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

[Digiman]

The trouble is we need to actually have a new Amiga. And as the choices so far are PC+UAE a la C= USA or really expensive and low value for money under-performing PPC chips what do we do.

I personally have accepted there will never be a new Amiga, so that leaves Amiga compatibles and that's that. And because of that I don't really care to be honest as the only answer is a complete X86-64 rewrite of everything.....so in other words forget overpriced PPC MOS and OS4 options so a supercharged AROS I guess.

But for me Amiga ONLY equals the machines Commodore made 1985-1994. And therefore the best OS for Amiga is actually the one supplied by Commodore.

[Digiman]

I don't think that's even remotely the only answer. It's still possible that someone could come up with a more reasonable PPC-based system - it's not like the architecture is dead, it's just in a rough patch for consumer computing - but it's still holding its own in the supercomputer market, and more relevantly, in the console market. Who's to say it doesn't make a bit of a resurgence as far as cost-effectiveness goes?

There's also ARM, which is kicking more ass than ever before now that it's become the architecture of choice for mobile computing of any variety - it's already obliterated the competition in the mobile-phone and tablet markets, there's a few netbooks out there sporting it, and Apple's apparently moving its laptop line over (and quite possibly its desktops, who knows?) Even Microsoft is getting in on the act - and not just for mobile platforms. You could do a lot worse for a new AROS machine than a Tegra board, that's for sure.

And there's also the Amiga clone-upgrade projects - sure, Natami isn't going to be as inexpensive as an ARM system, but for those of us who really like the 68k, it's quite promising - and FPGA Arcade looks pretty encouraging, too. So no, x86 is hardly the only choice. And frankly, if most of the platforms still using it are the PCs that need it for compatibility (and even the one PC OS where that's a factor is exploring other avenues,) then it looks like x86 might very well be on the way to becoming legacy hardware itself, barring another change in the winds.

(That said, I do agree that OS4 is a dead end - Hyperion obviously have very little clue about even the market they're targeting, if their definition of "classic Amigas" is "classic Amigas with a PPC board." How many of us even have such a setup? At least MorphOS can be assed to make their OS run on more than that very particular subset of system configurations.)
I'm with you there, although I'd count NatAmi and FPGA Arcade if they turn out to be what they're looking to be. But I don't begrudge people who want a more powerful system running an Amiga-like OS.

PPC is far too expensive to achieve i7 cheap as chips speeds or value for money, and ARM is barely suitable for use as a netbook IMO

X86 is the only mass produced CPU we have, that's not to say you can't build a clever bespoke motherboard that isn't identical to hardware layout of PC motherboard. Think of Xbox 1 vs Pentium III 700mhz PC. Radical difference in design and hence performance there really, and cost/performance too.

[Digiman]

I use OS 4.1.  I use MorphOS.  Neither can do anything that my cell phone or tablet cannot do, sorry.  If you are looking to raise Christ in Amiga form and find a cross, blue or red - you're 20 years too late.  

Quite, Amiga had revolutionary cutting edge in price/performance and ultimate ability underpinning the whole thing. The OS was a very nice big juicy cherry on an exceptionally sumptuous and morish cake!

Unless the same sort of intelligence that gave us the PPC based Xbox 360 motherboard appears on the Amiga scene and fast it is a dead end. The ingredients have been there all along since 2007 but all we get is expensive complicated systems like x1000 and SAM 460 .............. *pass*

The software alone can not fight back against the sheer number crunching power available to people running code on super computer levels of performance on the latest i7 or AMD Thunderbird chips. FACT.