Raspberry Pi is amazing. Everything from the size and simplicity of hardware to that of Raspbian. Super moddable, modular, surprisingly performant. As a lot of others do, I use one for most of my sites and apps as a home server. 15+ apps, sites, and APIs running on this thing 24/7/365 over WiFi.
What would be the benefit of using RISC OS over Raspbian, or even Ubuntu Server? Is it pure nostalgia like running Windows XP on a Pi?
Apps? So you would use this OS for the amazing consumer experience? And in your mind is that comparable to a Linux distro like Raspbian or Ubuntu in terms of availability of apps?
Strange way to gauge simplicity too "this screen has 10x less pixels!"
The way you're talking (Linux is a "slow complicated OS") means you're likely some dark wizard in a tower somewhere inventing either the apocalypse or the next great consumer experience.
For that reason I thank you for your likely many contributions to obscure open source projects and gosh speed on your endeavors.
I'm a techie turned journalist, who's been using computers for well over 40 years now, with a particular interest in obscure and niche OSes and programming languages.
I've used an exceptionally broad range of computers for someone still active in the industry. Counting the entire field of PC-compatible x86 machines as one, then I'd guesstimate I've used and worked with 30 or 40 different architectures. Counting all forms of Unix-like OS from SCO Xenix to Linux as being Unix, being 1 OS in different implementations, then again, I'd estimate 30 to 40 different OSes.
I remember how small and simple OSes used to be. I remember the era when a multitasking GUI OS fitted easily into a single megabyte of RAM. When a machine with 4 or 8MB of RAM was more than adequate for exploring the Internet.
I am especially interested in OSes that are still around today, still being maintained, that are small enough for a single person to read the entire codebase, all of it, every line, in a matter of weeks and understand the whole thing in months.
There are several such systems.
There seems to me to be a belief today that a serious useful system must inherently be gigabytes of code, tens of millions of lines, and nobody can understand the whole thing. That is simply NOT TRUE and it never was.
No, I am not writing such things. I am writing about them and trying to bring more peoples' attention to them.
> What would be the benefit of using RISC OS over Raspbian, or even Ubuntu Server? Is it pure nostalgia like running Windows XP on a Pi?
It's small - apps are hundreds of KB to a few MBs and it's fast/responsive. The question is what do you want to use it for? There are apps for most things, but as it's not Unix or Windows it doesn't have a lot of ports of bigger open source apps.
It could also be that it meets its users needs and gets out of the way. Commercial software is still sold for Risc OS. The market is small, I imagine even smaller than the Amiga, but some people still buy it.
Is it nostalgia, or just if it aint broke don't fix it.
It's raw, like if you had a Forth system with a GUI that isn't aggressively obtuse. You can touch everything in it with a BASIC dialect, and at least in some variants drop into assembler and run the hardware somewhat directly.
This allows e.g. interesting graphics programming, and there's very little that gets in the way of immediately testing ideas.
What would be the benefit of using RISC OS over Raspbian, or even Ubuntu Server? Is it pure nostalgia like running Windows XP on a Pi?