It's a fun hobby.
Childhood curiosity of how things worked in my C=64 and Amiga 500 lead me into the engineering field. I wanted to be a systems designer, but have been content as a chip designer by day, and still fiddle with Amiga things in what free time I have. Amigas had plenty of hacks on aminet to tinker around with and learn from and have fun building. PCs didn't. On PCs, everything is already done, there's really nothing for a hobbyist to do there. Nothing to tinker with. No missing features to add. No drivers to write. No hacks to do. Heck, you really can't even swap out a dead chip to repair a bad board anymore on PCs. What's the fun in that?
I enjoy coming up with ideas for hardware designs for Amiga things, though I haven't actually built any of them. Solving problems that don't exist in the PC market, which can take systems design beyond what PCs are or do, in terms of how the things are built.
There's not much that's "realistic" about using an Amiga today, though I do enjoy the fact that I can't get any of them email viruses constantly going around in PC land. I do the occasional image format conversion or resize using ImageFX. Other than that I honestly don't use my Amiga for much these days. I still have never played any of the PPC/Warpup games I bought as they were released, I eventually will enjoy these as soon as I get my A3000d towerized and CSPPC card installed there, as I finally got the PPC card recently. Heck, by now my AmigaOne/OS4 probably plays many of them, I just need to find time to try them out. While I'm in the OS4 private beta group, I somehow ended up without an OS4 registration, so I can't download the OS4-native updates to anything from Hyperion, but some may work as shipped.
But for any real-life day to day work, Amiga is showing its age. Hopefully things will turn around a bit if Mozilla and OpenOffice ever get ported. Papyrus has potential since it's Word compatible too.
But I can't use it for PCB design. I can't conveniently carry it with me when I go out of town. You can't play the first-run games on it, and there's some PC games today that the current hardware is not capable of playing. While we once had Maple, there's no up to date math software. No educational software such as for learning a foreign language. I can't use it to do my income tax return. My PC does all of those things now. I mostly use Firefox for web browsing as many web sites I do to don't work in Ibrowse anymore.
But I still use it for fun. I don't get along with Windows well. Linux is hard to get things working in, but I do like it after that part. I hope to get MythTV running someday on my Linux box. I'd love to see Amiga do all these things so I don't need so many computers laying around taking up space anymore, but it will be some time before this happens.
