@takemehomegrandma,

Not all MorphOS users share your opinion about the "Only" way forward, or only thing that could have a "positive" effect on the future of the existence of MorphOS.

It all depends on what the MorphOS Development Team wants to do with MorphOS, and what they want it to become. I don't think that anyone believes that MorphOS will become a competitor to Windows, MacOSX, or even Linux in the future.

Moving to x86, or any other "maintstream" architecture will not automatically solve anything for MorphOS users. It has advantages in cost of components and the speed/power available, but switching to x86, or any other "mainstream" architecture also has it's disadvantages as well. They have been discussed many times before, so I won't repeat them again here.

Only the MorphOS Dev. Team can decide what to do next and where they will try to lead the MorphOS users in the future. Or what they want MorphOS to become.

We will just have to wait and see what they announce next, but we are all free to express our personal preferences on which way we would like them to go, even you and your desire to have them move to x86, or some other "mainstream" architecture.

My personal preference is that they stay on their current course with used Mac G4 and then G5 computers for the next year or two. While that is happening, they can also keep an eye on the latest developments with the new FreeScale and Chinese PPC chips and systems, or development boards, to see if any of them are cost effective and have enough power, with a great power to cost ratio to make them an attractive alternative to the used G5 Mac computers, as a target for their next port of MorphOS3.x.

(Maybe I will repeat the reasons again)

Currently there is no MorphOS software that requires us to move to the latest and most powerful x86 hardware, so the only advantage of such a move is the cheap cost of x86 hardware and its widespread availability. If current high end G4 computers provide more than enough speed and power than is needed for 99% of the programs and tasks that MorphOS users need to use their MorphOS computers need to use them for, and if the available G5 Mac computer models could give us the added power we need to accomplish that last 1% that we can't currently do with the high end G4 systems, we need to look closely at the reasons for moving to x86 and what ways it would improve our MorphOS experience.

If we just want to be able to run Linux ports better, then we might as well just find a Linux distribution and tweak it a little to look more like MorphOS, integrate the WinUAE emulator and then rename it to MorphOS-x86, or M-OS, or some such nonsense just like Commodore USA are trying to do with their C-OS and x86 hardware in retro cases.

I think if you want MorphOS to move to x86, they might just as well have the entire MorphOS Development Team join the AROS team and turn AROS into the next MorphOS, by improving it with anything it is missing, that MorphOS already has implemented, and making progress of AROS move more quickly forward, since it will then have more talented programmers working on the combined AROS/MorphOS system.

The money that MorphOS Dev. Team currently makes from registration fees could easily be replaced with AROS bounties, so there would be little difference than how things are now, except that the responsibilities would be shared by more people and the control would also be shared, but I believe they could work out any organizational challenges that would be caused by a merging of MorphOS with AROS and it would be good for both.

Until then, I prefer that MorphOS stay as it is now, on PPC hardware, either used Mac's like they have been supporting, or if cost effective, possibly on custom, or embedded PPC hardware in the future. As long as they can provide the functionality that we all want & need when using the available PPC architecture, I see no reason to switch to any other architecture, just because everyone else has already done so.

Our challenge as a niche community is to figure out a way to get more software developed and more programmers interested. Not in what hardware we are going to use (unless switching to another hardware architecture will solve our problem by attracting more programmers, but since we have many programming languages and tools already that work on PPC MorphOS, I doubt that simply switching to x86 will instantly make any difference in the number of programmers we have in our ranks).

As a side note on programming, James Jacobs, aka Minuous, has already been able to fix many bugs in his own software that someone else had ported to MorphOS for him in the past, so there are new versions of several of his software projects available for download now. He will be making an announcement of these new releases very soon. This new work was made possible, because he now has his own G4 MacMini with the demo version of MorphOS2.7 installed on it, which I donated to him last month.

I am going to request from the MorphOS Dev. Team that James Jacobs receive a free (or at least reduced price) registered keyfile for MorphOS. If the Dev. Team declines my request, I will be asking members here to help fund the purchase of a MorphOS keyfile for him, as I am sure that this early work that he has been able to complete in porting his work to MorphOS is just the beginning of many more software projects that he will complete in the future for MorphOS and AmigaOS3.x, and maybe even AROS, specially AROS 68k (possibly OS4.x, but he has no way of testing code on any OS4.x hardware at this time).

[ Edited by amigadave 29.02.2012 - 16:11 ]