MorphOS or AmigaOS 4 ?

[Hercules]

Which one would do you prefer?

Having never been able to afford the hardware to run AmigaOS 4, I went and bought a Mac Mini G4 for £50 with all accessories. Next plan is to fit the 1 gig ram upgrade and get my copy of MorphOS. I'm really looking forward to experiencing my first PPC experience.

[Reynolds]

I use OS4. The reason of not having MOS as well is simple, I have way too many hw and albeit with limited resources my CSPPC could run MOS too, my attempt to get a registered version for it was failed years ago so I lost my interest. I don't have enough time anyway, so...
I know that MOS is superior over OS4 (or more likely it is hyped to be, lol) but I don't see any benefits. Again this comes from two things, one is lack of installed version and lack of time to get familiar with it.

[matt3k]

MorphOS is 150,000 years ahead of AOS 4.x to me.

Humor aside:
1. It will install to a complete OS solution with zero fiddling right from the CD in 5 minutes.
2. 3.18 will very likely be released this year, this is already after 3 major releases and I would guess around 30 or so updates (truly a league of their own in Amigaland).
3. The team has been awesome to work with over the 20 or so years, they really support the product and are responsive to their users.
4. It has a real browser and email client. I use wayfarer all the time, and Iris is a great email client that is very modern in functionality.
5. I use MorphOS daily as almost a total replacement for my PC.

Down the road you may wish to invest in a G5 Powermac if you want maximum performance. To my knowledge the Powermac G5 are the fastest Amiga available to purchase compared against the X series etc. for just a few hundred USD.

I went with a PowerMac G5 2.0 GHz single processor PCIe system. I then swapped the CPU out for the 2.5 GHz version and this is currently the best system you can run MorphOS on. MorphOS only uses one processor, so the dual processor systems generate a lot more heat and the fans will run more often. You can watch HD content and it just flies with almost everything. Everything is installed with the CD you need, no hunting for software.

AOS does definitely feel like Amiga 3.x and MorphOS feels to me like what Amiga OS would have evolved into had Commodore not gone bankrupt. You can add skins to give it more of an Amiga OS 3.x feeling.


In all fairness AOS has been hijacked and attacked for so many years, therefore it has been very difficult to do very much with. The developers are gone and there are many new developers involved. MorphOS has been very stable over the years and have produced great results. I think they made the right choice to stay out of the hardware and just focus on the software. When/if they port to something else they have a total/robust OS that can be just ported over.

imvho Amiga stateholders should just adopt MorphOS as the operating system.

Head over to a Morph.zone for more...

[Samurai_Crow]

Re:Advancement of OS4 vs. MorphOS
I have a MicroA1 with OS4 and a PPC Mac Mini G4 Silent Upgrade edition running MorphOS. While MorphOS has chosen to update key infrastructure to run WebKit Legacy, the OS4 team has tried for years to add SMP to take advantage of the additional cores of an X1000 or X5000.

The results are quite stark. MorphOS has modern ameneties for web and internet in general. OS4 users hear about limited success with multiprocessing in the beta branch. The OpenGL-ES drivers for certain Radeon cards are a third-party add-on for OS4 while the shader support for TinyGL on MorphOS is almost comparable at this point. (The shader support available on my Mac Mini is negligible from the start so I can't verify this first-hand.)

In short, the AmigaOS team bit off more than they could chew and had to backtrack to OS3 as a fundraiser. MorphOS is looking better all the time as a result.

The roadmap for future MorphOS 4.x versions will be multicore x86-64 and run on select hardware. AmigaOS 4.2 was slated to run on PPC forever. The Quark Microkernel that MorphOS runs on, supports SMP already but will require compatibility-breaking changes to implement, thus never supporting 64-bit PPC nor a second PPC CPU.

I trust the MorphOS team's instincts at this point as PPC is a dead architecture. Without the 32-bit x86 overhead, MorphOS 4.x looks promising on x86-64 but I'm curious about how the mainstream OSs are looking to switch to ARM9 or RISC-V. I hope they aren't painting themselves into a corner in the future. Performance is presently on the side of x86-64 but for how long?

[waldiamiga]

I've been using MorphOS for years, currently on two PowerBooks with G4 and one iMac with G5. AmigaOS 4.x I only have Classic versions on WinUAE.

[cv643d]

OS4 is really nice to use but feels a bit left behind in some areas. Recently got back into OS4 again when I catched a PPC system again and it is a nice experience but I think it is only for hardcore Amiga fans. I mean, I struggled with installing OS4 system, and I would not consider myself a complete novice. The Amiga prefs system feels really dated, especially on a NG system, I had to hunt for odd fixes here and ther to get the system to the level I would expect it to be and the Amistore tool feels like something hacked together by the devs. I sort of understand there is no money for UX feedback etc, it is what it is, better than nothing. I have not used Morphos that long, but it feels slightly more polished. But I guess the charm with OS4 is that it behaves just like 3.* but it is "what could have become"...

[qz3fwd]

I started with AOS4 when I bought my x5000 motherboard about 2 years ago, then learned of MOS’s existence. AOS has nice “modern” GPU support through the Radeon Enhancer driver while MOS supports much older GPU’s. Hopefully that will change. They both are very nice in their own rights. I support both. But I wish there were more frequent OS4 updates, OR AEON would just finish building out an OS4 distro and kick Hyperion to the curb. AEON owns the Exec kernel and seems to be slowly building up the Enhancer package to replace parts of the Hyperion distribution it seems.

The MOS side seems very hostile towards and x5000/x1000 users coming to MOS land. Typical Amiga bad blood - sadly. Very dysfunctional community from my observations.

[slaapliedje]

Personally, I enjoy OS4 more. It feels more like 'what would have Amiga looked like if it had survived' than MorphOS, which feels much more like 'someone wanted to make something similar to AmigaOS, and did a pretty good job at it!'

MorphOS seems to have changed some of the behavior most people would find strange today that AmigaOS has (and 4 kept). So a lot of it might be that. Their settings also feel more like a modern day control panel, rather than a drawer with various preference applications (one could argue one way or the other which is better, I rather enjoyed the nature of just having separate preference apps in a drawer for configuring your software.)

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by qz3fwd

I started with AOS4 when I bought my x5000 motherboard about 2 years ago, then learned of MOS’s existence. AOS has nice “modern” GPU support through the Radeon Enhancer driver while MOS supports much older GPU’s. Hopefully that will change. They both are very nice in their own rights. I support both. But I wish there were more frequent OS4 updates, OR AEON would just finish building out an OS4 distro and kick Hyperion to the curb. AEON owns the Exec kernel and seems to be slowly building up the Enhancer package to replace parts of the Hyperion distribution it seems.



The MOS side seems very hostile towards and x5000/x1000 users coming to MOS land. Typical Amiga bad blood - sadly. Very dysfunctional community from my observations.

There are some beta drivers for TinyGL already that have shader support. Most of the troubles X5000 users have is trying to dual boot OS4 when they don't use the same graphics card for use in both operating systems.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Originally Posted by slaapliedje

I rather enjoyed the nature of just having separate preference apps in a drawer for configuring your software.)

I agree Count, the same line is used by AROS, MOS uses a kind of more advanced Dopus5 Magellan (Ambient).

[matt3k]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

There are some beta drivers for TinyGL already that have shader support. Most of the troubles X5000 users have is trying to dual boot OS4 when they don't use the same graphics card for use in both operating systems.

Bigfoot is in the middle of a bounty to add all the newer Radeon cards. Not sure where it is at, but at that point you should be able to use a X5000 with the same cards.

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by matt3k

Bigfoot is in the middle of a bounty to add all the newer Radeon cards. Not sure where it is at, but at that point you should be able to use a X5000 with the same cards.

Agreed. At the beginning of the month he was on R600 and R700 Radeon cards. He's making good progress.

[matt3k]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Agreed. At the beginning of the month he was on R600 and R700 Radeon cards. He's making good progress.

Yeah, I have been jealous of AOS 4 for a long time because of their modern video card support. It will be so nice when MorphOS at long last has it. Thanks for sharing, I had no idea where development was at.

It is interesting that on my G5 PCIe running a old 1900 xt (PPC version) I get amazing video playback, I know the video card won't make a huge difference but I wonder how much it will do.

[jPV]

Originally Posted by Hercules

Which one would do you prefer?

MorphOS

Having never been able to afford the hardware to run AmigaOS 4, I went and bought a Mac Mini G4 for £50 with all accessories. Next plan is to fit the 1 gig ram upgrade and get my copy of MorphOS. I'm really looking forward to experiencing my first PPC experience.

Mac mini is a lower end hardware and if it's a model with only 32MB graphics memory, you might end up with a compromise between resolution, eyecandy, amount of screens etc. But if it's the last "silent upgrade" model with 1.5GHz CPU and 64MB gfx mem, then it's quite OK machine to get everything out of the operating system. I'm actually running that kind of machine as my main MorphOS setup still, even though I have some more powerful spare machines too. With 64MB vmem it's fine for FullHD resolution with 3D accelerated layers for eyecandy and speed, but with a 32MB machine you probably have to use smaller resolutions or fall back to 2D rendering of windows etc.

Originally Posted by slaapliedje

Personally, I enjoy OS4 more. It feels more like 'what would have Amiga looked like if it had survived' than MorphOS, which feels much more like 'someone wanted to make something similar to AmigaOS, and did a pretty good job at it!'

It depends which kind of Amiga setup you used before going for the next generation. If you did use standardish Workbench, then OS4 feels more like home, but if you had Workbench replaced with DOpus Magellan 2 (like I did), then MorphOS feels more like what you'd expect for the "surviving" situation

MorphOS seems to have changed some of the behavior most people would find strange today that AmigaOS has (and 4 kept). So a lot of it might be that. Their settings also feel more like a modern day control panel, rather than a drawer with various preference applications (one could argue one way or the other which is better, I rather enjoyed the nature of just having separate preference apps in a drawer for configuring your software.)

MorphOS is highly configurable regarding these kinds of things. You can revert almost anything back to the OS3/4 style if you want.


The Browser mode can be disabled to get plain looking Ambient windows, preferences icons can be created in the Prefs dir for the system settings, etc.


Here's an example how to tune it "backwards":
https://library.morph.zone/How_to_Ma..._Look_Like_OS4

[qz3fwd]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Agreed. At the beginning of the month he was on R600 and R700 Radeon cards. He's making good progress.

I have a 1950XTX on PCIE riser (1X) for MOS and RX590 on PCIE x16 for AOS4.

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by qz3fwd

I have a 1950XTX on PCIE riser (1X) for MOS and RX590 on PCIE x16 for AOS4.

Is there anything that really uses an RX590 on AOS4, or is it just a bragging rights thing?

[Daedalus]

I use both, but much prefer OS4, mainly because it feels closer to the spirit of the Amiga OS. I haven't yet found anything I wanted that to do that I can only do on MorphOS.

Originally Posted by jPV

MorphOS is highly configurable regarding these kinds of things. You can revert almost anything back to the OS3/4 style if you want.

Theming and skinning is one thing (and likewise OS4 can easily be made to look like MorphOS), but behaviour is another.

[Hercules]

Thanks for everyones points of view ! It interesting to read other peoples views.

Now ready to do some upgrades to the Mac Mini G4 - mainly to max the RAM out to 1GB... Just for lulz, going to ditch the ide unit and use a 256 MSATA drive with MSATA to IDE converter. Will probably put in a new fan too whilst I'm at it.

Incidently, for manual partitioning, what are the recommended partiting sizes if installing Chrysalis update pack on top of my MorphOS install?

[utri007]

Originally Posted by cv643d

OS4 is really nice to use but feels a bit left behind in some areas. Recently got back into OS4 again when I catched a PPC system again and it is a nice experience but I think it is only for hardcore Amiga fans. I mean, I struggled with installing OS4 system, and I would not consider myself a complete novice. The Amiga prefs system feels really dated, especially on a NG system, I had to hunt for odd fixes here and ther to get the system to the level I would expect it to be and the Amistore tool feels like something hacked together by the devs. I sort of understand there is no money for UX feedback etc, it is what it is, better than nothing. I have not used Morphos that long, but it feels slightly more polished. But I guess the charm with OS4 is that it behaves just like 3.* but it is "what could have become"...

Only thing to struggle is add bootloader to HD from HDToolBox. It is not nice that get system up an running we need third party apps. Though!! This is not a situation with AmigaOne or Sam 440ep computers, as they doesn't have Radeon HD drivers and libraries.

Installin Amiga OS4 to Sam 440ep Flex is very straight forward operation.

For me Amiga OS4 feel more familiar and more "Amiga" than MorpOS. With MorphOS I always compare it to MacOS. Both are hobbyist operating systems.

[drHirudo]

I have many PPC machines (microAmigaOne, X1000, X5000, Mac Mini, 3 PowerBooks {667 Mhz, 1 GHz, 1.67 GHz}, iMacs G4 and G5) and I am all for AmigaOS 4. It is for me the natural evolution of AmigaOS 3 and I feel more familiar with it when coding and experimenting back and forth on classic 68K Amigas (and Vampire SA) and PPC based Amigas. I installed MorphOS on the Mac Mini, but had some issues with the resolution, then I installed it on the iMac G5 and it never turned off the CPU fans during work (probably the reason I burned one of my iMac G5s).

Anyway, I see better games and applications on the AmigaOS 4 and I have no problem recording it's screen with my BlackMagic framegrabber, so I will continue to use it. MorphOS is not for me.

Actually, coding for AmigaOS 4 made me love the PPC processors (contrary to Jim Drew who hate them and always says they suck) and I started collecting PPC based machines. Yesterday, I ordered Wii-U, soon I will get also XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 (all the latest PPC based machines) to add to the collection of PPC hardware.