AROS has no chance in the future if...

[nadoom]

Once AROS has more applications it will easily break the 10 minute barrier, i know this will happen but the more people who get involved the better.

One of AROS's strengths is the fact it isnt owned by amiga inc. with aros everyone is free to contribute and use it, its very refreshing considering Amiga OS 4 being so tied down to licenceing crap.

AROS has been around for years, since the dark days of commodores bankrupcy, i do recall reading it was once called Amiga Replacement Operating System. maybe once it has reached an even greater level of maturity the R can be changed to another R word.

Most amiga software is nearly 10 years old! and very few applications are being developed at the moment, so i see no reason why some sort of binary compatability is a must, aros was never intended to work as such, Its Amiga OS for a new world.

[Piru]

10 years old software is better than no software.

My comment on another thread

[Fransexy_]

*It isn't multi-user.

ER!!! My computers are PERSONAL COMPUTERS so unless i have multiple personality i find multiuser support a waste of computer resources.NO NO y NO!! i want a personal multimedia centric OS and not a Multiuser OS.I hate, I repeat I HATE multiuser OS´s  :-x

[bhoggett]

nadoom wrote:
Once AROS has more applications it will easily break the 10 minute barrier, i know this will happen but the more people who get involved the better.

That's the crux though isn't it? This has been the case for the last four or five years.

I really don't think the "build it and they will come" philosophy holds water any more. You can't easily port from the biggest resource of open source material, *nix, and while it may be easier to port Amiga native applications to it, the vast majority of the Amiga tradition has been for closed source and the source for most applications isn't available. So that's not a solution either. Considering the small number of developers and large number of developments still needed, waiting for native AROS apps to be developed isn't realistic either.

It's no good telling poeple they should get involved. You need to make them want to get involved, make it practical for them to get involved. Bounties only go part way, but real development won't happen until after you attract more people, and for that you need to break the 10-minute barrier first. IMHO until someone decides to do something concrete about addressing that problem, AROS will never get enough support and developers to break the barrier.

I've just read some of the relevant threads on AROS-Exec, and on the whole I can't say they sound encouraging.

[Louis Dias]

I think Team AROS should pull a Red Hat and become a solutions provider.

The OS can remain open source.

[Oliver]

I've tried the AROS live CD, and enjoyed it, but also only for about 10 minutes.  I really liked the responsiveness of the Workbench (is it called that?).  Slow bloatware has always bugged me.  When I buy a powerful machine, I want to feel that power.

However, when thinking of OS's designed for speed, BeOS also comes to mind.  It seems that the open source Be (Haiku) is coming along fairly well, and there's a moderately well supported commercial version from YellowTab.  Is there anyone who's tried both AROS and BeOS, and is able to give a comparison?  Does AROS have an advantage somewhere?

I've always liked the idea of AROS, but if its only hook is that it's Amigan, then where does it sit amongst the choices?  It seems good so far, but why would a user or developer choose it above, say, Haiku?

Please understand, I'm not meaning to be disparaging, but rather just thinking 'aloud'.

[bloodline]

Well no one is holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to use AROS. You don't have to make any form of comitment to try it out... well, maybe a CD-R. If you try it and you like, great! if you try it and you don't like it, great, use something else!

I don't think that any of the Amigoid OS's have much of a "future"... and certainly, now MacOSX is running on sensible hardware, I doubt any OS is ever going to be able to keep up.

What the Amigoids do have, is a place in the hobby market... however one chooses to go about their hobby is up to them. I prefer not to spend 1000s of pound to support my computing hobby, I like it to be an off shoot of my personal and work related computing work. Only AROS can fill that role for me (and quite a few others)... thus it has a future!

[Savan]

AROS has a lot better future than OS4 ever will. HYPEDUPrion should have spent their wasted Amiga Inc lapdog years on AROS and made it the way OS4 is now, plus everyone involved with AROS gets total freedom unlike OS4.

AROS is the only TRUE thing left in Amigaland worth supporting.

[bhoggett]

bloodline wrote:
Well no one is holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to use AROS.

No, but that's hardly the point. What I am saying - and have been for some years - is that during this time AROS will only keep people's attention for more than 10 minutes if they intend to make a commitment to develop for it. Everyone else just thinks "Yeah, nice, let me know when it's ready for actual use."

It hard to see when AROS will move beyond that stage, and it's not even entirely clear it wants to move beyond that stage.

So at the moment it's only a hobbyist solution for those developing it. For ordinary users it's more like a curiosity, to be checked out periodically in case it has made any noticeable progress. I don't think that's an unfair comment or a particularly uncommon one given how things stand.

[bhoggett]

Savan wrote:
AROS has a lot better future than OS4 ever will. HYPEDUPrion should have spent their wasted Amiga Inc lapdog years on AROS and made it the way OS4 is now, plus everyone involved with AROS gets total freedom unlike OS4.

AROS is the only TRUE thing left in Amigaland worth supporting.

Yeah, but ideology aside, what are the practical benefits? What has it got over SkyOS, or Syllable or Haiku/Zeta, or one of the Linux mini-distros, aside from the nominal Amiga connection?

[Tomas]

*It does not integrate 68k/full Kickstart emulation.

That is not possible due to the legal issues. Though i sure as hell would like some emulation myself, atleast something similar tothe JIT emulator that OS4 uses.

[Piru]

That is not possible due to the legal issues.

What legal issues? Emulation is not illegal, MorphOS has all that and it's perfectly legal.

[Tomas]

Yeah, but ideology aside, what are the practical benefits? What has it got over SkyOS, or Syllable or Haiku/Zeta, or one of the Linux mini-distros, aside from the nominal Amiga connection?

Responsiveness, userfriendlyness and more.

But i agree with others about the need for more apps or even a integrated emulator. I wont be able to use it as a main OS before i can actually surf the web with it, play videos and maybe do some gaming.

Hardware support should also be a high priority.

I am very overall very impressed about how similar in nature it is to the real thing when it comes to responsiveness even on a old computer.

[dandelion]

I think that chap from Lancashire is correct in some ways (although his tone is a little negative). AROS does need more developers to come on board to really accelerate it to the point where it can gain real usability as an everyday OS rather than a curio. From where can they come? The Amiga "community" isn't what it once was. There are still excellent, talented people left, but there's an abundance of "ROM-kidz" and people who'd never accept the idea of Amiga being a mainstream OS and don't care about helping it become that. I've been thinking about posting to some of the Linux newsgroup, at least with the live CDs you can say to someone - take five minutes of your time and check out something very exciting happening in the strange old world of Amiga. Maybe some will remember it and be moved to get involved.

I do find it rather disheartening everyone asking what's the use of it if you can't run 68k programs natively! These are the growing pains of a platform making a brave step from one technology to another. It happened with Mac and it should happen with us! If you want to run 68k software get out your a1200 or run UAE within AROS.
(However, maybe all AROS code could have some sort of  header...and if code is launched which doesn't contain this it could be passed to UAE automagically?)

[Marco]

Piru wrote:
What legal issues? Emulation is not illegal, MorphOS has all that and it's perfectly legal.

I think he means providing the kickstart files needed to use UAE, which require you either have the originals, buy that AmigaForever thingy, or know how to use an internet search engine and do it the traditional Amiga way - piracy. (Note: I do NOT endorse doing it that way as it'd be wrong and immoral and kill the Amiga blah, blah, blah).

I understand that they want to reimplement the kickstart in it's entirety anyway, so that wouldn't be a problem in such instances.

On the main topic: as far as lack of native apps for AROS go, yes this stops me at present from using it for more than 10 minutes - as a 'curio' as dandelion puts it. Though it is getting there as all I really want from an OS are a web browser (a proper one that is, no Amigan format has this). An office package (really just the word processor part would be fine for my purposes). A music app capable of understanding current formats (subtle hint for .ogg), a video player (these two could be combined). And an art package of some kind (AROS has a port of Lunapaint, but I've not tried it yet).

At the moment I'm not too clued up on what exactly AROS has in native form. If at some point I can tick those 5 boxes, I could happily switch to AROS on a semi-permanent basis (need Windoze for games obviously).

[dandelion]

Would it be possible (by this I mean, reasonably do-able, easy and worthwhile) to set up some sort of X-window device available to AROS, to make porting of unix applications that much easier to AROS? They've done that with RISC OS and it's brought many improvements in terms of application support including Firefox (which is a very nice application to have access to on a minority platform I can tell you).

For info on unix porting to RISC OS see: http://www.riscos.info/unix/