The comparison might not be equal in terms of how much they’re doing, but the Amiga was doing it on a single core CPU, so it could quite literally only do one thing at a time.

A modern OS running on a multi-core CPU has even less reason to hang - one of the cores should always be available to immediately switch context to handle UI events, even if the other cores are running a million processes. There’s no -technical- reason for it to hang, just poor programming.

Edit: Upvoted because despite disagreeing, your comment seems to have sparked a ton of discussion, and that's always great. :)

One important difference was that AmigaOS bumped the priority of threads that dealt with user input - the user always had priority over other tasks.

Somehow this simple trick seems to have been forgotten or is ignored in modern OS development - or if modern operating systems still do this, their process schedulers seem to be pretty terrible at handling priorities.

Eh. I disagree and agree at the same time.

<< The diff is the amiga is doing maybe three things total.

This is indeed the crux of the problem. Windows Start is trying to do everything at once including guessing what the user may be thinking of wanting including, but not limited to semi-random bing searches. Some would argue that less is more.

However, this is not a popular opinion these days. User is assumed to be an idiot and to not know what they want. As a result, MS menu does 3000 things as opposed to 3 Amiga did.

doesn't seem all that different to me, the user. how many things am i doing at once, really?

Why not run an amiga as your daily driver, then?

It's not comparing 'the things it's doing' it's comparing the UX. That's apples to apples. Begone radish farm.