Ah.. Guys. You've all gone way off topic.
So I will too. ;-)
Look. Clearly the future is x86 for the desktop. Stuffing around with PPC is clearly a dead end for so many reasons and you will never ever be anywhere near the cutting edge. PPC will only buy us a couple of years more based on the current state of Amiga OS(or alike) development.
That said, the implementation of x86 should be done like Apple, ie, on custom hardware, for the obvious reason of minimising hardware support. So you pick a manufacturer(some unknown Taiwanese for instance) to partner with and rebrand some of their x86 hardware as Amiga, and include an AmigaOS as standard, hopefully in a nice case. That's gotta be too easy.
As for worrying about GPUs and the like, forget it. There are no developer resources to take advantage of it anyway. You couldn't sign console devs to work on it because the return would be too low. The latest GPUs would only come in handy if you could dual boot Windows for Windows games, which is what we're trying to avoid anyway.
My vote would be to partner with the company producing those wedge shaped computers reminiscent of the A500 of old, as you wouldn't be expecting much from them hardware wise, and wouldn't be picked on for not being able to utilise it fully anyway. I think it would be a great stepping stone and maybe I am alone in thinking they are cool.
If you can't get your OS5 ready in time or an x86 port of OS4, you simply use AROS, or you get an OS licence for something that can act as a host for AROS libs, like say QNX(QNX would sit well with Amigans). Think OSX running on BSD. There done. You've got the Amiga API combined with a modern OS with modern features like memory protection etc, you got apps already ported to QNX like browsers and Office stuff, and you've got all this sitting on fully branded and stable Amiga branded PC/Windows compatable computer. And it would eventually run AROS native too if you wanted or even Windows in a virtual machine. How AmigaInc could lose with this approach I do not know.
But now I will go BACK on topic and at last mention my take on OS bloat.
Bloat is a function of abstraction more than anything else. Abstraction is a boon to developers and allows them to design and develop software at a higher level or with a higher level language or API. I'm no expert but generally I imagine more low level knowledge is required for software devs in AmigaOS than most others. Abstraction lends itself to modularisation which also increases the ability to coordinate efforts, which in turn increases developer output, and leads to more ambitious productions. Abstraction typically creates software layers, which can be better maintained, and all this is made possible by the growth in computing power. So while you lose out in terms of speed in most cases you gain by software that is likely to be more ambitious, interoperable, frequently updated, and easily maintained. AmigaOS isn't bloated in comparison, but it probably isn't considered as feature rich either.
Ok. Going back to my happy place.
