AROS has no chance in the future if...

[bhoggett]

uncharted wrote:
AROS needs to

* Slice
* Dice
* Juice
* Purée
* Remove tough and stubborn stains
* Make my hair lush with it's patented conditioning technology

Without these I'm not going to even think about touching AROS.

Probably not what you intended, but it does rather sum up the situation. From a user's PoV - as opposed to someone who wants to develop for AROS - AROS is still where it was several years ago. It doesn't really want to be part of a legacy bridge from an emulated system to a native one, but at the same time it is too primitive and unsupported to stand up as an OS in its own right. Every few months I'll take a look at it, play with it for 5-10 minutes, run our of things to do, and forget about it for another six months.

I mean how many people use AROS as their primary OS? How many people who are not in some way connected with developing something or other for it use it at all?

I've never quite understood what AROS is trying to be. Is it just a "Research Project"? If so, it has probably exceeded its goals because it was never supposed to be of any interest to anyone except the researchers. OTOH, if it has pretentions of being a general purpose OS aimed at users, it does fall rather a long way short and isn't fit to be mentioned in the same breath as AmigaOS4 or MorphOS. I can't help but notice that the things AROS needs to support before poeple are (rightly) willing to treat it seriously is growing faster than the actual development can keep up with, thus giving the impression that AROS development is treading water at best.

I want to like AROS, I really do, yet I can't shake off the feeling that it's just a geek's toy gizmo - one of those things you play around with fascinated for a few minutes before you realise it serves no purpose and forget about it. It's like AROS, as a project, is afraid to set itself any overall practical goals in case it fails to reach them. If you have no aims, no schedule, no roadmap, make no promises and state no concrete purpose you can't fail, right? Unfortunately it also means you can't succeed and you end up just drifting aimlessly while patting yourself on the back for not letting anyone down.

Despite all this I still harbour a secret hope that one day, preferably before I'm too old and senile to notice, AROS will manage to break that 10-minute barrier in holding my attention span. At the moment, that day seems no closer.

[bhoggett]

nadoom wrote:
Once AROS has more applications it will easily break the 10 minute barrier, i know this will happen but the more people who get involved the better.

That's the crux though isn't it? This has been the case for the last four or five years.

I really don't think the "build it and they will come" philosophy holds water any more. You can't easily port from the biggest resource of open source material, *nix, and while it may be easier to port Amiga native applications to it, the vast majority of the Amiga tradition has been for closed source and the source for most applications isn't available. So that's not a solution either. Considering the small number of developers and large number of developments still needed, waiting for native AROS apps to be developed isn't realistic either.

It's no good telling poeple they should get involved. You need to make them want to get involved, make it practical for them to get involved. Bounties only go part way, but real development won't happen until after you attract more people, and for that you need to break the 10-minute barrier first. IMHO until someone decides to do something concrete about addressing that problem, AROS will never get enough support and developers to break the barrier.

I've just read some of the relevant threads on AROS-Exec, and on the whole I can't say they sound encouraging.

[bhoggett]

bloodline wrote:
Well no one is holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to use AROS.

No, but that's hardly the point. What I am saying - and have been for some years - is that during this time AROS will only keep people's attention for more than 10 minutes if they intend to make a commitment to develop for it. Everyone else just thinks "Yeah, nice, let me know when it's ready for actual use."

It hard to see when AROS will move beyond that stage, and it's not even entirely clear it wants to move beyond that stage.

So at the moment it's only a hobbyist solution for those developing it. For ordinary users it's more like a curiosity, to be checked out periodically in case it has made any noticeable progress. I don't think that's an unfair comment or a particularly uncommon one given how things stand.

[bhoggett]

Savan wrote:
AROS has a lot better future than OS4 ever will. HYPEDUPrion should have spent their wasted Amiga Inc lapdog years on AROS and made it the way OS4 is now, plus everyone involved with AROS gets total freedom unlike OS4.

AROS is the only TRUE thing left in Amigaland worth supporting.

Yeah, but ideology aside, what are the practical benefits? What has it got over SkyOS, or Syllable or Haiku/Zeta, or one of the Linux mini-distros, aside from the nominal Amiga connection?

[bhoggett]

iamaboringperson wrote:
One thing I see very often, are companies/organisations which use x86 and MS-Win for POS and kiosks.

That bothers me - for numerous reasons.

AROS would be a great to use with these machines.

...

But overall it would be better than buying 100's/1000's/10,000's MS-Windows licencess, IMHO.

Except that if cost was an issue, those companies could easily switch to a dedicated Linux distro to do exactly what they want, and Linux programmers and/or documentation & support is far more widespread than AROS will ever be.

Amiga people need to get off this concept that the embedded world is just sitting there breathlessly waiting to be swept off ots feet by Amiga-like operating systems.

I have no idea what the future of AROS is, but I'm pretty certain it isn't as a competitor for MS on embedded systems.

[bhoggett]

dammy wrote:
I don't think people have quiet gotten the idea what AROS is all about.

True, and this despite trying to work it out for years. To be honest, I don't believe AROS knows what it's all about. There seems to be no direction and no aim, and the only actual purpose I can make out is to give the people involved something to do. Things seem to move on more by accident than design, but at the end of the day it seems to have very little to offer to those who are not involved in developing or advocating it - beyond something to mess around with for a few minutes every few months.

The reason I always ask the same question about AROS is because no one ever has an answer. It seems to be in a constant and perpetual state of aimless development, but I can't make any more use of it today than I could a few years ago. Does anyone ever plan to change this and elevate it to a point where it deserves the hype and interminable announcements? I wish they would, because then we could start talking about practicalities rather than just ideals.

The original question is this thread is a valid one, and despite all the protestations, no one has really has really said any more than "everything's great, don't bother us with details".

[bhoggett]

Kalamatee wrote:
Perhaps you should write down EXACTLY what IS your question.  Ive only read negative statements so far ..

*Sigh*

OK, here it is again, for the zillionth time:

"If you are not an AROS developer, and not involved in its promotion or hype, what use is AROS to you? Why should you really care about AROS?"

I know there is plenty of activity and discussion between AROS devs on the mailing lists and forums, but it does seem to be a project simply aimed at the devs alone.

The OP essentially asked the question "What is AROS for?", and it's a valid question. If the answer is "It's a project for the devs to have fun with." than that's fine, I can accept that. However, reading all the various announcements and the posts about it on forums from people like dammy, you'd think it was a project with significance to ordinary users, a realistic and preferable alternative to porting AmigaOS4 or MorphOS to x86, for instance - but in that respect asking "when and how" is a valid concern.

Will AROS be able to hold the interest of the casual user for more than 10 minutes, and if so when? Is it taboo to ask?