As a Hypothetical... (Deciding between AOS4 and MorphOS)

[Insidious611]

Were I to suddenly get enough money to afford a tricked out A4000 system complete with PPC accelerator, which I would dearly love to do someday, my biggest question would be on operating systems to run.
 
On one end, I am of course going to run AmigaOS 3.9 on at least one partition because thats what its built for and all that, and because thats kind of the reason I want an Amiga in the first place, that and the games.
 
On the other, I'd also want to run a somewhat modern OS so that I can use my Amiga for work and for general entertainment use. Thats where it gets sticky.
 
You see, my choices there would be either AmigaOS 4 or MorphOS, from what I can gather.
 
Well, originally, I looked into AmigaOS 4. Now, being on an x86 platform I can't really test either operating system so I can only go by impressions given from reading forum posts or documentation or wikipedia or etc. My original reason for looking into AmigaOS 4 was actually the fact that someone had ported MegaZeux, a program I've been involved with in terms of its community for years, to AmigaOS 4 out of the blue. This brought the OS to my attention and made me think "Wow, if someone just picks up such a niche program and decides to port it, there must be some merit in the system"
 
I looked into it, and looked into it... The biggest problem for me was the fact that apparently for the longest time there wasn't a modern web browser for it! I mean, gee man, you're positioning this as a modern operating system and you don't realize that 98% of anyone's modern computing is done over HTTP? Then someone made a version of OWB for it, and that quickly became very modern and useful indeed... And then it came down to implementing HTML5's

[Insidious611]

Just figured that one out. I need to go fix the wikipedia article about MorphOS to make that more clear now, because that certainly confused me. MorphOS 1.4.5 still looks attractive though as apparently from what I've seen you can run OWB 1.9 (which has the features I need) on it as long as you update with a MUI snapshot from 2007-ish? So that may end up being the best idea.

Triple booting had come to mind but to be frank if I spend that much money on A4000 hardware I'm probably going to end up skimping out on something and its likely going to be hard drive space.

Apparently the powerup MorphOS slows down after 2 hours until you register, but I can't tell if "registering" is meant in the sense of just tell them "Hey, I'm a user", or actual payment. Either way, I don't really mind.

[Insidious611]

Funny, pretty sure you replied to one of my threads earlier about purchasing an A1200.

Hi John. Small world.

EDIT: Tangentially related question. QEMU can emulate a Pegasos. Would that allow me to test the latest version of MorphOS for myself, however slowly, or is the Pegasos emulation in it too poor?

[Insidious611]

Looks like a Mac Mini G4 alongside an Amiga 1200 would be my best choice then? Funny, I used to have a PowerBook G4 Titanium that might have been acceptable for MorphOS, but that fell victim to a rather notorious hinge defect in those macs.

[Insidious611]

Ah, good to know. And yeah, I checked the one linked earlier and looked around and found a few others. Unfortunately they'll likely be sold out by the time I have the money to afford them, but knowing that they can acquired pretty cheaply is a good thing

If only we weren't coming up right against christmas, I might actually have the money to afford one of those Minis right now.

I actually have a perfectly working mac sitting right behind me, OS-less, but its an iMac G3 so way too old for this sort of thing.