Just over 8 years ago I decided that AROS was the way forward. At the time I had just gone to University and my A1200 was no longer useful. I needed modern Software running on fast machines... I found myself in the Uni-Computer labs using aged Windows 3.11 on 300Mhz Pentium II's... pretty much every day.
Despite my 240Mhz PPC, the PII's were faster and more capable... better graphics, better audio, more peripherals... and importantly cheaper... But the OS (Win 3.11 sucked)... I realised then, that the AmigaOS needed to be running on this new, commodity hardware.
DosUAE ran rather well on these machines and was faster than my 68040+AGA... plus it could use the PC gfx cards etc... that was fun for a while... but I wanted AmigaOS native. So I joined the AROS dev list in 1999 and got to try the early technical demos from Michal Shulz... the first of which did nothing more than print a few lines of text on the screen assuring you that exec.library was running the machine :-)
Then intuition started working... so we got a window with a smiley face and mouse pointer... and I've watched, and committed code, and AROS has grown... It feels a bit like my baby since I've been so intimately involved watching it develop. I have, quite deservedly, picked up the reputation of an AROS troll :-D But despite that, I feel it is the only way way for the design AmigaOS concept (as flawed for modern computing as it is) to survive.
What really makes it stand above all the other projects has nothing to do with the fact that it's free... nothing to do with the fact it runs on any cheap, powerful modern hardware... nothing to do with the fact it's open source... but rather the fact that it's a community project... I've been involved in design discussions and it has allowed me to understand how the OS works... and the best thing of all is that anyone can do the same!!! Any one of you can join in the debates, download the source code and see how the real live Amiga OS works, and decide the future for yourself... no sheep waiting for other people to spoon feed you their vision.
Ok rant over.
