11 Jun
2009
11 Jun
'09
10:45 a.m.
On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, Liam Proven wrote:
The Mac's at about 4-5% now, I believe. So a good
4x the penetration
of /desktop/ Linux. But Linux has very wide penetration in servers and
in embedded roles, which are very hard to count. I suspect the Mac is
still ahead on sheer numbers, though, if we're talking interactive
users. It's possible that millions of ADSL routers running Linux - or
cellphones and what-have-you - might put Linux in the lead, but then,
if you count them, every iPhone is running OS X...
Mac OS X hit 9.63% in December. It hasn't been as low as 4-5% for some time
now.
Ha! Amiga don't. Amiga Inc. - the new name of KAOS
Inc. after the
original Amiga Inc., spun off from Commodre, went broke - don't have
anything to do with AmigaOS 4.x. Amiga Inc. the 2nd licensed AmigaOS
to Hyperion in Germany, who developed OS 4.0 for PowerPC, but they've
fallen out & Hyperion have gone it alone to finish it, launch it and
now put out v4.1.
You've been keeping up better than I have. It's been at least a couple
years since I was able to follow this soap opera.
AROS, in the meantime, is slowly but steadily making
progress. I
believe it now has native USB & Ethernet + TCP/IP stacks and a decent
modern bundled web-browser. It's not really "there" yet (unless you're
an Amiga user and are not accustomed to having all mod cons), but it's
close.
I see they have a new update. USB support isn't quite there, but I believe
from the last time I checked TCP/IP has been there for
several months now.
The new browser is good news. It sounds as if while it's
not really
"there", it is *VERY* close! Which makes me happy.
Haiku too is getting there. It recently reached 2
milestones: the 1st,
the more significant, it became self-hosting; the 2nd, they got it
building and running with the current GCC. The snag is, build it with
GCC 3 or 4, it works fine, but it's not binary-compatible with BeOS 5.
Build it with GCC 2.whatever, it's binary compatible, but you're stuck
with a legacy toolchain.
Haiku has had a fraction of the time AROS has had to get to where it is.
BTW, AROS can now build itself as well, which is another of its recent
developements.
Currently, in the Amiga world, there are 3 threads of
development:
- AROS, primarily on x86 but with a PowerPC build, Free and open source;
- MorphOS, from Genesi - semi-open-source in bits, 2 versions - one
old one for classic Amigas with PowerPC boards, one for new Genesi
PowerPC kit
- AmigaOS 4.x, from Hyperion, strictly only for the tiny handful of
PowerPC Amigas from 5-10y ago.
There are some tiny handfull of PPC based "Amiga" systems such as the
AmigaOne which can run AmigaOS 4.x. They're insanely high priced for what
they are. They were when they were brand new, and I imagine due to their
rarity, it has only gotten worse. I wanted a PPC board for my Amiga 3000,
but couldn't justify the cost.
Frankly, I reckon only AROS has a snowball's
chance in hell of
surviving. I'd like to see MorphOS open-sourced so the best of it can
be incorporated into AROS, if that is at all technically viable.
Agreed.
Meanwhile, if Haiku keeps it together, in a few
years' time, it has
the potential to be a really fast, smooth, POSIX-compatible GUI
desktop OS that could stomp all over desktop Linux in performance.
This would not surprise me, but I have my doubts that it will ever have a
userbase to match Linux. Of course when I started out with Linux, I didn't
think it would ever have the level of acceptance it has now.
Zane