How much would it cost to port AmigaOS to x64?

[runequester]

Operating system success has nothing to do with most of the things people talk about. It has everything to do with marketing.

The GUI is rubbish, as is its reliance on the CLI.

Which GUI are you talking about?

[runequester]

...and the science of marketing isn't about what most people thinks it is (advertisements etc), but identifying a need on a market and provide a way to satisfy that need with the right combination of Products, Price, Place and Promotion! If your product doesn't satisfy a true need, it's redundant, and it won't matter how much you advertize...

If the need isn't there, you can create it. Happens for luxury goods all the time.

And if you can control the market, marketing doesn't stay important of course.

[runequester]

No you can never create a need, but you can educate people about needs they thought they never had!
 

Same thing effectively. I guess if you want to do some sort of pedantic "well, people didn't know they needed ipads before it was invented" then sure.
 
 

Most of us have many needs that makes us want various more or less "luxury" (unnecessary for our survival) goods, they are what has been driving the western economy the last 100 years...

Yup. An economic system based on perpetually increasing consumption.

[runequester]

The clusterfu¢k one where no matter what desktop environment you select, every application uses one of half a dozen UI toolkits that all operate in subtly different, mutually-incompatible ways, and each application introduces its own inconsistencies on top of that, and eventually you snap and shoot up a Post Office?

lol, It's gotten a lot better in recent years at least. Seems to be a lot more of a Gnome issue than KDE though, at least lately.
With KDE4 at least, apps behave remarkably consistently. GTK integration can be hit and miss, but it's hit a lot more than miss lately.
 
 
I guess it sort of comes down to "you can have these options or you can have us pick one for you" though.

[runequester]

Well, if you only use KDE applications, maybe, but good luck with that...

Well, now that you mention it, almost all of the app's I use are KDE specific stuff. I mostly liked the default stuff that comes in Kubuntu (just installed Yuk and VLC) so I guess I never noticed a ton.

[runequester]

The question noone seems to have answers to is..

okay. Now you got amiga OS on an I7.

What difference does it make when Quake 3 is the most you can put it through?

[runequester]

With access to AMD or Intel CPU power for pennies on the dollar v/s PPC, and the possibility of purchasing a new OS to run on your machine, there would be new users. Thousands on the conservative side.  Tens of thousands in all likelihood. From there you have a seedbed for forward momentum.  Embedded CPU's in limited quantity is not a viable upgrade path, no matter what the zealots say.

Why didn't AROS make this happen already then?

It's tough enough to get developers to support apple, harder still to get them to support linux, and we're banking on a sudden renaisance for an OS most people today haven't heard about, which would have 20 years of catching up to do, and which would start with zero software support ?


People love to moan about PPC but it's not a difference of "path forward" versus "dead end". THey're all dead ends here.