I am here trying desperately to save what is left of the Amiga community
@Wayne,
Good luck, I don't think there's much of a community to save anymore. I think most of us have fond memories of that community from 10-15 years ago, but most of us have moved on.
True, there are people who are trying to bring the "Amiga" back, but you have to relize that limiting the Amiga to the desktop is self-defeating. Amiga for me was as much about the people as the technology. After all, most of us relize that that the technolgy angle was in serious trouble by 1990.
This brings us to the alternatives- I simply find nothing interesting in desktop alternatives that fall short of Linux in many areas. Amiga Forever/Amithlon are fine, but at it's core it's UAE, which you can run on a PC, a PDA or even some phones. It's existance simple illustrates how far behind the Amiga is today.
At some point these "alternatives" are going to have to show what makes them worthy of calling them real alternatives. I've looked at MorphOS's reviews, I've looked at AmigaOS4's specs, and I don't see much in the the current incarnations that would excite an Linux user (maybe a Windows user might be impressed with the boot time).
That's why I got into the AmigaDE stuff, which is real; it's not a replacment desktop OS, that was investigated, and rightly rejected. It's fun OS to program with a very supportive community. In some ways more AmigaOS-like than monkeying around with DirectX. This makes sense- the people who wrote it (both at Tao and Amiga) started off on the Amiga. Now I don't know what qualifies a product as Amiga, but having Amiga people all over it and the Amiga name on it sound like a fair definition. Maybe there's some kind of communistic "Amiga purity" test they skipped, but I'm not aware of one.
Like it or not, DE is also going to provide the funding to keep Amiga Inc. going more so than a few thousand AmigaHeads buying OS4. I'd love to be proved wrong, but I doubt mine and a few hundred others are going to do it.
...yes, I lied about those when I was an Amiga Inc cheerleader...
I appreciate your efforts in keeping Amiga.org going, but since you missled for Amiga (Inc.) before...
Zoltan