Sure, we have AmigaOS and MorphOS, but those cost money and require special hardware. For those of us more interested in running an Amiga-like operating system on regular, x86 hardware, there's AROS. Two AROS distributions, Icaros Desktop and AspireOS both saw new releases recently.
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Member since:2010-03-08
See it this way : to display HTML5, you just need to port some of the dozens of open-source web browser rendering engines out there, put a simple frontend around it, and you're done. It won't be pretty, but it should do the job well enough to advertise "HTML5 compatibility". Prerequisites do not go much beyond having GUI ready.
To print, now, you need a lot more infrastructure work : not only GUI, but also a printer driver model, printer drivers themselves, code that allows application code to talk to printers, GUI that makes it easy to do, all that knowing that as with any infrastructure work, the silliest mistake will follow you across the OS versions to come due to the need to maintain driver and UX compatibility (whereas with a web browser, you can just ditch the old rendering and replace it with another one and users won't even notice).
The two tasks have a similar "wow, this OS is grown-up now" factor, but printing is an order of magnitude more complex to implement. It is as such logical that it comes second, unless it is a priority to developers.
Edited 2012-03-13 07:49 UTC
Member since:2007-09-24
Member since:2010-09-23
From the summary: Most importantly, there's the first parts of a printing system. Currently, printer.device only support PostScript printers, and only a few programs are ready to use it.
If you would like to summarize that by "It can print" then you have lost all sense of reality (although you are not technically wrong)
Member since:2009-06-09
....and that is even what people are now expecting
AmigaOS and its influences were never ancient. It kept on developing despite numerous hardships.
Kudos to AmigaOS and Icaros!
Member since:2005-07-06
"Ancient" basically just denotes time... AROS is, to be sure, by far the most sane of those (directly) AmigaOS-influenced efforts, but that influence is fairly ancient, as far as timeline of home computing goes.
And yeah, about that "kept on developing" ...still no memory protection (hence also, sort of, no proper multitasking, just the not-quite-one that depends on well-behaving apps, where any program can essentially take over).
A decade more till it comes? Two decades? Will by then all of ~Amiga application development be just porting OSS stuff from the ~PC?
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Member since:
2010-09-23
I just can't over the fact that a recreation of an ancient OS will probably be able to display HTML5 (not even a finished standard) before it can print
....and that is even what people are now expecting