One unified OS for the future?

[danwood]

Anyway, I can afford new amiga os hardware, I don't care much about the price, I do care that it is not old used hardware

Must admit, I always find that argument a bit odd on Amiga forums.  Don't most of us have old Commodore hardware in use that's at least twice as old (or three times) as a PPC Mac?

My G5 Tower from 2005 is at least 12 years younger than my newest Amiga.

[danwood]

Thanks.

So beyond that, how do they compare?

I was pretty impressed with Ambient, very polished. How does Workbench on OS4 compare?

Hows the stability? How seamlessly do 68k apps integrate?

What do you dislike in each?

Ambient is very polished yes, Workbench is.. well Workbench, it really depends what kind of Amiga user you were.  

If you ran a Workbench replacement like Dopus Magellan, chances are you'll prefer Ambient, if you used Workbench with some add-ons, you'll feel more at home on OS4.  Of course, you can run Dopus Magellan on either system as well.

Just down to taste really.

[danwood]

@danwood >> I was ofcourse talking about NG systems.

Of course, but my point is that even most NG users still have Commodore Amigas around too.

I'm sure most on this forum have at least an A1200 or 500 still.

[danwood]

I think the difficulty that's being faced is that AmigaOS has to change the API, whereas MorphOS doesn't. AmigaOS's long term goal is SMP and memory protection. That's a heck of an undertaking, and where a load of work has gone already (that's not been noticed because it's invisible to the end user). As MorphOS has been concentrating on single-core hardware, I haven't seen it making the groundwork towards SMP - which would require changing the API (like AmigaOS has done). SMP will never work on AmigaOS unless the API-changing groundwork is done first.

If and when MorphOS starts work on SMP (have they done so already? I really don't know) they too will have to change the API somewhat, but I just wish it would be with changes that are compatible with AmigaOS's API changes. Not going to happen, though, I suspect....

I must admit, I'll be highly impressed with Hyperion if they can successfully implement smp and memory protection while remaining compatible to current apps.

There are those who claim it's impossible, and famously even Apple tried and failed with Copland.