One unified OS for the future?

[TeamBlackFox]

One reason unification will never work is nobody will ever agree on a balance as to compatibility with legacy applications and adding modern features. Frankly, the majority of the software I as a user depend on:

Vi/Vim
Clang/PCC/GCC & binutils
Firefox and Thunderbird
ZSH/KSH93
Perl
BSD user land tools
X11/xWayland

All of these can be recompiled. For those using older, proprietary products you're obviously going to be forced to emulate or stick with older releases,but this isn't unlike Windows or OS X, where changes in ABI/API and architectural generations results in software not working. For instance, I know of a program for Windows XP that won't run on any 64-bit CPUs regardless of the OS being 32-bit, the developer used an undocumented instruction in the x86 instruction set in his code. In addition it is tied closely to the 32-bit ABI of Windows XP so it won't run under Vista or higher. So you're screwed if you want to use the program ( it is a soft microphone emulator intended for audio production ) on anything modern.

This is why I push for products to be either made with an open licence and source available state, or else well-written so they will work ten years down the line. Just the other day I built a copy of System V R4 based on the source on Archive.Org. Had a boatload of warnings but it compiled and reportedly ran on my friend's old 386 box ( he lost a bet with me and has to use System V R4 for a week. I bet him Ian Jackson would resign from Debian. Had I lost I would have had to use Yggdrasil Linux for a week ) That also being said, I wasn't able to run a binary for Windows under Wine because there is an undocumented bug in the MS version of the DLLs it needs.

[TeamBlackFox]

There are plenty of logical reasons to not like x86. I prefer my Tetra K1 development board from my job for work many times over my howling dual Xeon system, which, since getting the board, isn't being used as much.

Why don't I like x86? Number of reasons:

High power consumption, heat generation etc ( My workstation howls like a jet taking off )
Patent protected, poorly documented/supported SIMD instructions for C compilers
Glitchy, unreplaceable EFI that won't boot Linux BSD correctly
Expensive, compared to my ARM boards.
x86_64 assembly is harder to debug, read and program for, and you have to deal with useless addressing modes such as real mode.

I really like my ARMv7 A8-Cortex BeagleBone and my ARMv8 Tegra K1 I use for work. They aren't perfect, they aren't going to blow you away with power but they're wonderful, inexpensive computers that do more than my workstation does with a lot more power.

Now with OPENPOWER, OPENSPARC, and various MIPS CPUs abound building a less expensive, open source hardware board that does what is needed should be possible. I'll consider the Apollo 68k designs good when they have them running on a dedicated ASIC or built as a CPU. As I said, A-EON should partner with TYAN to adapt some of their CPU designs to a newer, less expensive AmigaNG system,since TYAN already manufactures POWER hardware.

[TeamBlackFox]

OMG!!! :lol:

Did you even think that through before hitting the "submit reply" button?

*Ahem* I don't appreciate being insulted and addressed in a patronising manner. I did logically think this through: For roughly the same price as a brand new X1000, I could buy a POWER8 server ( The PA6T is based on POWER5, for reference, and that is 5 revisions behind the POWER8, counting the + revisions ) I am seriously getting something worth every penny I pay, compared to the X1000, which is using 10-year old tech and passing it off as a new system.

With A-Eon's investment of more than 1 million dollars to Vari-Sys to  design and build PPC motherboards for running AmigaOS4.x (and possibly  some embedded markets), I don't see them changing directions any time  soon, or switching to a different company to do design work, or  manufacture boards for future A-Eon computers.

All very good points, but if Varisys doesn't offer hardware that is cost-effective to build, and performs poorly, what's the point? Besides you and a few others, I don't know anyone who even owns an X1000, let alone laid eyes on it. I'm sure they were the best option when A-EON was founded by far, but you have to jump ship if the current one is leaking. I can't imagine Trevor and A-EON have made much in terms of profits, and while I know none of those involved in OS4 do it for the money, I can't have expected them to survive long running a deficit, especially with the banks so reluctant to lend money.

I yesterday bought a notebook with 2 core 2.7 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB  Harddisk, GPU, WIFI and so on  incl. Win 8 for 238 EUR (used). There is  nothing that can compete right now with such offerings.

Sorry to burst your delusion, but there are: http://elinux.org/Jetson_TK1

I have experience with that board above, and it is a wonderful board that I have been given the pleasure of using, for free, for work purposes. It is quite powerful, not to mention inexpensive, and performs probably twice as good as your laptop's integrated graphics pipe, and depending on the CPU generation, comparable or better than the CPU.

Not exactly the cheapest ARM board out there, but definitely a winner in terms of cost/performance. I also bought a BeagleBone Black for $55+$11 shipping, and that is no slouch either, I have it running Gentoo until my friend, the developer of Void Linux and a former NetBSD developer, ports Void to it. It is very fast, about 4-6 times the speed of a Raspberry Pi, which is about the speed of a 300MHz Pentium II. Do the math, and you can tell it blows the transistors off of a Pentium III running at 1GHz, which I have running PFSense here, especially in power consumption.

I'd love to benchmark the TK1 against an old Mac Mini G4, I suspect that since it has twice the RAM, many times the bus speed, a faster CPU and GPU, it will beat it at nearly every record. When Project Denver, the ARM64 Tegra comes out, it will do better than almost every Intel Atom and likely a G5 CPU in terms of performance.

x86_64 is so messed up, that it has literally 63 different instructions that can perform the jump operation. An audit against the instructions used by the Linux kernel to the instructions present in a modern x86 CPU, in hardware or microcode, came to be roughly 1 instruction used by Linux for every 10 the CPU offered. And it has to maintain that massive instruction set, either in hardware or microcode, in addition to anything else AMD or Intel wants to cram into the chip. The patent-protections on these chips prevents third-party compilers, such as GCC and Clang, from fully utilising the instruction sets, forcing you to either use a proprietary compiler and the OS it will run on to build your OS and programs, or else contend with only being able to utilise a fraction of a chip's instructions.

The problem, I will remind you, with using the x86 architecture as a base, are the following:

The hardware is so diverse that with the tiny size of the community, only a small subset of that hardware will ever be supported. The BSD community, which is at least 4 times as big as the Amiga community, has trouble with this on almost every system built today. Your average GNU/Linux distro that doesn't use blob drivers not merged into the Linux kernel only supports about half the computers out there to satisfactory level, adding blobs from Nvidia or AMD raises it to about 70-80%. The GNU/Linux-libre distros? Less than 10%.

The Amiga community won't be able to utilise blobs, because Nvidia, AMD, Realtek, Intel etc. won't write them, unless you're referring to the Linux-hosted version of AROS, so you can count on their support being less than 10%, even in a unified state.

Furthermore, most members here don't even use AmigaOS or an OS that in any way resembles Amiga OS, the majority uses Windows, with lesser minorities using OS X and GNU/Linux, and then you have the esoteric ones like me who use BSD, IRIX and Solaris, operating systems most people aren't even aware exist. So what's the point? Most are on here to discuss WinUAE or maintaining old hardware, so one could argue that the apathy and lack of participation among userbases would effectively stifle any effort to modernise the OS or the hardware underlying it, let alone UNIFY it. You're kidding yourself if the switch to x86 will do anything other than piss in the well of the users who sunk money into NG hardware, frustrate new users with lack of hardware support, and fragment the community even more, and perhaps even cause MorphOS or OS4 to be forked again, making yet more players into a market the size of a quark.

[TeamBlackFox]

Exactly! When you look at it from my perspective, there is no reason to *not* seriously consider ARM. I've worked for MS, Dell, and a few other companies, and all the higher ups say that there all pushing their chips in the ARM bucket due to Windows' decreasing user base giving a very good opportunity to release more high end ARM CPUs. Qualcomm, Nvidia, etc are all working furiously on getting more powerful boards and CPUs ready.

[TeamBlackFox]

Thomas_Richter,

I don't know your background in the hardware industry, but I have several people in the companies I have worked for saying that the engineering divisions are putting their bets on ARM. There are ARM for mobile, ARM for the workstation and ARM for the servers. It isn't limited to mobile or embedded applications, and hasn't been for about 5 years. If engineering divisions of major companies like MS and Dell are saying to place your bets with ARM, then perhaps a major shift is coming in the next few years. With mobile devices being the norm, it may end up spreading back into the workstation and server markets, and the server market is already getting some promising designs. AMD is selling society compatible Opteron-A ARM kits for developers, Qualcomm and Nvidia are ramping up production with high performance ARM chips. Why not get ahead of the curve, and stay on top of the game?

x86 is very costs ineffective because it doesn't scale down well, Intel Atoms consume on average 20-30% more power while offering a diminishing return on power as clock speed scales up. I have a Nocona Xeon workstation at my side that besides being louder and running hotter than modern chips, does roughly as well due to having massive RAM ( My machine has 16GB ) and UW-SCSI, which is still very fast when using 15kRPM disks. The only applications it sucks are are those that are quad+ core aware, it has dual Xeons and for NetBSD usage does very well, but I simply don't use it because it is loud and hot when I have the option of using my TK1 based board from work, which is quiet and has better graphics performance.

[TeamBlackFox]

"bet on something" is for private people making bets on horse races, on  business you "do not bet" but make predictions and try to leave open  chances to turn direction if prediction fails. We all know of the bets  that were lost, from Commodore starting up to what we are discussing  now. So if changing direction it would make more sense to have something  portable like Aros so you can support both X86 and ARM and are on the  safe side.

Uhh the entire industry of computing is based on speculation - you can carry out years of market research in advance of a product release, but you seriously can't anticipate the impact of said product, or its reception. In the case of Android, which PRIMARILY runs on ARM devices, with x86 and MIPS making up the minority, it has been well-received. An Android desktop would likely be ARM based, as the hardware is cheap enough that it will still be powerful, but competitive. Intel/AMD x86 at the same price range as ARM either is too power-hungry or too anemic to even boot up. That being said, I'd trust the engineers of MS, Dell and AMD, all of which I have worked with in my past job as a data center tech, over a handful of users and developers in the middle of a forum known for sociopathic trolls, hell I had lunch with a manager for the largest AMD data centre in the DC area simply because he was called out to the MS data centre I worked at and invited me and the rest of the crew to lunch at a sushi bar and discussed what he wanted to see done to improve AMD-based Dell server reliability with us, over sushi and beer at that. He also talked to me about the Opteron-A series, and he said that it will, in his own words "Be the smartest move that HQ has made since launching the Opteron line"

You know as well as I do there are logistical and also other concerns with having to support two different architectures, diametrically opposed at that! Without a ports type system like FreeBSD uses, one or the other will simply have little software. Best to focus on one architecture for logistical reasons.

Show me an ARM that competes well with an i7. AmigaOS is not some tablet  OS. If a switch away from where it is now is justified then with a  significant increase of computing power. Sure, an Atom is rather crappy,  but who speaks about that stuff? i5 or i7 is whats' in remotely normal  computers these days. And to that level ARM scales up rather poorely.

If you're going to make a brash statement, prepare something better than just an opinion: http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-k1-processor.html

This, my friend is a SoC which has the power of an Nvidia GPU and a quad-core ARM CPU. I can't find any benchmarks vs an i5 or i7, but most people I know are on the budgetary end of computers, either older gen i-series, older-gen AMDs, or the Pentium and Celeron series of CPUs. Your personal desktop is certainly *NOT* representative of what everyone else has. ARM has scaled up at a logarithmic rate that is even better than x86, I can't really explain it to you other than it simply doesn't waste any space on the die for any legacy-cruft that an x86 CPU does. Your desktop, my workstation and most other x86 devices start up in a 16-bit mode, and have to be initialised from there to protected and then long mode just to even boot a modern, 64-bit OS. ARM? It originally deployed with a 32-bit design and a 26-bit address space, but it can still run a 32-bit binary inside the 26-bit address space. x86 doesn't have this luxury, its address mode is locked to its execution mode.

Furthermore, I will use the same argument that Howard Roark made in Fountainhead, original text below:

"The famous flutings on the famous columns — what   are they there for? To hide the joints in wood — when columns were   made of wood, only these aren't, they're marble. The triglyphs, what   are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people   began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made   copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done   it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made   copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we   are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of   copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?

Similarly, what is real mode, AKA 16-bit mode, in a modern x86_64 CPU for? To start the BIOS, mostly - the original BIOS comes from the original IBM-PC designs, based on the 8088 and 8086. This was reimplemented by competitors to become PC-compatible. Then the 386 and 486 added a 32-bit protected mode, using an undocumented opcode in the original 8086 design to initialise it. They retained the 16-bit mode to keep DOS running, they simply used extenders like DOS4GW. With the extinction of Windows 9x with the atrocious Windows ME in late 1999, the 16-bit real mode was effectively rendered obsolete. But this was kept and copied into the 64-bit world, where now you had to escalate to long mode from protected mode from real mode. And this is all because the industry decided to use an architecture which is an extension of a 16-bit reimplementation of an 8-bit copy of a 4-bit processor. Why the hell keep all this cruft? DOS won't even run properly on a modern GPT sliced disk, let alone a system with no drivers!

ARM is significantly more towards my ideal of legacy-free than x86, and with the ARM64 releases, they're using a binary translation layer to execute the older 32-bit binaries in microcode on the 64-bit CPUs. In addition, Amiga would do better on a dedicated piece of hardware that is both cheap, and cost-effective, x86 isn't that answer. AmigaOS has a new place in the media-centric world - its low resource usage, efficient memory management and user-centric design would make it a perfect small computer OS, being used in either all-in-one computers or small set-top box computers, and ARM excels in those applications. None of the NG Amigas utilise anywhere near the full potential of workstation hardware, and as I hate to admit it, the days of a large howling workstation are numbered. As we speak I've my Nocona workstation for sale, simply because it is too loud and noisy to keep on, my Challenge S is quiet enough for low-end server applications, the Origin does well for high end, my Octane2 and Beaglebone have been doing very well as my main machines for most applications, and where I need a mobile solution, my trusty Nexus 7 does the job. I simply don't really need x86 except for a few things, which I am considering getting a small low-power computer to do the job of instead.

[TeamBlackFox]

Wow Biggun, I don't know if you're trolling or just plain delusional:

Not only does AmigaOS fit that criteria, but so does CP/M, TOS and DOS. I don't see why you'd want to renounce memory protection, I mean I'd hate to have a stop error, guru meditation or what have you constantly interrupt my work and corrupt my data. Its used because often enough programmes simply aren't perfect and will happily corrupt your OS.

SMP, and also threading and multiplexing are very important, simply because a single CPU can't do more than one task at a time. Multiprocessing allows for load balancing, increased CPU efficiency and less time spent switching tasks.

64-bit addressing and pointers are also important, because 4GB RAM no longer cuts it. Virtualization, rendering, servers and computational math all are very memory intensive and you simply can't use nasty hacks like PAE to get around it.

Either your trolling or your computing needs are so minimal that a cooperative multitasked OS with incomplete preemptive scheduling, no network stack out of the box and severely limited security and performance is enough for you to do everything on. Hell, Windows 3.1 is the same way. Expose that to the internet and before you know it you're box is compromised and exposed!

[TeamBlackFox]

AmigaOS does in fact have several performance bottlenecks, discounting hardware completely, the OS is cooperatively multitasked, similar to Mac OS pre X, so a task that  demands CPU time gets it, with no way for the user to interact with and kill the task. Similarly, the OS is lacking a thread implementation, which spells to me NOT-THREAD-SAFE. I have seen a few userspace implementations of a ptheads-type model, but this is insufficient in most cases. This means AmigaOS, bare metal, runs everything in its own process, which increases memory requirements, wastes CPU time and makes the OS feel slower.

4GB RAM is not sufficient in many cases, either. If I am rendering something in lightwave on my Octane, I am limited to using slower rendering techniques that conserve memory, simply because my Octane has only 2GB RAM. If I had 8, the max, I would not have to be as careful. Even if I were to to take the Origin and hook it up to a  G-Brick, which can have over 8 times the RAM of the Odyssey GPU, with only 4GB between four 64-bit CPUs, is going to have issues. Before you call a false analogy and say that IRIX is bloated, I have many times the power of the most-decked out Classic Amiga, and MIPS R10000 CPUs and derivatives are in a class above any G4-based Mac, and if I had a quad 800MHz Tezro with DCD and 8GB RAM I would go toe-to-toe with a quad G5 Mac in benchmarks and expect comparable performance, for a similar reason that the Amiga edged out PCs in the early 1990s: the central CPU didn't have to be fast because the GPU was able to pick up the slack, combined with a DMA design based on, and designed with, networking in mind.

The fact is you can't brush off hardware advancement like its nothing at all - you have to adapt and advance with it. 64-bit is becoming the norm in the open source world - PC-BSD, DragonFlyBSD, Ubuntu and a lot of other players are dropping 32-bit support, it is a DEAD-END. Even ARM has the v8 specification now, a 64-bit architecture is upon us. I love my Beaglebone Black, but sooner or later I will sell it, and cope with the fact that 32-bit in the consumer and hobbyist market is running out of petrol and circling the drain.

The fact is the Amiga-NG platforms MUST evolve and advance, otherwise it will be pretty  much history, and it will join its competitors, DOS,OS and OS 9 in the history books for good.

[TeamBlackFox]

The Amiga has used preemptive multitasking from day one. It has lots of different processes and tasks. Almost everything including most of AmigaOS works in user space which is much faster than switching to supervisor mode for everything. It's not as secure or crash proof because of it but it is fast and it works well enough when programs don't misbehave.

AmigaOS uses cooperative multitasking with a preemptive scheduler. Where it falls short of the definition of preemptive multitasking is memory protection and task protection. Without both, you're going to have badly behaved programs trashing daemons, other programs or the kernel itself. On UNIX, Windows NT and Linux, for example, the worst a badly behaved program will usually do is coredump with a segmentation fault, vs on the Amiga where it will lock up the system or send it into a guru meditation error. Also, the microkernel model has been shown to not always be the most efficient model around: the Mach microkernel has several design flaws which hinder performance vs the System V or BSD kernel designs, which are both monolithic in design

MIPS has the worst code density of any modern processor. The code size is more than twice that of 68k code. I can understand why you need more memory. Can you even boot your Octane with the same amount of memory as the Amiga 3000? My Amiga 3000 came with 2 (or 3 MB?) of memory and I could do a lot with it. I have a 3000T with a little over 100MB of memory with RTG gfx and I can do just about anything I need to with that while multitasking. I can't imagine 1GB of memory not being enough for 95%+ of users on an Amiga.



The 64 bit hype sells computers. Bloated software sells computers. The desktop computer seems to be disappearing though. I wouldn't say 32 bit is dead for embedded and electrical devices. I know a 68k Amiga could do everything a pad and lower end laptop could do with less memory. Most powerful 68k Amiga computers have 64 or 128 MB of memory with happy Amiga users and you are saying that 4GB of memory is not enough for an Amiga? Maybe it wouldn't be for a MIPS Amiga or even a PPC (has good code density for RISC) Amiga but I can only dream of powerful enough apps for a 68k Amiga with 2GB of memory to ever run out of memory.

My Octane doesn't have a small enough module for me to test that, but the Indy I have will boot with 16MB installed, assuming I run it in serial mode, not via X11. I'm not going to fscking argue about code density, because in the end memory and disk space are cheap, and 64-bit CPUs are no where near the memory ceiling for addressing as of yet. Don't get me wrong, both the 68000 and 65C816 are great CPUs, for their class. Scaling the design up won't work. The 6502 and 65C816 are proto-RISC, and arguably the 6502 and derivatives are more successful than the 68000. That's not to say that the 68000 doesn't have advantages, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUZpF2JLF4s That is done using a Mega Drive, FYI.

But I will quote Simon of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, an idol of mine from my childhood:

    "We evolve, beyond the person that we were a minute before. Little by little, we advance with each turn. That's how a drill works...That's your limitation! You sit here closed off, blocking away other  lifeforms like some sort of king! That's nobody's limitation but your  own!"
If the moment something stops evolving, be it a person, an industry or a piece of software, you limit yourself. Why limit yourself to 32-bit, and only guarantee your obscurity. With the 32-bit limit in mind, you will never be able to, for example, render a 1080p with a high texture resolution: Mathematically, if the textures don't fit into your memory, you're not going to be able to render at that resolution, period. If I am renting out racks of servers, as I have done at previous occupations, (Windows Azure, FYI) all of them had at minimum, 8GB RAM. The render servers? Up to 64GB, and at other datacenters there were 128GB racks. 32-bit is dying for the consumer computer market. For embedded and mobile? Not at all, but then why are people justifying against ARM, the single most used 32-bit architecture these days? ARM64 is out, but its definitely in its infancy. It won't be long, but it will soon creep into the server and the consumer computer markets. The writing is on the wall.

If your texteditor crashes then you loose your work anyhow.
Whether this is on AMIGA-OS or on UNIX it does not matter.

And memory protection does not help here.

Yes, but on UNIX, at least, I don't have to worry about it corrupting my entire running kernel, killing any other processes and threads running, and then have to deal with the potential risk of data loss. It doesn't help that AFFS has no logging or soft updates to deal with the threat of data loss - fsck-type check and repair isn't exactly perfect, nor fast.

First of all - AMIGA OS supports threads.

I never said it did not, I said it wasn't thread-safe. Its like running mod_php with MPM worker on Apache: People do it, but it isn't smart, and furthermore, doing it ups the risk of the web server crashing under load, as mod_php isn't thread safe. It can thread, but as soon as it encounters a lock held by another thread, or a race condition, it is going to crash.

AmigaOS exec kernel has no kernel-level implementation of threading, so the implementations that exist run in userspace, which has been shown to be unstable and be questionable in terms of performance vs a kernel implementation

Your argument is very "simple" but OK lets follow it.

Not happy yet?
Still need more?
What bloated Software do you want to run?

For all I want to do with my computer - 4 GB is enough.       

Now you're patronising me. See my above example - in rendering you can't make 5+2=2; mathematics for rendering are as rigid as you get. Furthermore, you can't assume your case, that you'll never need above 4GB, holds up for everyone else here. Don't give yourself that much credit.

Paulone: I find myself nodding in agreement with a lot of what you say - are we running in parallel or something?

Bottom line is - I don't have room for a cooperative multitasking, single-user, insecure, outdated and 32-bit only OS in my daily lineup. I have my 3000, for when I'm manic enough to try using it for something or for playing one of the few Amiga games I've found I enjoy, and also for the rose-tinted, watercoloured memories of my youth. Beyond that? its an expensive old hunk of metal and circuits that takes up space in a cabinet near my desk 99% of the time.

[TeamBlackFox]

Uhh guys I'm not redefining any terminology: preemptive multitasking by definition requires the OS have the ability to cull tasks that overrun other tasks, or hijack the scheduler, as one can effectively do currently with the forbid() system call.

It has been described as preemptive multitasking, but the de facto definition of preemptive multitasking requires the OS to be able to protect tasks against each other. Task protection and memory protection are two different things, but they're both integral to stable systems.

Furthermore, I never said other OSes can't be taken down from software, but there are countermeasures which can be applied to enforce that. On Linux, for example, cgroups effectively isolate and control processes in such a way that the OS can't be resource starved. UNIX and Linux further use ulimits, privilege separation and permissions to act as countermeasures. This is in addition to memory and task protection.

What I'm trying to say is, the AmigaOS is a fossil, effectively. If it ever is to stand a chance of being a stable, secure,general use OS it will need to evolve and break compatibility if needed. If your proprietary binaries can't keep running, then get the developer to update and fix them or else release the source code under a proper licence like the MIT, BSD or ISC licence so others can continue and if needed, fork it.

[TeamBlackFox]

Amigadave,

My point exactly. People are delusional to compare it to other OSes favourably, especially in its current state. On the same hand I'm not denying UNIX and workalikes as a whole don't have a very different set of problems from AmigaOS, namely the fact that there is a massive undertaking to remove a boatload of retrospectively bad design decisions, from the System V init daemon, to the X11 protocol of over 20 years ago and implementations, to newer mistakes such as HAL, systemd, udev and Weston which the community is dealing with in very divisive manners. What I do know is that they're much more advanced, even in the state of division that plagues the communities.

My comments are more to people who think, in an asinine manner, that the AmigaOS can be satisfactorily used as a daily driver without serious limitations. I looked into it years ago, when I had my 3000UX ( Amiga UNIX is a pile of garbage, in retrospect ) and discovered that there is a tone of poorly written implementations out there of various programmes, so one has to spend a lot of time auditing, writing dirty hacks and modifying the machine's underlying OS. Which I'll admit, is fun at time, but to use the now antique computers as daily drivers of any kind is pretty asinine. The only reason I can still run IRIX for example is because the UNIX APIs for a lot of things are cross platform, and one can replace old, proprietary libraries and OS parts with new equivalents that are open source. Also since IRIX is almost 10 years ahead of AmigaOS in terms of development, since OS 3.x ground to a halt ~2000-ish while IRIX still was regularly patched until the SGI bankruptcy in 2009-10.
Finally as a refrain to the original topic, I like the state of how things are now in the community: There are well-defined differences between each major project and its goals, and their user bases. Nothing wrong with a little bit of choice now!