Very insightful article. It's truly a shame that the companies involved all got screwed up along the way, but the community became much of the real driving force behind keeping the Amiga spirit alive.
I know that the NG Amiga slope is a very slippery one with many community members out there, and there's always fighting between which is the better pick. While my personal choice is MorphOS, which I feel to be the closest to the true spirit of the original Amiga system, I won't go out to say something like "Oh, AmigaOS 4 sucks" or "Screw AROS; it's crap". AmigaOS 4 is also a very well thought out and well designed NG Amiga operating system, and out of the "Big Three" NG OSes, it's the one that has the most community support, since, after all, it's being sold with the new Amiga X systems, and it runs well in UAE to boot!
However, MorphOS is right alongside it, since MorphOS has the advantage of being able to run on
older PowerPC Mac hardware, which means that Mac users who still have old PPC systems (side note: wanna see my collection?
) can easily pick up one of those old Macs, dust it off, and install MorphOS on it! You don't need to buy an expensive setup for it; just grab a cheap PPC G4 Mac and go to town! Yes, you do need to still register the OS in order to use it for extended periods, but MorphOS 3.10 is worth every penny to register!
And as for AROS, while it's great to have an x86-based Amiga-like OS (despite detractors like Hyperion's own chairman, Ben Hermans, who
hated the idea), it's still gotta play some crazy catch-up to get to the level of AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS in terms of support and also emulation; MorphOS and AmigaOS 4 both can run system-friendly AmigaOS 3.x programs (nothing that bangs on the custom hardware of Amigas) seamlessly, using JIT compatibility layers. AmigaOS 4 uses a RunsInUAE layer to run stuff that does need the custom chipset emulated, and while AROS can do similar, it's not nearly as seamless as on its brethren, requiring a layer called JanusUAE to be activated to run (you can set this on startup in AROS). But even with JanusUAE, I've found compatibility to be rather spotty, and native AROS software is rather sparse on Aminet.
Regardless of all this, I still believe that the community is the true driving force behind the Amiga, and these companies writing NG Amiga OSes and creating new hardware and/or software for us do get affected by the ebb and flow of the community. I don't want to see in-fighting between the camps; pick your system and support it, but don't be shitting on others who choose one of the others. I love MorphOS, but I don't see the point of hating on AmigaOS 4 users. Same with even classic systems: I use and enjoy having AmigaOS 3.9, but if someone says that they want to stick with Workbench 3.1, or 1.3, or 2.1, or whatever... that's fine, too! Like I mentioned once before, the Amiga isn't what some haters or snobs make of it; it's what you, the user, make of it. There are no gatekeepers; there shouldn't be! So whether you use Amiga OS 4, MorphOS, AROS, Amithlon, or keep it classic, you're still an Amiga user in my eyes!