OK... so the thread is predictable.. but funny LOL
Re: AROS, for someone who mentioned it, yes, it will run native on the x86, can't do a lot with it yet (some games and basic apps) but it does.. HDD installation not properly ready yet, though. Hosted under Linux on the x86 it will work fine.
Right.. the list...
ALL Windows 9x OSes were utter ####e. 95 was essentially a GUI for DOS 7.0 and not that good a one. 98/98SE were really bad, but did in fact replace much of the DOS aspect of 95. ME was a bastardized compromise between 9x and NT. It was utterly useless, cost me a lot of money and time and is probably my biggest mistake ever in terms of judging an OS - I actually said "I reckon ME will be really good, I'd recommend upgrading" to a lot of friends.. some still won't let me live it down. They are all bad because they have no memory management at all and are incredibly unstable even aside from that.
Windows NT OSes are pretty good, NT4 works fine but is terribly dated now (and to answer an earlier poster, yep! I ran my desktop machine on it for about two years - for serious work it was perfect, being stable and powerful. It lacked the support for devices I needed later though). NT5 is very good (that's Windows 2000 and XP btw) and I currently use XP Pro as my desktop system. The GUI in XP takes a lot of flak, but it's simply personal preference, I hate the Mac OS look and feel, including OS X. Though OS X is a very good OS.
AmigaOS... dated now. Hence the AROS project, AOS 4.0, MorphOS, etc. In their day, the versions were pretty good from what I saw, although I did not use them to speak of.
Linux... which distribution? Linux is not an OS anyway, it is a kernel. I know this gets done to death some places, but it is an important distinction, because one "linux" can be utter ####e and another very good. And a lot depends on what you want to do with it. As a desktop OS I think it is pointless. But that is only my opinion.
BeOS.. never quite delievered what it promised. Older version of MacOS... I never liked them at all. Seemed to be hard to get the same range of good software at sensible prices too. FreeBSD I think is good, but a desktop OS it is not, really. I like it for dev work, sometimes.
AROS: well I am working on the project now, so I am hardly an objective observer.. but my thoughts are as follows;
AROS is going to be platform independent (in hardware terms), it is going to (I hope!) allow all the old Amiga software to run. It will retain and improve/update the old AmigaOS look and feel, while at the same time being a modern OS with the kind of features that OUGHT to have been present in AOS, e.g. some memory protection support, non-custom hardware drivers, etc. We also hope that the API will be easy to work with for developers, when we are done. So, I intend to switch to AROS for development and even as my main desktop OS at the earliest opportunity. That is not possible right now, but it should be very soon. (I use x86 hardware of course and want native support, not hosted on top of a Linux kernel).
John
