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Comment by lproven

3 hours ago

The counterpoint is RISC OS for GNOME.

GNOME 3 was trying to built a clean modern minimalist desktop without all the clutter inherited from the design of Windows... But all they know is, very visibly, Windows and KDE.

RISC OS is that clean legacy free desktop. It's unlike anything else, built from scratch by a team not interested in what the rest of the world was doing.

And it's still alive and still updated and works well on modern hardware. Several separate efforts are building 64-bit replacements today.

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lproven

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hobo123  21 minutes ago

Many people might not know that ARM the company behind pretty much all phone CPUs (at least historically) was founded as Acorn Risc Machines and built their own computers with their own RISC OS.

I know almost nothing about it, so I will give your links a read.

HeckFeck  3 hours ago

RISC OS? That's still going! What can I run it on?/run on it?

  • lproven  1 hour ago

    The FOSS version is here:

    https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

    It runs on all Raspberry Pi models up to the 4, and runs really well. As of version 5.30 it supports the Wifi chip in the Pi so it can connect to WLANs.

    The owners of the IP are RISC OS Developments Ltd (ROD) and they have an enhanced version -- free on the Pi -- called RISC OS Direct, with an IPv6 stack and a modern WebKit browser:

    https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/

    They also sell more capable hardware for it.

    There is another fork of the OS that is still proprietary. That's owned by 3QD. They used to sell upgrades for real Acorn-compatible kit but there's none of that that isn't vintage now, so it focuses on a software emulation that runs on modern x86 machines:

    http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk/index2.htm