'Can't', 'won't', and 'don't' are delimiters, which I almost never use when discussing possible future projects, especially theoretical ones. If you start limiting yourself before you even start, what happens is you never start.
Another mistake is letting current market trends dictate innovation. That's not innovation that's emulation. And the market, of course, is fickle.
I get the impression that most people who participate in blogs like these are not your average users. Most of us build our own, program our own, and repair our own, not only these 20+ year old machines, but also our PCs, whatever OS they run.
I would also venture to guess that most of us don't wait for the vendors or computer companies to add new features to our machines - we do it ourselves whenever and where ever possible.
If enough of the right people can do that for their own machines, why would they limit themselves to 'what the mass market will allow' when considering a new project?
Consider: The Commodore family of computers is over 20 years old. Yet dozens of forums just like this one exist, and have existed continuously for all that time, with new members being added to each one everyday. Almost all of them are comprised of PCs users also running Windows and/or Linux. There's your target market right there, if anyone would care to look.
Why talk about 'competing' with Raspberry Pi? I actually have a number of them, and at no time since pre-ordering mine way back in February or March did I even consider that this device would compete with my existing home network to the point where it would supplant them. (By the way, its nothing but a really small PC.) I instead added it to my general interest and hardware pool. I didn't stop spending money on PCs, or stop using them. Why would I? Its 'and', not 'either or'. The 'market' is not one mass, homogeneous entity, it consists of a conglomeration of various types of users who often overlap with their interests and their dollars.
Pretending that Linux is the only way a new machine (or company built around it) can survive is like saying a). That no new OSes will ever exist after Windows and Linux, and we're basically stuck with them forever, and that b). Without Linux any and every new venture is totally lost (so thank God somebody created it, and finally, c). Nobody is smart enough, creative enough, or intuitive enough to create a totally new OS from scratch. I think the original founding fathers of the Amiga and the Commodore 64 would vehemently disagree.
Finally, I feel like I'm beating a dead (fill in your favorite punchline here!). In a previous post, I already pointed out that, to take full advantage of pre-concieved notions of 'market dollars', there could be a blank machine which would feed off of that market (and basically running whatever the customer wanted, be it Windows or Linux or DOS), along with the core Amiga machine, which would run pure Amiga-style hardware and OS software.
If its not against the forum rules, I'll quote one of my own previous posts:
This bi-level scheme I propose (currently used by PCs, of course) would serve many purposes:
1. It would allow the new machine (I'm really trying to avoid calling it 'Amiga') to return to the market place, and, more importantly, to a lucrative niche, since buying a 'blank' one would allow the user to do whatever the heck he/she wanted to do with it.
2. This would generate income for...
3. A full return to the sustained development for the platform into the next level of its severely delayed evolution, resuming the same culture of extreme innovation that created it in the first place.
4. The culture can be niche, while the brand could go mainstream. There could be people who buy this thing who honestly never considering doing anything else on it but run Linux (or even Windows), or play old legacy games. This would keep the brand and the name in the market place, and also eventually make it possible...
5. ...for all the innovations in hardware, software, and general use to continue lucratively, and not fall over dead, like all the other attempted reboots. In some crucial way (which I'll save for another thread!) they've all made the same fatal mistakes, one of being forgetting what the Commodore experience was all about in the first place. (The C64 remains the best-selling computer of all time for a reason. If anyone with money who wants to start it up again can't remember why they will surely fail.)
