Icaros is not a bad OS at all :D

[Duce]

I liked AROS when I played with it a few times, but found the fragmentation that's happening with the different variants annoying as hell.  I found the whole Icaros, Broadway, AROS Vision, AspireOS thing to be a confusing pain, but then again, I'm short on patience.  I'm simply used to Linux distro's where I can clearly click on either x64 or 32 bit variants and have the OS burned on a USB key or optical media and installed within 3 minutes.  If I've gotta dig around and slog through different variants, I just wash my hands of it, but maybe the download options are more clear now than they used to be.  When I did get it working though, I did like it, other than some bad screen resolution modes issues I hit where one minute it'd be working fine then all of a sudden it'd try slipping back to VESA mode.

I'd hoped the SAM version of AROS might replace OS4 on my SAM, but I was never, ever able to even get it to boot to install mode no matter what I did

I just gave up and built an Amithlon box.  If I'm going to hunt for supported hardware for an OS, Amithlon gave me a better experience.  I don't consider a "hosted" OS a daily driver OS, but that's just a personal nit I tend to pick.

[Duce]

Aeros is more compatible to existing hardware than windows 8.

LOL, good one.

A Linux hosted OS version doesn't count when you're using the hosted Linux  OS to make up for the inadequacies of the end OS hardware support wise.

[Duce]

Tried running/using/installing the latest version on my main PC just to see how the OS was progressing.  Screen flickered for a sec in VESA mode and went black after that.  Even took one of the gfx cards out and no difference, figured it might be an SLI problem.  No dice.

Oddly, all Windows versions right back to XP run (and install right away) on this hardware without burping.  (Intel Skulltrail mobo, 2x 9775 cpu's, 32 GB ECC RAM, 2x nVidia Titan cards, 1 OCZ 240 GB SSD, 1 Samsung 1 TB SSD, both SATA).

Ubuntu installed with no effort as well.

[Duce]

XP is not going to be supported further come April 9, but the point was missed in my post

I tried AROS on this machine and it didn't work in the least.  I've used Windows variants all the way back to XP, and am currently using Windows 8.1.  Works just great.

Therefore the statement of "Aeros is more compatible to existing hardware than windows 8." sort of falls flat.

I'm not trying to pick nits here, but I tried it and it didn't work at all.  Even removing one of my gfx cards didn't help.  Oh well, i'll try it on my other machines and see how far I get.

[Duce]

Fair enough.  What version can I use that will support sanely modern hardware?

Tried it on my nvidia 590 / i7 box and it's not seeing the NIC at all.  Dual gigabit ethernet on the motherboard.

It's an off the shelf Intel i7 920 with an nVidia 590 card and dual SSD's, using a run of the mill Asus P series mobo.

Which version of AROS would be the best for me on such hardware?  I'm getting nowhere with this.  I own no machines other than my Amithlon box that have old stuff like IDE interfaces and such.  The lowest of my low end/older PC's is a Core 2 6750 with a nVidia 295 and dual SSD's.

[Duce]

"Why do people think it's the video card and CPU that are the important details for an OS to boot?"

Well, mainly cause the other dude said this OS supports more hardware than Windows 8, perhaps?  When I can't even get a display, I do think it's worth noting the make and model of the graphics card (s), lol.

Not getting even VESA mode on this machine.  Display blips then goes black.  Skulltrail mobo, dual 9975's, Dual Titan's, etc.

My i7 machine has an Asus P6T mobo and I did manage to get it working in VESA mode, but I can't see the NIC at all on it.  Installed a spare Bigfoot PCIe NIC (Killer 2100) in the machine and no dice there either.

Oh well, I tried.

[Duce]

And "the screen flickered then went black" was explaining what happened.  I explained the issues I was having on the various systems I was trying every step of the way  

[Duce]

Are you also annoyed that there's more than one Linux distro? The official AROS website does have links to most of the AROS distros, but I can't see anything wrong with that. Anyway, if it bothers you that much, you can just pretend only one of them exists.

Not particularly, no.  The deciding factor is I can download one Linux kernel version and I know all my hardware will be supported, be it Mint, Ubuntu, Redhat, SUSE, etc.  Hell, even Solaris works on every machine I own, machines spanning a good 8 years or so.  In the end with Linux, it's mainly just a matter of preference when most of the big boys are all rolling along the current kernel.

All I can tell you is I grabbed the mainstream, commodity hardware AROS variant I was recommended and it didn't work on two of three machines I tried it on.  Tried the same version, same install media in fact, and crapped out two out of three times.  One black screen, the other a NIC that no matter what driver I tried I came up without any connectivity.

If you got the impression I was trying to do some smoke and mirrors trick like getting the 68k version running natively on my dual Intel 9775's, my apology for the confusions.