Which OS Would Be The Best Amiga Way Forward...

[SamuraiCrow]

+1 on that. AROS really needs something like Virtualbox. That one app would open the door for everything that didn't run native.

There's an effort that PhoenixKonsole is working on called Broadway Plus X.  It is an effort to make hosted AROS run with Linux while allowing the X server to remain active for running LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org and any other Linux app that AROS doesn't have an equivalent to.  It also should support the non-free drivers that Linux supports.  BTW, AROS runs inside VirtualBox but it's really not worth it without the Guest Additions to allow folder sharing and the like.

BTW, I voted for AROS also.  It's the least common denominator of all of them so a hosted AROS could be ported to OS 4 and MorphOS for source compatibility.

[SamuraiCrow]

The new FPGA systems, I believe, will eventually bring PPC back in some way.

I think you are mistaken there.  I think the PPC is morally wounded by the fact that its instruction set requires more memory to represent the same code.  This makes all of the caches less efficient and memory a more overvalued commodity.

If there is a revival of the 68k processor it may put some of the existing CISC designs on the defensive in ways that the PPC never could.  The N68050, for example, will be able to represent certain opcodes as combinations of two opcodes.  (This will allow 3 operand instructions to be encoded in a backward-compatible way to the traditional 68k machines.)

ARM may stand a chance though.  There's enough time and talent going into the ARM chips now that it will definitely beat PPC on every front leaving only CISC/RISC hybrids such as the 64-bit Intel x86's and AMD64 to fight over the rest.  If the 68k doesn't come back by the time that Windows 8 comes out for the ARM processors, it probably never will.

[SamuraiCrow]

Are there tools for converting OS4.x to Arm? Will it allow a port to be easy.
Easy is a relative term.
PPC, just tell an Amigan it can't be done. Chuckle.
I guess FPGA would allow Amiga OS4.x classic to live a little longer.

Most of the apps for OS 4 are written in C rather than Assembly making them MUCH easier to port to ARM AROS.  That's right, AROS already has an ARM version for that Efika netbook.

What we need most is not a new OS but a new compiler backend.  GCC is kludgey and LLVM is catching up with the quality of code generated by it.  This would allow a target-neutral sandbox based on AROS for all versions of AROS including hosted versions of AROS for PPC systems.