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So, you argue, that these OSes like AROS are really good yet nobody uses them?

Or perhaps you're drawing massive presumptions and converting 'promise' into 'good OS'.

The reality is that these OSes are *not* usable for the *vast* majority of people without a *lot* of tail chasing. People are interested but not interested in wasting countless hours on beta or even alpha operating systems. There's enough unfinished software out there absorbing our collective time. The majority of us do not have time to add an OS to that list.

So don't be dispirited. I guarrantee you that when Syllable, Haiku, and AROS come of age, they will regain the cult followings and more. They are just not of age yet, so don't assume that they never will have users, because you are frankly wrong.

AROS has been lacking developers (and therefore users) for quite some time, I think the reason for this is not so much because former Amiga users have lost whatever amount of passion they had for the Amiga but more because a near identical clone of AmigaOS running on top of x86 hardware is just not enough for those that have been touched by the experience that the Amiga provided. While AROS may be a good reimplementation of the AmigaOS API, the x86 hardware lets it down. I'm not saying that any new or improved AmigaOS should run on the original hardware, but x86 just doesn't do it for us Amiga users.

See, the thing about the Amiga, the thing that made the Amiga such a brilliant computer was actually many things, I'll give a few examples:

Adding new hardware to the Amiga just worked. Plug the hardware in, maybe you'd have to copy some files into one of the OS directories and away you go. It just worked, no messing and it was always simple to install. As far as I'm aware no other consumer computer system in world has ever got this to work *correctly*. It was called autoconfig. In the IBM PC world it's called plug n play, and it doesn't work properly.

AmigaOS was *small*. You could look at every file that made up the os (with the exception of the libraries on the one or two 512K ROMs) and know what every file was for. You might be able to do this with UNIX or a UNIX-like system, but even then you're still talking a few thousand files, at least. Oh and the entire AmigaOS (not including the stuff on the roms) would fit on about three PC floppy disks).

Repairing a broken AmigaOS installation was really easy. Doesn't matter even if it was a device driver, the recovery procedure was almost always the same: reboot, insert orignal workbench disk and copy damaged/missing files across, reboot again and voila you got a working system.

Unlike the IBM-PC market (aka Wintel) companies that created hardware and software for the Amiga actually cared about the platform and continued to do so long after the demise of Commodore. You think if Microsoft announced that they were going to drop support for all versions of Windows and replace them with Singularity or something that software/hardware vendors would continue to support Windows?

Software that ran on the Amiga was small. Let me introduce you to MUI (Magic User Interface), a GUI toolkit that took somewhere around a meg of diskspace and provided all the common GUI widgets and was almost fully user configurable. It's still going today I believe on MorphOS.

The Amiga hardware was *very* well designed, so well designed that it was possible during the mid-late ninties to add a PPC accellerator card which provided the user with a way run to 68k software side by side with PPC software. This was years after commodore too and probably wasn't even envisioned by the team of people that designed the Amiga. (I could be wrong but I think this was also probably the first successful consumer implementation of a multi processor computer).

These are just a few of the things that made the Amiga what it was, great hardware, great software, and a great community. Not all of these things can be had with just new hardware/software because the Amiga was not just a computer, it was a *fun* experience, it was sex, or extreme sports, or taking your M3 for a spin on the Nurburgring. Where the experience provided by other computer systems is more like getting up in the morning after a few to many bevvies the night before and finding you only got brown bread to eat and bovril to drink. At least that's the way it's always seemed to me and probably other Amiga users too.

As for your point about people losing passion for the Amiga, we've still got the passion burning inside us, and it will continue to do so until a new computer system comes along that manages to do or have all the things that made the Amiga a fun experience. We're all still here, were just keeping quiet and using computer systems that provide us with the least amount of discomfort until the above actually happens.

Did I inject enough passion into that? 'cause If I didn't I've got *plenty* more.

Edited 2007-11-22 05:22

I'm not saying that any new or improved AmigaOS should run on the original hardware, but x86 just doesn't do it for us Amiga users.

So you'd rather have an underpowered and overpriced (and generally unavailable) processor and chipset, rather than something that is available now, for dirt cheap, and performs a lot better?

No wonder the Amiga is pretty much dead.

(I could be wrong but I think this was also probably the first successful consumer implementation of a multi processor computer)

The "real" first might have been the MSX TubroR (z80 + R800 running in // ), another dead standard for fanatics

And saying x86 would hold back AROS is just plain stupid, just look at how well does MacOS X run on Intel. The x86 platefrom isn't bad, it's even becoming very good with the implementation of EFI.
The real hold back is hardware/software support, but with some hardware manufacturer releasing specs it could become something I guess (AMD/ATI accelerated driver come to mind)

While AROS may be a good reimplementation of the AmigaOS API, the x86 hardware lets it down.
Actually x86 is almost identical to 68k, unlike "foreign" PPC arch. x86 is silent and fast now, unlike PPC.

The Amiga hardware was *very* well designed
New generic PPC hardware is not (except game consoles)

Most things you mentioned are just a software.
Aros @ x86 is much more Amiga-like in comparison with entry-level PPC crap-boards.
Amiga _must_ be high-end, not lagging behind everyone.

Edited 2007-11-22 15:10

There were many commercially successful multi-processor computers before people put PPC's on Amiga computers.

The Apple II had the Z80 Softcard, and that was VERY commercially successful.

The Amiga itself had the 8088 Bridgeboard. And that was somewhat successful.

There was the Transporter Card for the Apple II that ran PC Software as well.

I'm sure others will chime in with lots of other commercially successful multi-processor systems.

Which is not to say that I don't agree with you that the Amiga platform was a visionary, revolutionary and wonderful piece of hardware.

I'm hoping the Minimig platform is expanded and completed and made commercially available.