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But is that surprising? The Amiga was released in 1985, 34 years ago. It peaked (arguably) in 1991, 28 years ago.

Work that backwards. Supposing you were back in 1991, and someone mentioned to you a computer system that was big in 1963, and hence most of its fans were in their 40s and 50s. You ask what software there is for it, and you're told that most of it is comes with the OS, is ported from a modern OS, or is from the 1960s.

What would have been your response?


Plus, (and @thread in general, not to you Edicus_Rex), AmigaOS was an non-scalable design. The way it works has many fans, but the problem is that it can never do many of the things that modern operating systems take for granted, like killing tasks or virtual memory or multi cores. And therefore nothing with backward compatibility with it can either.

And more controversially, the way the community got through the harder years was to become very thick-headed and resistant to outside change: stuff like deriding x86 and Windows, almost like it was a religion to do so. It kept them going, but it also meant they were far more prone to turning on their own. When MorphOS came out, it was immediately attacked as being a threat. This was all too easy to harness as a weapon.

There's too much water under the bridge. We can't make MorphOS appeal to people who never knew the Amiga, and we can't make it appeal to people who worshipped the Amiga brand name unconditionally. We also can't go in a radical new direction because we lose the Amiga connection that makes it appeal to its current userbase.

Is there a solution to that? I'm pretty sure there isn't. But I'd love to hear one nonetheless.