Mon 26 Nov 2007
If you havent lived under a rock for the last couple of months you probably know that OS4 (aka Workbench 4.0) is going to be released november 30 this year for Amiga computers with a PowerPC turbo board.
If you ask me about OS4 do not expect to get any valid answers because I do not know a lot about it yet and it is kinda hard to find out things about it on the net. Anyway, it should be much faster than 3.1/3.9 is since it is running 100% on the PPC chip, I expect the OS to feel a bit more modern. Lately I think Workbench 3.1 at least is beginning to show its age. Make no mistake it is still a fast and usable OS but there is A LOT left before it is a usable system (at least for me). Of course you could always run 3.9 but even then I feel it is lacking a lot of vital parts I find in a modern Windows XP environment.
I do not expect OS4 to be an instant XP replacement, if you want the honest truth I do not think OS4 is even going to replace XP for me since so much of the tools I use everyday is not available on the Amiga, of course I could do stupid things like coding PHP in CED and transferring files over to web server, but I think life is to short for silly experiments like that to prove something works not because it is best but just to be able to say I use my Amiga for coding PHP. OS4 or not, I would rather take my Eclipse environment over anything else, thank you.
It would be neat if you could run most old school application in a faster and more stable environment. I would really like to run Eagleplayer in OS4 so that you can run multiple graphic effects at the same time (a PPC chip should be able to cope with that even though its emulated software).
Anyways I am really excited about this release and I look forward to the package coming into my mailbox in a couple of weeks (hopefully). I am too lazy to create a professional OS3.9 installation so I have high hope OS4 will be mostly a plug and play solution. Expect to find a review here in the future about a modern OS on vintage Amiga hardware 
I preordered my copy of AmigaOS4 at HAST enterprises.