New OS

[Cymric]

You're selecting an OS for all the wrong reasons, to be brutally honest. First select the applications you want to run, then choose hardware, OS, and coolness factor. Chances are quite big that you will not find Linux to your liking as well. You can tinker with it to your heart's content and some internals really have an Amiga-like feel to them (even if they're much more elaborate) but unless you like to do that all the time, it is not really that different from the rest. It just crashes less often---although I have to admit that Windows 2000 is already quite stable.

The only idea I can think of besides the OSes you already mentioned is SkyOS, but there you have to work with an appbase which might (or might not) be big. I am not that interested in these things anymore.

I think it is time for you to come to terms with the fact that something like the Amiga is no longer available nor feasible. Well, if you insist, you can use AmigaOS4, or MorphOS, or perhaps even AROS, but you already indicated you're not that keen on those. It took me a few years, but when I tried AROS a year ago, it felt almost like sacrilege to have something that (relatively) simple run on hardware nearly two orders of magnitude faster. My entire usage pattern has changed too: I cannot do on an Amiga what I now do on the PC anymore.

Of course the above is invalid if you don't care about apps; then SkyOS would be my first non-Windows, non-Linux, i86-based OS of choice.

[Cymric]

Managarm wrote:
I've read too many horror stories and seen too many ruined computers to dream of putting a Windows machine on the net. (Last week a friend of mine had their computer knackered and they were using Firefox which I thought was secure.)

No computer program is secure, even Firefox has its share of bugs, but---and this is important---far less than Internet Explorer. Even so, you can configure Firefox to accept ActiveX controls and the like, and that is like rolling out a red carpet for anything fishy wanting to get in. In addition, if your friend was surfing the web as an administrator, and not as a regular user, he was not really thinking about what he was doing either. And we're not even sure it was Firefox's fault: for all I know he could have been IM-ing with a shady person, or double-clicking a bit too hastily on a program/crack he got off a P2P network.

My point: Firefox is just a part of a long and hitherto unfamiliar chain of programs, access rights and basic security measures needed to keep a machine safe and healthy. That chain specifically includes the human operator: you have to think about what you're doing. There is no real reason to write off a PC with Firefox as 'bad' or 'unsafe' based on the experiences of a single friend: the fact that I have been using the exact same combination for over a year behind a tiny print server annex firewall without a single problem is sufficient testimony that you can use this combination very easily and without any problems. And I'm not even running spyware or antivirus programs. The only time I needed them was when I was using IE---it didn't even matter whether I turned off or on ActiveX. (Which reminds me, I need to scan my computer. Last time was 6 months ago :-P.)

There are plenty of sites out there to help you lock down a Windows-machine, and while the end result may not be as robust as a properly configured Linux-box, it will make it very hard for a hacker to get in in the first place. Don't forget that those guys are not going to hack a well-guarded run-of-the-mill machine when there are still thousands just waiting to be abused with a minimum amount of fuss out there.