyway, you're wrong. There is interesting stuff in AmigaOS. You just have to take of your Linux fanboy goggles to see them.
Like a previous uninformed poster asked: "What does AmigaOS offer that GNU/Linux doesn't?" I would say Datatypes and REXX integration are two very powerful examples. But these things are only obvious when you have actually made use of them. Otherwise it is like telling a MS user that he is missing out on "Multi-user remote X access like Linux offers" or "Multiple workspaces on the desktop". What does he care. Doesn't sound very powerful to him. All he is going to be interested in is can it play his proprietory games and read his proprietory datafile formats. Like Flash, or Java applets.
OMG! NewsFlash ... "Pimply Teenager Thinks He Knows Everything."
Now, that's funny!