Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet A Commodore-themed talking Linux desktop, complete with hundreds of games, makes for the biggest distro we've seen yet. In the halcyon days of 2011, The Register reported on a plan to make a modern PC clone in the classic form factor of the Commodore 64 after CEO Barry Altman had some troubles licensing the Commodore name ( …
Like you, this is the antithesis of Linux for me... on any OS the first thing I do is turn off the special effects and sounds, which here would be rather missing the point.
The good thing is not that it is done, but that it _can_ be done. One of these is definitely deserved --->
Indeed, I was going to make a tongue in cheek comment about whether the distro includes a scroller of "greetz" with a chiptune playing, while it is loading, but it seems from the article that they've already thought of that… «laughs/cries»
The desktop theme shown reminds me of Tron, which is pretty cool. I don't think I'd want it for everyday use, but kudos nonetheless.
Perhaps the real question is why they haven't gone for MagicWB icons and MUI interface widgets…
(goodness, those are all a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away now…)
I've just been clearing out my late father's shed, and found a box of 1.44M 3.5 inch floppies. I think a 37.85 GIGABYTE! installation ISO goes some way to explaining why we don't use floppies any more...
Having said that, it does look like a fun but slightly bonkers way to keep the Commodore name going...
A twenty-high stack of these was the first Linux distro i installed. Someone at a local uni dumped it on tape for me (I had no internet) and at work the QIC went into the IBM RT, the through Kermit to my PC, then i finally got to go home with my stack of floppies to install, I think it was SLS where it quickly became the main OS for my Fidonet BBS and I never looked back since.
Does the kernel fit on twenty floppies these days?
> everything INCLUDING the kitchen sink!
No no no.
An aisle of sinks, including kitchen and bathroom, steel, chrome or porcelain, gold plated, hot and cold or cold only or mixer taps, with and without soap dishes, draining boards, towel racks, sprinkler heads, hand operated, elbow operated, foot operated, and with optical sensors.
Retro emulation - or in the case of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Next, full-blown reimplementation - is a surprisingly growing area, even if it niche. I suspect it's partially games driven: you look at a modern AAA title, and it's basically a playable movie. Older games had so much more gameplay. Not all older games (I'm looking at you, Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga), but a good amount had decent gameplay.
> Retro emulation [..] is a surprisingly growing area
Surprising? Retro emulation was already a "growing area" twenty-five years ago. At this point it's huge to the point of being overdone, at least as far as the more commercially-driven nostalgia-exploiting efforts go.
I already had a ZX81 emulator for my Atari ST in the early 1990s and an Atari 800 emulator for Windows 95/98 in the late 1990s.
By that point- just four or five years after the demise of Commodore and the discontinuation of the original- there were already commercial attempts to cash in on C64 nostalgia by reusing the brand on a low-powered Internet PC, the "Commodore 64 Web-it".
Around the same time, Hasbro- which had just acquired the Atari name and IP- was releasing "updated" nostalgia cash-ins of classic Atari games like Pong: The Next Level, Centipede and several others.
We've had countless "official" relaunches and cash-ins of the Atari VCS/2600 over the past twenty years (including various "Flashback" models and the more recent "VCS" consoles).
And- appropriately here- we've had countless disparate attempts to cash in on Commodore, helped or not helped(!) by the fact that various parts of its IP have been split up, sold off and/or sublicensed separately (*) to a confusing extent. (At least Atari's historical IP seems to be largely intact).
None of this is new.
(*) For example, notice that "The C64 Mini" doesn't say "Commodore" anywhere, ditto "The A500 Mini" which also doesn't say "Amiga". I'm willing to bet this is because the rights to those names are owned separately and weren't included in the deal.
You're probably right about them not having the rights to the names, When Commodore went bankrupt the trademarks and IP ended up getting passed through multiple companies who all seemed to be cursed by it and ended up going belly up or getting bought out themselves shortly afterward. Escom, Gateway 2000, Tulip have all owned the rights at some point. And I believe now that Amiga and Commodore brand names are owned by different companies.
If anyone wants more about the mess of the IP and endless nostalgia cash-ins related to Commodore...
At one point, just over a decade ago, someone had acquired the rights to sell cases using the Amiga brand and names of classic models- i.e. Amiga 1000, 2000 and 3000- but with no other connection to the Amiga(!)
This was at the same time that the completely unrelated AmigaOne- hardware designed to run the new, updated version of AmigaOS- was also being sold by an entirely separate company. (Admittedly, that was- and still is- aimed at a completely different and far more niche enthusiast market).
The AmigaOne itself is not low-level hardware compatible with the classic 68000-based Amigas, so not for those who want to play Lotus again.
The more recent aforementioned "A500 Mini" will let you do that, but that's just a nostalgia-oriented reproduction via a software-based emulator in a cute case, and nothing to do with either of the Amigas above.
Anyway, a bit of checking shows that the HTPC cases above were made by "Commodore USA", the same people who made that PC in a replica C64 case around the same time.
They also made a slimline PC using the "Vic 20" name that- unlike their C64- didn't even *look* like a Vic 20. I just found out that they also made an "Amiga Mini" (no relation to The A500 Mini), which was a PC in a Mac Mini style case but- again- nothing to do with the Amiga beyond its name appearing on the case.
In the context of what he just said, I'd have taken "you sound like you're on the fence" as a joke. But I genuinely can't tell whether your link to the animated wallpapers and "the terminal at 7 minutes in" (*) are a deadpan continuation of that joke or whether you genuinely believe he'd be converted by that?
Something which oddly reminds me of Lister's forcefully turning down Talkie Toaster's offer of numerous toasted bread products and (spoiler follows) getting the response... "Ah, so you're a waffle man?"
(*) I mean, I'm sure it's cute *if* you're into that sort of thing. But I think it's already pretty clear that OP... isn't.
And as cute as they are, I suspect that the novelty of the pseudo-C64 menus slapped onto the Linux command line and that "glowy CRT effect" are still going to wear off after five minutes for most people. And they certainly aren't going to convert anyone who wasn't already converted!
Mate is good, not too heavy unless compiz is enabled and very versatile. I've used more desktops and Linux distros than I can remember easily and Mate is my favourite on 4K workstation, server, ex chromebook, lenovo laptops (all Mint) and a RasberryPi4b (not Mint) and another laptop with MX Linux.
> Mate is good, not too heavy unless compiz is enabled
How about Compiz and every single optional plugin?
Serious question.
What does MATE do that Xfce doesn't do in less memory and fewer CPU cycles?
I am aware of a single feature: in Xfce you can lock a whole panel in place, and that is all. In MATE you can lock every control on the panel.
That's it. The end.
What am I missing?
you can literally ask the same question you set out for MATE vs. XFCE for every other WMs/DEs out there, like KDE or whatever.
but, at the end of the day, they're just UIs, and UIs are subject to subjective tastes. It doesn't really matter if MATE is heavier to run or whatever, if one loves and likes its looks.
Remember when there used to be companies who would sell you CDs and DVDs of popular Linux distributions by mail?
Can't help thinking there could be a market opportunity here for a small enterprise, especially with the advent of things like the ventoy scripts. Go on a Web site. Click which live distributions you would like packaged onto a 64, 128 or 256Gb USB stick, provide address and pay by card. Some weeks later a jiffy bag with your USB stick arrives in the post. I would pay a reasonable amount for the convenience of that.
To engage with Gnisho's post directly, I think the idea is that this is a turnkey(*) entertainment system all pre-configured with content. All configurations applied and ready. No assembly required. Plus it was probably a lot of fun to put together. Liam Proven has featured the Endless OS project previously. The full English version of Endless weighs in at just under 25Gb and that image is designed for offline use with curated educational content and applications.
* given ROM images
Why would you pay for that? I think the optical media by mail service was mostly for people who didn't have a network connection fast enough to download those quickly, but most users can now download a normal distribution overnight or this monster in a couple days, and many can shorten that to a normal one in half an hour and this in four. Most users who would have trouble creating the USB disk themselves would also have trouble using Linux or knowing it existed. What would the convenience element be here compared to just downloading and writing it to a disk you already have?
> I think the optical media by mail service was mostly for people who didn't have a network connection fast enough to download those quickly
That would have applied to pretty much anyone using dial-up, i.e. the majority of Internet users until the early-to-mid 2000s. I worked out back then that downloading a full CD-ROM's worth of data would have taken around a day.
(Just to confirm that was correct... dial-up modems back then had topped out at the maximum capacity of a standard phone line, i.e. 56 kilobits- or 7 kilobytes- per second. A 700 megabyte CD therefore would therefore have taken 100 * 1024 times as long, i.e. 102,400 seconds, or 28 hours and 26 minutes.)
Yup I recollect that in the UK the good old BT dial up modem arrangement would drop a connection after 2 hours...
I have actually found a UK based company that supplies Linux distributions on USB sticks. Not ventoy and no online compilation tools alas, they offer only a list of mainstream distributions. Enquiry by email led to a special order of Endless OS full English edition. I'll see how that goes.
This would be perfect for me if I didn't have real work to do! Before Linux I was heavily into Amigas (1000, 2000/2500, 3000, 4000T) for both games (not seriously - I'm terrible at all of them) and development. I settled on Mate after Gnome went bonkers because I want just one tool, etc. bar that I can put on the right side of my portrait orientation monitor. And, it has everything via menus, so I don't have to attempt to remember function keys, swipes, etc. A release or two back on my current system I had UAE up and running so that I could re-play my AmigaMUD and Explore/Amelon games. Pathetic, I know.
I'm going to try it (in a VirtualBox VM.). I was an Atari 8-bitter myself before I went to a PC (my first was a 386 with DOS then with Slackware Linux... installed from floppies.). So I don't care too much about commodore nostalgia. But I do like games and I'm interested to try the 100s of games LOL.
For old geezers like me, for whom the height of games fun is Galaxians / Frogger / Elite / PacMan / Donkey Kong etc this sounds like fun. I can get a cheap i7 with 16GB of RAM for £100 and connect it up to my existing monitors etc and just use it for gaming.
Giving it serious thought.
Edited to add: Can someone please do a BBC emulator in a similar vein so I can play my 1980s Beebug games?
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