I did see Debian on YT being booted up on an Amiga. It was, to say the least, a painful-looking experience. It seems sacrilege in a way. If you're going to use an Amiga you might as well use AmigaOS.
Amazingly, Aminet is still up-and-running with frequent uploads.
I also made an animation on the Amiga, "Sadistic Circus". A circus dog jumps through a hoop a few times, then gets set on fire. What a sick, sick little puppy I am. I submitted it to a PD disk collection one time.
The dog was an image I got off of a magazine disk, which I mucked around with to create my animation.
Pretty rubbish really, but whatever. Happy days.
Ah, nostalgia ain't what it used to be -- source contested
TheAmazingRace · 18h ago
I'm noticing a decent spike in Amiga content on Hacker News. I hope this trend continues!
bni · 19h ago
This link quite capture the internet 1993 vs 2023
TheAmazingRace · 18h ago
It really did.
1993: Respectable, academic in nature, genuinely helpful.
2023: Random garbage, musings about the prices of cryptocurrency, more garbage.
snvzz · 18h ago
We never recovered from Eternal September.
jimjimjim · 17h ago
The internet, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age... before the dark times, before the aol.
encom · 17h ago
There was garbage on the internet in the 90's. Lots. I was there, and I occasionally made the pile bigger. But I think 2025 garbage is of a different nature (and magnitude). 90's garbage was low effort and low quality. Think Geocities and pointless Usenet arguments. 2025 garbage is malicious, exploitative, industrial brain rot. And it will only get worse.
KingOfCoders · 20h ago
(Never did run Linux on my A4000/40/Retina, got a PC for that)
I remember the early 90s when there wasn't DNS working at our university for everything and we exchanged IP addresses of FTP servers like the one from the thread:
ah the memories (studying engineering in Aachen two decades ago), that was the B subnet my dorm was on..
KingOfCoders · 13h ago
Studied in Ulm three decades ago.
teo_zero · 20h ago
I have memories of running BSD on my Amiga 1200. The 680ec30 had no MMU, so the kernel had to relocate all executables before running. Nothing more than a prompt, but what an achievement!
2809 · 19h ago
I used to run Debian Hamm on a 040. Worked a treat.
bestouff · 21h ago
I remember running Linux on it A4000 shortly after that. What a pain, but also what a reward that was !
snvzz · 18h ago
Linux was big back then.
Nowadays, you'd have a better experience on Netbsd, which still has developers who care about its Amiga support.
PCMCIA network cards work (whereas Linux got rid of PCMCIA entirely) and so does X11 (currently dead on Linux).
Running Netbsd current on my A1200 with 030@50, 128MB RAM.
erwan577 · 17h ago
Is that kind of setup still usable for some kind of desktop computing or only for command line stuff ?
128MB RAM sounds huge for the early 90s - win 3.1 and word / excel of the time could fly with much less. Is the lack of hardware floating point support an issue to run modern apps ?
The speed difference with current systems is mind boggling. The original A1200 CPU is 2,000 to 5,000 times slower than a random N100 setup. one second wait nowadays means one hour delay on the A1200. This shows how much software bloat accumulated.
bbarnett · 15h ago
X11 isn't even remotely dead on Linux. It's being used all over the place.
d--b · 19h ago
I ran a Linux distro on my Amiga 1200 in 1997 or something like that. It was really slow, but it worked. It took me something like 48hours to compile the Enlightenment desktop manager
erwan577 · 16h ago
The irony is that GCC improved so much since then that now the 48h may be reduced to 30h on the exact same hardware.
Amazingly, Aminet is still up-and-running with frequent uploads.
https://www.aminet.net/
I contributed a package to that once.
I also made an animation on the Amiga, "Sadistic Circus". A circus dog jumps through a hoop a few times, then gets set on fire. What a sick, sick little puppy I am. I submitted it to a PD disk collection one time.
The dog was an image I got off of a magazine disk, which I mucked around with to create my animation.
Pretty rubbish really, but whatever. Happy days.
Ah, nostalgia ain't what it used to be -- source contested
1993: Respectable, academic in nature, genuinely helpful.
2023: Random garbage, musings about the prices of cryptocurrency, more garbage.
I remember the early 90s when there wasn't DNS working at our university for everything and we exchanged IP addresses of FTP servers like the one from the thread:
Nowadays, you'd have a better experience on Netbsd, which still has developers who care about its Amiga support.
PCMCIA network cards work (whereas Linux got rid of PCMCIA entirely) and so does X11 (currently dead on Linux).
Running Netbsd current on my A1200 with 030@50, 128MB RAM.
128MB RAM sounds huge for the early 90s - win 3.1 and word / excel of the time could fly with much less. Is the lack of hardware floating point support an issue to run modern apps ?
The speed difference with current systems is mind boggling. The original A1200 CPU is 2,000 to 5,000 times slower than a random N100 setup. one second wait nowadays means one hour delay on the A1200. This shows how much software bloat accumulated.