About a modern browser, forgot about that if it was possible it would be already done on 68k and MorphOS !
Indeed. Lack of tools is one thing, but the OS has to conform to minimum standards, too. Making software portable is developing for the lowest common denominator. Abstraction layers for AmigaOS are pretty much emulators, not translators.
xeron: OS4 runs all the system friendly apps i've ever thrown at it
How many of
those are there? ;-)
motorollin: It works beautifully IMO, and is less of a mess than (for example) Linux.
Yeah, but how many hardware platforms does Linux support? Can you run the latest OSX on a Mac that is 6+ years old?
Plus, high-level driver support is a joke. All you need is one bad driver to wipe out a system. Contrary to popular belief, Linux is no more immune to crashes than Windows if you have buggy drivers, and Linux has plenty of those.
Never confuse "clean" with "sparse". Besides, Linux isn't clean by any standards. I'd be more fair to compare OSX to BSD, its parent. What has Apple done to improve BSD? Or, have they merely stripped out the stuff they think they don't need?
motorollin: I don't know what they're doing to make it unstable. None of my Macs have *ever* crashed or produced unexpected error messages.
My mini has. A few lock-ups, too. Even if there is Mach and UN*X underneath, at the GUI level, it's all proprietary closed-source code made by Apple. It has plenty of bugs of its own.
I tried to play a DVD, and I got one of those infamous "negative number" error messages. I tried to make a connection to my web server, and I got an error "-50". Great work on the usability front, Apple. Everyone knows negative numbers are the best way to handle unexpected results. It also locked up during the NFS connection, once I did figure out why I was getting "-50".
If I didn't need the Mac for software testing, I'd sell it. It's certainly no more stable than my Win2K system.
srg86: Under the hood, there is a lot of overhead with the difference layers.
Lots of overhead is typical in a mircokernel OS. Windows NT fits in this category, BTW.
There's really no hard speration between monolithic and microkernel unless the OS designer is a fanatical idealist. I don't know why some people are so religious about the comparrison.
coldfish: I doubt Apple would sit idley by as someone makes money hijacking their hardware?
Possibly, if the company in question is a commercial entity.
motorollin: I don't think Apple would care as long as they are selling hardware. The OS people choose to use on it is nothing to do with them.
I don't agree. Apple is far, far more aware of their brand image than most other PC companies. They can't do anything to the free software guys, but they get pissy when commercial companies move into their territory, even if it may increase hardware sales.
Besides, more and more, Apple is becoming a service-based company.
Put it another way: If Hyperion decided to port OS4 to Intel, would they have to pay Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, and all the other manufacturers of IBM Compatible hardware a license fee? I don't think so.
Define "IBM Compatible". ISA is long gone.
Modern PCs are based on open standards. Very few single companies can claim ownership of the platform, and many have contracts not to sue the pants off each other (Intel and AMD, for example). It's relatively easy to get hardware documentation. Even Macs are just PCs in a different box, though there's more weird stuff going on at the firmware level AFAIK.
