RISC OS Everyday?

How many of you use RISC OS everyday, as a primary OS? I love how quick and efficient it is. Overclocking my Pi seemed to help out a lot. I wish I could find real RISC OS hardware here in the USA, but it’s difficult to find. ROOL has made it possible for me to use RISC OS. Thanks to the ROOL team for making this happen!

How many of you use RISC OS everyday, as a primary OS?

I do, at home.

I wish I could find real RISC OS hardware here in the USA, but it’s difficult to find.

The Raspberry Pi is available throughout the world, isn’t it? That’s your cheapest solution that doesn’t require any DIY more complicated than snapping together a pre-cut case and plugging up keyboard, mouse, monitor and power supply.

Next step up is a BeagleBoard xM, which is a bare board – I have never looked for a ready-made case for that because I have made my own (by cutting and filing an off the shelf plastic case).

Next step up from there is a BeagleBoard xM in a case, as a real product, from R-Comp, who I’m sure will be happy to export to the USA.

They also have an even more capable machine comiing up very soon; they think it will be Q1 this year.

So you do have some choices that you may not have been aware of.

We ship real RISC OS hardware to the USA every so often!

PandBoard Systems
S/H Iyonix PCs & Risc PCs etc

I do, at home.

The same here.

The same here. Only the video stuff and any special things like 3D CAD I do with a other OS (Linux).

I use at home for Mail. If we had a better Browser for Interent, I would use it far more. Many of the sites I use make extensive use of JavaScript (ie Google Apps, Trello)

I also use RO most days.

Mail, News, writing documents and generating graphs, mostly. I actually prefer RO NetSurf for a lot of general web browsing so only resort to FF on Linux for sites I really need to access which NetSurf can’t handle. Main example being access to the BBC iplayer.

I also find it easier to write small ‘C’ progs on RO than on Linux. But I guess that’s really just familiarity.

Jim

Yep, me too most days. And similarly, I use it for mail, news reading, Ovation Pro (mainly before I transfer it to Windows) and now Net Radio and offline maps.

Apart from the mail stuff, I don’t use it for productivity applications that much any more. Word became too ubiquitous to ignore, Xara took over from Draw and Artworks, and the lack of cloud usability (i.e. DropBox GUI) rendered it largely ‘unproductive’ for me. Google Calendar took over from Organiser. And we never did have the equivalent of PowerPoint, which I use regularly for work. Or did I miss something there?!

That said, I love playing with it, love the way it works on newer hardware, and love the familiarity I have with it. And I love the potential that the Pi gave it…

I use it everyday for my website business.

Artworks, StrongEd, Textease Studio, Easiwriter, Variation, TextEffx, Remane, Imagen, Uniprint, Picsize, Snapper, Webchange, ProArt24, ConvImgs and many more.
E-mail and News, Netsurf (including banking and Amazon), NewsUK and WeatherUK.

Organizer too – invaluable.

Seamless link with laptop (Uniprint and RDP Client) means I can cope with anything that clients throw at me!!

Currently using ArminiX with Iyonix and NAS for backups (raspberry Pi just added – but that really is for learning Python).

I got a BBC Master in the late ‘80s. By 1993 I had upgraded to an A410/1, followed by a S/ARM RPC in ’96. I put a Kinetic card in this when that came out, and replaced it with an Iyonix in ’06. The Iyo got eBayed in ’13, since when I’ve used RPCEmu on a Wintel PC. In July last year I got a Pi, which has since been my main RO machine. I have a KVM switch connecting the PC and Pi to the same monitor/mouse/keyboard, and use RISC OS as my main focus, switching from NetSurf to the PC for any browsing requiring javascript or video. Email is handled on RISC OS by MessengerPro and NetFetch, image editing by Photodesk, DPingScan and Variation, and image previewing via Thump, desktop publishing by OvationPro and Techwriter, music score writing by Rhapsody4 (I sing in a choir and learn scores by setting them and playing back). Artworks is indispensible for a whole slew of graphic origination and processing, and I also use Sleuth for OCR’ing scanned text. Other useful programmes are ChangeFSI, GView, Eureka and AemulorPro; a big advantage of the Pi over RPCEmu is the ability to run 26-bit programmes under the latter, without having to swap between RO4 and RO5 on different RPCEmu installations. LanMan98 handles the networking between Pi, PC, a WinXP laptop and a NAS. I stick with RISC OS because I like the interface and I am very familiar with the programmes I use, having used them for many years. I have used various MS software (Word, Publisher, Excel, Outlook) on PCs and Photoshop and QuarkXpress on Macs in a work environment, and while I appreciate the power and sophistication of both platforms I still prefer RISC OS!

The big lack ATM is a javascript-capable browser: as other posters have mentioned, if you want to actually interact with websites, javascript is essential. As cloud services become more useful and commonplace, this will become even more of an issue, I believe. Unfortunately the Firefox port of a few years ago is not stable on my system, and is substantially out of date in any case.