What is Amiga's Purpose currently???

[Trezzer]

I don't care why others want to use AmigaOS. For me it's very simple. It's the only operating system out there that is suitable for general desktop use, which doesn't drive me nuts. And I've been all over the place with different *nixes, Win, MacOS and so on. Sooner or later I always think "Aw man. Why can't this just work like on an Amiga" and I go back.

My A1 has nowhere near the raw processing power of my PC, but if I used that for any serious work (that is: anything but gaming) I'd lose my mind. I just can't stand if the interface doesn't respond at once. Simply put: I've seen no system that responds as fast as AmigaOS 4. Besides that it has the best app for what I do the most : IRC. I also prefer SimpleMail over anything I've seen on Windows / OS X.

I also like that the system is pretty transparent. You can dive as much into it as you want to. You don't have to, but it can be fun. Like everyone else I could use a better browser. A newer IBrowse, Aweb or a port of KHTML/Firefox certainly would be nice.

What else... Hmm. Java-support would be nice. A wider range of printer drivers. Then I'd have everything I *need*. Everything else that comes along is just a nice bonus really.

[Trezzer]

@Waccoon

I recently saw a freshly installed AMD64 ~3GHz system. Yes, it booted very fast (no doubt thanks to the SATA drive and 2 GB ram), but there were still delays of *seconds* in some interface interactions. That's just not acceptable to me at all. My own 1,6GHz system (2000+) is still ridiculously slow at most standard operations. It's all brand stuff too (decent Asus board, Asus Radeon, fast ram etc). I can agree that Windows isn't as bad/slow/unstable as some make it out to be, but it's still far from something I could use on a daily basis without tearing my hair out. It would drive me nuts if I had to wait for it to respond. I guess that's why I have shortcuts to the two games I use the machine to play right on the desktop.  :-P

Some parts of Windows respond well enough assuming nothing else is running on the system, but what use is that, when you use an operating system for running programs? Regardless it's just not fast enough. As for Windows ruling... well, for games it's certainly > MacOS X, but for pretty much everything your average user needs to do MacOS X > Windows. By a friggin' huge margin.

I still like my OS4 better though  8-)