What do you need on your desktop?

[Seehund]

Wayne wrote:

I need, in no particular order;

1) Wholly Integrated network stack.  
I should not have to learn how to install the Internet just to use it.

Add integrated support for a bunch of protocols apart from TCP/IP to that. SMB, NFS, SSH...

2) A 100% fully compliant browser which handles every new standard out there including CSS, Javascript, XML, and XHTML.

3) Games.  Lots of cool, NOT PORTED games to keep me occupied.

These three things I feel would drive development, much more than a word processor or even desktop video application.  What do you think?

Agreed. "The web" is a basic and probably the most used "application" and a fundamental requirement of a modern desktop system today.
While not essential for the usability of such a system, games do certainly attract/retain users and drive development. As an example, I don't think many x86 Linux users would let a Windows partition be around wasting disk space if there only were a sufficient number of games for Linux. Ports are needed too - for example,  people probably want to play the same network games with other people on other platforms.

A reasonably modern printing system, with network support and integrated postscript interpreter. People want and need to make hardcopies of their work, simple as that. CUPS is probably a bitch to implement on a single-user platform, but that'd be an example of an ideal solution IMO.

[Seehund]

mikeymike wrote:

You want integrated support for the most buggy and security-hole'd  filesharing protocol in existence?

Yup, because in addition to being the most buggy and security-holed file/printer sharing protocol, it's the most commonly used one. There's no SANA-II implementation for all the most common OSes, or is there?

No, I don't want it and root directory sharing turned on by default.

[Seehund]

mikeymike wrote:

What's so wrong with FTP I have to ask... and don't tell me people seriously need to directly print files to a printer on another PC... even I just FTP the file to the other PC at home and print it off from there, and both computers are running Windows! :-)

My printer doesn't have a built-in FTP server, but it does have a built in printing/JetDirect server. Also, in a multiple OS network it's not reasonable to expect that the application you wish to print from is/can be installed on every system. If the printer is connected to/served from a Linux box, then I can't print a PageStream document from the Linux box, but if AmigaOS had a printing system from this side of the Silur geologic era I could ask PageStream on the box running AmigaOS to send the job to the Linux printing server. If I have a Word document with pics, tables and stuff I can't print it from the box running AmigaOS if that's the machine connected to the printer... Et c.

(It's been years since I've needed to print something from my Amiga)

It's been years since I wanted to print anything with AmigaOS... PageStream is what comes to mind, but now I'll have to convert such docs to postscript and copy them to a machine with an OS capable of network printing.

[Seehund]

@mikeymike

I see your point. Samba (smbd, smbclient, smbmount...) can be a bitch to set up and use though. Thinking in *ix-ish ways related to Samba on AmigaOS feels like a malplaced kludge. I guess "Samba suite included, not necessarily integrated, but with nice tools, GUIs, seamless WB and file requester usage, and integrated support of network mounted disks regardless of protocol" is perhaps a more accurate description of what I'm looking for.