Next MorphOS version: 3.0! (Not 2.8)

[takemehomegrandma]

At the Amiganoid 2011 event held on 17th of September 2011 in Essen/Germany, the MorphOS team were present and demonstrated the latest development version of MorphOS on PowerBooks (among other HW). During this time they also released the news that version 2.8 is "cancelled", and instead MorphOS will bump up to v3.0! Among the news is also a now official announcement of support for Power Book laptop computers from Apple.

Here is a MorphOS developer's comments on the issue:

The idea is MorphOS 3.0 would be the next public version and will introduce support for PowerBook (only 15" and 17" PowerBook5,6-5,9 which are the two latest revisions RevD and RevE):

- It will be a completely *free* (as in money free, nobody would have to pay) upgrade for already registered users.
- There will probably be some experimental wireless support for a few external cardbus cards featuring WPA/WPA2. That was demonstrated in Essen.
- There will be enhanced 3D drivers for the R2xx range of Radeon cards
- Proper use of AGP bus has been added where reasonable and available, helping on some low vmem issues with Mac mini for example
- There will be a builtin CD/DVD recording tool named Jalapeno.
- There will be various other enhancements which are not disclosed yet.

As a final note, G5 iMac/PowerMac support will not be released anytime soon. It was just some experiment. No development work is done on it. The focus is now on bug fixing and implementing remaining features for 3.0.

(Link)

Also, it won't be released before December.

[takemehomegrandma]

I would think the Power Book support should in itself be enough to convince a lot of people to jump on board. Us MorphOS users have had it good and things are only about to get better!!!!

I agree with you.

I bought MorphOS 2.0, and I must say *I have got a lot* for the license fee. *MorphOS 2.0 in itself* was *entirely worth it*, since it was a true paradigm shift from MorphOS 1.4.x, with several *major* upgrades in key areas. But then there has been a steady flow of updates, some containing really fruity stuff, real new features, on top of the expected bugfixes and corrections. Just look at everything marked as "NEW" in these pages (and these lists aren't even entirely complete):

MorphOS 2.1
MorphOS 2.2
MorphOS 2.3
MorphOS 2.4
MorphOS 2.5
MorphOS 2.6
MorphOS 2.7

All this completely for free! Best spent EUR €111.11 ever, it has been totally worth it. This free upgrade policy makes it's by far the lowest cost Amiga NG option (and I don't even factor in the HW cost, I mean this entirely based on OS cost). On another "Amiga NG option" you would have paid all over again a few times during an evolution like this, but not here!

The deal has been that *all* upgrades within v2.x of MorphOS would be free of charge for registered users. But now they have announced that *also MorphOS 3.0 will be free of charge* to registered users! And that's major news IMHO!

:pint:

[takemehomegrandma]

Isn't AROS cheaper?

:nervous:

Indeed it is! But *far* from as capable, hence I would rather pay EUR €111.11 for MorphOS than EUR €0.0 for AROS... :p

[takemehomegrandma]

That's a pity. :-(

Well, maybe it's just that they have put a lot of work into this Power Book development (a lot of new, never previously existing software had to be written in order to support features only/mostly available on laptops, etc), and then when it's ready (the last PPC?), they will migrate somewhere else, and don't put any more resources on trying to support new machines of this architecture? Highly speculative from my side of course, and probably not true at all, merely a reflection of my hopes and dreams!

[takemehomegrandma]

This is a forum. I don't think there are (or should be) rules regarding comment/comparison between systems.

Of course not, there are no crybabies here! Fire away!

Certainly the price (not the only reason but one), is more than I am willing to spend for a hobby os

Well, I understand that not everyone is prepared to pay money for their hobbies, we are all different and have all different priorities. But few hobbies are completely for free, and among the mature, "usable for real" NG OS's (which excludes AROS), setting up a system with MorphOS is by far the cheapest option, and the value you get just increased even more with the free 3.0 announcement! MorphOS is completely free to try out and use though, if you don't mind rebooting every 30 minutes!

[takemehomegrandma]

A few more pieces of info:

Well, let's try to answer some of those questions:

- there's no support for illuminated kb atm, but it might happen. Not a priority
- special keys already work to some extent and I intend to get them all to work
- trackpad supports two finger taps and scrolling
- dvi only works in mirror mode so far
- we'd like to get audio in to work at least for the PowerBook
- write support for hfs+ is unlikely, pfs will hopefully be included

(Link)

[takemehomegrandma]

if my beloved PB fails, I'm unable to transfer MOS license to another HW?

No they allow a transfer from broken hardware to functioning one. If that happens you should get in contact with the MorphOS team directly.

[takemehomegrandma]

Although MorphOS probably has the best copy protection any Amiga product ever has had.

There are pros and there are cons with all licensing philosophies. If you add up all pros I think that they outweight the cons in the MorphOS case. For instance, I think you should weight in the fact that this license method makes it possible to download a generic ISO containing the entire OS *for free* (they could have put it on "the Pirate Bay" themselves even, to save server bandwidth) that works on *all* supported machines, and you can use it for for 30 minutes without paying a dime. It's the full version! Try before you buy, on mainstream machines available from *everywhere* (i.e. *not* just from the MorphOS Team or its partners, as is the case with a competing solution), no need to use strange, custom, low quantity HW that can only be bought for over price! And you have been granted free upgrades all the way from 2.0 to 2.7, and now even 3.0, which is great! The other way is to do it "the OS4 way"; i.e. only provide the OS on a physical CD as a hardcoded bundle to expensive, low volume, custom made HW, where the HW is function as a big, fat dongle, no chance to try it before you buy it, etc. OS4 team prefer it that way, the MorphOS team prefers it their way. It's up to the customer to decide what *they* prefer. But I must say that from these licensing discussions that pops up on a semi-regular basis, I get the feeling that some people simply don't want to pay *at all*...