There are lots of reasons why all Amiga flavors lack what it takes to break into the mainstream but things are improving. I think Aros is a great project and as been mentioned is work in progress.

However, my last post was no more propaganda than the thread title. What figures are there that there are more users on one flavor than another. Perhaps Paolo could publish the download figures for the next release of Icaros to get an idea, then match that against AOS4 licensed copies sold if somebody could mention how many AmigaOS4 users there are and MOS users. Aros is difficult to actually count of course but the other are easy if that information could be released.

Finally I own four real Amigas and three Aros machine because that is what I like to use. All of them are used at the moment for purely hobby reasons but Aros in my opinion is the one that may pop its head above the crowd in the near future. Although for all of our sakes I hope the X1000 is a success.

As for Linux having money spent on it, so does Aros but in much smaller amounts, some of us are actually putting money into paying professional coders to work on it for us to get the things it needs.

_________________
Amiga 1000, 3000D Toaster, Checkmate A1500 Plus
http://www.checkmate1500plus.com/

@clebin

Quote:

However, the bounty system does provide some sort of consensus. WinUAE integration was highly valued, so attracted lots of money and so attracted a developer. That's sometimes better than hoping a proprietary company is going to do what you want it do.

Well, I dont believe in "consensus" as a recipe to make all things "right". Its achieving a good or not-so-good compromise, but most of the time far away from the optimal solution.

Integrating e.g. WinUAE functionality into AROS still doesnt make up a "good plan" for me. IMHO its just another headless try to search for a niche and/or to catch up with the other incarnations already providing a very good solution for some years now.

I should explain this a bit further, I think.

WinUAE integration will bring legacy compatibility, no doubt. And it will bring some more usability to AROS, no doubt, too. But IMHO its a little bit late now to achieve this particular goal, and it will have a high price tag on it.

First, as I observed it over all this years, AROS developers will choose the "bloatware solution", means, that they most possibly will integrate WinUAE in a non-consistent manner, with lots of configuration files to edit, playing stunts with LoadSeg() part of the kernel and so on. They will for sure try to simply "port it over" and change the AROS main parts this and that, here and there, because its "cheaper" to achieve the goal using a quite straightforward port. I would be really surprised if they do different this time.

Second, look at the users, and what they actually want. Yes, they want their legacy software running on their system, as long as there is no alternative. They were amazed again and again by the "shiny" world of Win/Lin software, even more by the "free" potential Lin ports. They want to have things other platforms have. But as soon as they actually have them, they often are disappointed. And they are right in being disappointed. They were promised the "golden land" and were given a leaden land. Most ports are full of bugs or provide just around 80% of the original functionality, are difficult to use, configuration is a mess and they destroy the well-known Amiga-feeling.

But thats what people obiously want more than ports of Win/Lin software: Software with Amiga-feeling.

AROS potentially has the chance to make things better, to solve problems the Amiga way, but this chance was never ever used yet. People dont need a bunch of half-hearted ports on a x86 machine. They can get "the real thing" much easier and, most of all, better.

AROS will pay the price of all other "alternative OSses", if it doesnt provide real unique and real Amiga-like solutions on the x86 platform.

I still fail to see, where the "bounty project"-induced consensus should change this.

Quote:

I think it's unfair to call Cluster UK's argument 'propaganda'. There's a lot of enthusiasm and "call to arms" about the AmigaOS on this site, and this is no different.

No, its absolutely fair to call it propaganda. People like clusteruk are changing their "arguments", as soon as former "arguments" are proven wrong by reality. First, he and others advocated the "x86 hardware will make us winners in all cases!" idea. Now he says, that people who didnt advocate the x86 idea and still dont advocate it, should stay behind AROS to make the x86 idea a winner, although it still doesnt win. And of course he "forgot" to mention that his former "argument" was a failure. Thats a propaganda method, plain simple.

For this reason I mentioned the "developer theft" thing already, as it would be a nice "next argument, if all former arguments failed"-thing for people making propaganda.

Declaring something different being "the truth" to camouflage that a former "truth" wasnt the truth at all and that somebody was wrong over some time cant be called other than propaganda, Im sorry.

Im sure that clusteruk is a honest man, but the tools he use to advocate his favourite are not honest. IMHO its time to show another way of advocating.

There is no need to argue in a dishonest way. People should learn that there indeed are different ways to be "Amigan" and that these ways may or may be not match the wishes of all users and all developers.

And people should learn, too, that, if one or another of these alternatives has problems in catching up or gaining users, its not the fault of the other users or developers, not supporting the platform those people prefer.

Its the fault of the users and developers supporting the starving platform. Obviously they did something wrong then and should search for a honest solution. But what they should not do is, searching the fault in other people´s favourite platform or in people not using or supporting "the right" platform. It wont help solving the problems.

Regards

Wow, some people are getting rather hot under the collar aren't they. There's definitely a lot of passion on Amigaworld.

I think it is clearly nonsensical to think that anything Amiga&alike, in its current incarnations, can possibly compete with Windows or Apple platforms, for the general user.

The question remains as to whether AROS is a viable competitor for other Amiga&alike OSes and even the classic OS. I do not have enough experience with all these OSes to make an informed opinion.

But, at the end of the day, if AROS has comparable apps to the other Amiga-like OSes which do the job, can we not say it is a viable competitor? Dare I say, that with x86 hardware being both cheaper and faster than any *new* Amiga&alike hardware, can we not see that in some regards if may have a significant potential advantage. For instance, will it not run UAE smoother and faster? Will it not perform 3d rendering faster? Can it not be the preferred choice in the areas in which x86 hardware would be the preferred option?

_________________
Leo Nigro, CTO Commodore USA, LLC
Opinions expressed are my own and not those of C= USA.
Commodore/AMIGA "Beautiful, High-Performance, Home Computers for Creativity and Entertainment."

@tonyw

Quote:

Perhaps if AROS and MorphOS dev teams got together, they could generate something that challenged the position that AmigaOS4 has today. Separately, they are both just wasting time.

erm, and what position OS4 has today, exactly?

@ssolie

Quote:

Because AROS fans are still talking to the wrong people. This is an Amiga-only forum with a dedicated crowd which have already decided what they like and do not like. In other words, you guys are really wasting your time here. And I'm not just saying that because I happen to enjoy AmigaOS. Years of wasted energy trying to convert the dedicated is getting AROS nowhere.

Or is it your afraid that with AROS moving forward in development and being ported to new hardware with OEM's support, may impact on future OS4 sales?

_________________
Dammy

@phoenixkonsole

GREAT!!! I am looking forward to it. (Edit: this was in regard to the demo/tutorial videos)

Quote:

If i have sold a specific amount of AresOne i will hire one or to offshore coders to work on development tools and libaries. Lets say port everything from Aminet(A-Z) to AROS : )

That sounds good, but I would caution against wasted effort.

I would much rather see a decent kickstart replacement. While I have Amigaforever kicking around somewhere, I would much rather it was only optional, for getting stubborn classic software to run. Mind you, with the proposed UAE bounty would OS3.x applications actually require OS3.x? Is there not a 68k implementation of AROS that could be run instead? If we could eliminate all the proprietary dependencies for running classic software AROS would be stellar.

Last edited by BigBentheAussie on 12-Feb-2010 at 01:41 PM.

_________________
Leo Nigro, CTO Commodore USA, LLC
Opinions expressed are my own and not those of C= USA.
Commodore/AMIGA "Beautiful, High-Performance, Home Computers for Creativity and Entertainment."

@Fab

Quote:

erm, and what position OS4 has today, exactly?

Leader of the Amiga platform, in technological and ideological sense.

If Aros continue to have this great achievements that it has had the past year it will no doubt have a very bright future. I believe in our Aros coders they do one hell of a job.

_________________
AmigaOS or MorphOS on x86 would sell orders of magnitude more than the current,
hardware-intensive solutions. And they'd go faster.-- D.Haynie

@pavlor

In ideological sense, maybe, but technological? I'd say AmigaOS4 and MorphOS have similar feature sets, just different implementations and ideologies.

_________________

@BigBentheAussie

Quote:

I would much rather see a decent kickstart replacement. While I have Amigaforever kicking around somewhere, I would much rather it was only optional, for getting stubborn classic software to run. Mind you, with the proposed UAE bounty would OS3.x applications actually require OS3.x? Is there not a 68k implementation of AROS that could be run instead? If we could eliminate all the proprietary dependencies for running classic software AROS would be stellar.

The kickstart replacement bounty has been restarted: http://noisemonkey.wordpress.com/
This guy updates his blog with progress quite often, too. Yes, a open kickstart is very much needed, and it would give a boost to classic too. Yes, being able to compile a kickstart replacement would also eliminate the proprietary dependencies for all Amiga emulation in the world :)

The kickstart bounty is also the first step to getting AROS running on 68k again. AROS on 68k would be able to run classic software with no emulation whatsoever. Therefore, AROS may work great together with the new upcoming 68k hardware on the horizon such as Natami and Clone-A, either as a complete OS or as extensions to OS 3.x (like AfAOS).

As I see it, the effort made by AROS programmers is what secures the Classic Amiga legacy for the future.

Last edited by Channel_Z on 12-Feb-2010 at 02:03 PM.

I will never use it because it is a meaningless copy with no binary compatibility. I also want to use LINUX in x86, not AROS, not OS4 and not MOS. MorphOS is my favorite ppc OS, PPC is soo much better. AROS is kind of a "Freedows" style attempt at recreating AmigaOS : It just takes something open source, pops AOS APIs onto it and trys to get people to ignore the point the software doesn't work.

@Dreamcast270mhz

Quote:

PPC is soo much better

Good, show me PowerPC CPU that is not at least 2 times slower than 3 years old (!) Core 2 Quad in computer of my brother.

@pavlor

Yes, I too would like to see this alleged "just better" PPC.

_________________
The problem with AmigaOS on PPC isn't that PPC is big-endian. The problem with AmigaOS on PPC is that PPC is dead-endian.

@clusteruk

I will keep looking at AROS but for me it's lacking many basic features compared to OS 3.9. If the basic preferences and Workbench were at OS3.9 level it would be nicer.

I also have no luck getting it to recognize my realtek network card, even though it should be supported (it sort of works, but DNS doesn't resolve. I tried many things to fix it but no luck).

But otherwise another option is always nice :)

_________________
AmigaOS 4.x Beta Tester - Classic Amiga enthusiast - http://www.hd-zone.com is my Amiga Blog, check it out!

@whose

Quote:

Well, I dont believe in "consensus" as a recipe to make all things "right". Its achieving a good or not-so-good compromise, but most of the time far away from the optimal solution.

I never said it was a perfect system, did I? You have a habit of taking things to extremes.

I said that it provides some community consensus about how to move the platform forward, and that's better than no project management at all.

When you say 'AROS developers will choose the "bloatware solution"' what do you mean? Who are these AROS developers? If AROS has no project management and you're arguing against the community-led bounties system, how did these AROS developers get together and decide the course they wanted to take?

Quote:

They were promised the "golden land" and were given a leaden land.

Nobody was promised a "golden land" - that's just childish.

Quote:

First, he and others advocated the "x86 hardware will make us winners in all cases!" idea. Now he says, that people who didnt advocate the x86 idea and still dont advocate it, should stay behind AROS to make the x86 idea a winner, although it still doesnt win. And of course he "forgot" to mention that his former "argument" was a failure. Thats a propaganda method, plain simple.

There's some truth to what you say towards the end of your post, but your 'goodwill to all men' is lost when you start throwing around baseless accusations that people are being dishonest, promising things they can't deliver and switching arguments to fool people.

You have no proof that he thinks AROS hasn't "won", so he's encouraging people to support just to try and prove his earlier argument about OS 4. I don't even know where you got that from.

There are arguments for OS 4 moving x86. There are arguments for supporting AROS/open-source. They're not mutually exclusive and anybody can pick and choose one, none or both of those arguments. It looks like you're the one with the agenda here.

Chris

Last edited by clebin on 12-Feb-2010 at 02:33 PM.

@whose

Quote:

It was not so long ago, that AROS promoters argued, that we badly need X86 AOS, as, with plenty of cheap and powerful hardware available, thousands, if not millions, of people will return to the AmigaOS and the development train will definetly gain a speed burst. Well, your argument yet failed, and you were told so, all the time.

The sad reality of facts says the world doesn't give a damn about Amiga and what it stands for, otherwise they might get a pick at.

Having the delusion that by presenting an inferior hardware platform somewhat makes it special enough so people pay extra to get way less is a symptom of that line of reasoning.

_________________
Indigo 3D Lounge, my second home.
The Illusion of Choice | Am*ga

@pixie

And it's funny how AOS on x86 failed, since it never happened.

Chris

@whose

If overpaying for an underpowered outdated OS/Hardware is winning ... I'll take the loser anyday.

_________________
Support AROS sponsor a developer.

"AROS is prolly illegal ~ Evert Carton" intentionally quoted out of context for dramatic effect

@Channel_Z

Quote:

It is not hard to install, especially not the VM based variants.

I tried that. The vbox variant didn't even boot properly for me. Gave a bunch of error requestors and stopped at some point. No Workbench screen. I was told to forget the vbox image and do a fresh vbox isntall myself from the regular install CD instead. Maybe I'll get around to that someday.

_________________
All glory to the Hypnotoad!

In response to the comments made about PPC being slow, do you really need that much speed? The G5 anyways executes instructions on par with today's modern CPUs. X86 is going to fail in about a decade, once this era of computer ignorance wears off (Talking about the general population) and it shows the poor quality of x86. The x86 has already reached a wall of about 4ghz stock. Show me an x86 stock clocked at 4.2 ghz and I rest my case. ALL of my PPC machines are over 5 years old, but they run 6 trillion times as reliably as any x86 box I have. Once windows fails, intel will be next and AMD will move to the POWER or ARM architecture. AROS is focused on x86, a terrible platform :

Assembly code is a fricking nightmare
Poor quality due to mass production
Is designed to have WINNT built on it, which soaks up all the extra power it may have


PS: my 1.5 ghz G4 powerbook gets better benchmarks than the AMD Sempron Acer my brother has.