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Here is a little cut n' paste from various posts, authors, threads and sites:

The Amiga compatibility is better in MorphOS than in OS4, but then it's a matter of taste how important this feature is for you personally. To me it's essential.

The MorphOS desktop (Ambient) is light years ahead of any Workbench. Ambient is closer to Dopus Magellan in functionality, workbench is closer to... well, workbench, which is the reason to why Magellan came into existence.

MorphOS has a better organized and centralized prefs system. There are much more system settings to be made these days than back in the old days, and having the prefs divided in the old-school Amiga way (and Windows way) is unnecessarily messy.

MorphOS's shell is much more advanced than OS4.1's

The integrated USB stack of MorphOS (Poseidon) is the best USB stack, period! It supports USB 2.0 and a great number of peripheral equipment (although there are some bugfixes that has been left overdue on the to-do list for some time, I think Hodges went on a long time holiday or something).

I think the printing system of MorphOS (Turboprint) is better than in OS4 (although I feel that printing isn't a prioritized feature in any of these two OS's).

Personally I like MUI4 (and *the many programs*(!) using it) much better than Reaction, and since the entire desktop is using this, as well as being the de facto standard on Amiga programs (for example most networking programs use it), it gives a beautiful, clean and consistent user experience to the whole system and opens up for some nice customization possibilities.

Filetype system is also great on MorphOS, you can define lots of actions for each file type (mimetype). What happens when you doubleclick file, drag&drop file, click it with RMB etc. You can have several different commands for each action. Filetypes are also arranged hierarchly and they inherit the options to lower levels. You can for example make certain actions happen for all pictures and then more exact options for each individual picture format. On OS4.1 you only can edit icon's default tool for each file type.

One nice touch in MorphOS is the "open" command, you can open files from shell with it. It looks operations from Ambient's mimetype settings and uses them to open files. For example "open test.avi" plays movie like it's configured in mimetypes, you don't have to remember what program or options would be needed for that file type.

Then there's lots of small details, like screen title bar modules in MorphOS. You can have things like date, cpu monitor, volume control, network indicators, info from music player etc in screen titlebar.. and the best thing is that it shows up in all screens! Not just on desktop screen. So if you have browser in separate screen, you can see and use all those things on it without need to open Ambient screen.

Overall look and eyecandy is also better in MorphOS. There's cool themes for windows, about 30 different screenblankers (even 3D accelerated demoscene effects), nice background pictures and other gfx, colorful png mouse pointers etc. They really should think these things with OS4 too.. now there's ugly yellowish backgrounds with weird purple scrollbar backgrounds as default theme.

I also like MorphOS's IControl prefs. You can define hotkeys for all kind of actions. For example window handling options are good. You can define mouse/keyboard actions to bring windows to front, send them to back, center them, maximize them, activate prev/next etc. You also can do certain things for whole window families. For example bring to front all open windows of certain application. In OS4.1 they're handled with traditional commodities and by default there isn't many.. basically it's old ClickToFront commodity.


OS4 has... well, it comes in a cardboard box with a boing ball and an Amiga logo!

MorphOS also has a lot of nice features that you could learn about yourself by going here and click on the "Overview" and "Features" tabs. What's important to you? Think about that for a minute, and then go read about the features yourself. And then feel free to ask more specific questions!

In my eyes, MorphOS is the clear winner! And you can download it this instant, set it up, and try it out for free to explore its capabilities yourself. Chances are that you will find this fulfilling your NG Amiga needs perfectly, and there will be no reason to order OS4, pay its cost, wait for it, and then try it out.