AROS has no chance in the future if...

[dandelion]

Just going to add my two pence. I tried an AROS live CD for the first time on Monday and was quite frankly blown away. I see AROS at the moment as at a similar stage to Linux in the early days: a growing band of loyal supporters and developers, a desire to make a better use of all this abundant, cheap and fast hardware, a lot of work still to be done but for those in the know a growing excitement about the possibilities it has for the future. We need more developers on board, more publicity, more ports. I urge you all, at the very least, to try the live CD.

I'm becoming more and more convinced this is the very best opportunity the Amiga has. Out of the hands of business, into the hands of the users and fans.

[dandelion]

I think that chap from Lancashire is correct in some ways (although his tone is a little negative). AROS does need more developers to come on board to really accelerate it to the point where it can gain real usability as an everyday OS rather than a curio. From where can they come? The Amiga "community" isn't what it once was. There are still excellent, talented people left, but there's an abundance of "ROM-kidz" and people who'd never accept the idea of Amiga being a mainstream OS and don't care about helping it become that. I've been thinking about posting to some of the Linux newsgroup, at least with the live CDs you can say to someone - take five minutes of your time and check out something very exciting happening in the strange old world of Amiga. Maybe some will remember it and be moved to get involved.

I do find it rather disheartening everyone asking what's the use of it if you can't run 68k programs natively! These are the growing pains of a platform making a brave step from one technology to another. It happened with Mac and it should happen with us! If you want to run 68k software get out your a1200 or run UAE within AROS.
(However, maybe all AROS code could have some sort of  header...and if code is launched which doesn't contain this it could be passed to UAE automagically?)

[dandelion]

Would it be possible (by this I mean, reasonably do-able, easy and worthwhile) to set up some sort of X-window device available to AROS, to make porting of unix applications that much easier to AROS? They've done that with RISC OS and it's brought many improvements in terms of application support including Firefox (which is a very nice application to have access to on a minority platform I can tell you).

For info on unix porting to RISC OS see: http://www.riscos.info/unix/

[dandelion]

Definately get that feeling too! Reading a lot of the views on here, it's like hearing a lot of disgruntled Windows users feeling amazed by the sudden presence of Linux in their computer world. "What, you mean when I went across to Windows because everyone said it's the be-all-and-end-all of computing they weren't actually correct and I look a fool now?" Yes people, you can have more fun with computers than what the people in Seattle tell you. No, this doesn't mean running UAE and it doesn't mean you have to open your wallet to do it. There's very exciting things of real technological prowess happening in the open source world. And they provide a real, viable alternative to MS. AROS isn't that yet, but it has, if we all stop complaining and support it, the potential to do so.