Open Source Amiga OS

[vidarh]

AROS may be an alternative that is modern to AOS, but it just doesn't seem as fast and responsive as AOS. Now that I know that AOS was written in Assembly(I thought it was C and Asm combo), I suppose that the genuine 68k code really doesn't do anyone any good since the instruction sets are different.

I just can't help but think that the mechanical concepts behind what make AOS work so quickly could be re-implemented in another form, or clone, of AOS.

Of course it can.  But AROS is written to be generic and portable, and has mainly targeted much more modern systems until recently. It's only been working on real Amiga's for something like a year or so by now, and is very much a work in progress. So you're comparing apples and oranges.

There's nothing conceptually that'll prevent optimizing AROS until it's as fast as genuine AmigaOS. Whether anyone will be motivated to push things that far (which would also mean stripping out functionality) is another matter.

[vidarh]

Comes from multiple attempts over a solid seven years and change to try and get a really usable, pleasant user experience out of any of the eleventy billion mutually-incompatible Linux distros.

My experience is that in recent years, installing Ubuntu is easier than getting Windows to run reliably at anything than snails pace, and things like getting it to recognize printers requires far less voodoo (what a change from a few years ago..).

More importantly, even if it isn't suitable as a desktop OS for you, the immense success of open source is demonstrated quite well in that most of us have at least one device running Linux (or less likely another open source Unix clone) in our house - even if you don't know it. Most routers and set-top boxes run a Linux version these days, for example. And of course any Android phone.

Both open source and proprietary software is hit and miss. The big difference is that if a proprietary product doesn't measure up, the company goes bankrupt and the product disappears, so you mostly get to see those which are at least modest successes, while for open source you get to see all the in-progress and failed projects too.