Can I seamlessly run Amiga games written for the 68000 on it? This would require emulation, but it's been done before.

I wonder why they wouldn't use a Linux distribution for this project.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I recall from the Amiga back then (a friend had one), and what I have seen here so far, this "Amiga Experience" is all about the GUI, not so much about the underlying tech. Which is no matter what totally different than on the original Amiga for the simple fact that we have so different hardware nowadays. Hard drives, more memory, USB, optical drives, WiFi, you name it. It wasn't there back then, and is standard now.

Already there are themes to make Gnome or KDE look and behave exactly like OS-X, or Mac Classic, or Windows XP or whatever. They can be themed so thoroughly, using different window managers probably even more possibilities, that I'd say this is the way to go.

Take a Linux distro, e.g. Ubuntu, as base, and build your own customisation on it. There are plenty of derivative distros that do it just like that. Ubuntu being a derivative itself. And presto you have the Amiga Experience, with all it's quirks, with all the underlying goodness of modern hardware support etc.

Or am I really missing something here?

No, it was the OS. The OS was fantastic. I'd have been much more comfortable jumping to ix86 back in the mid 1990s if AmigaOS had been available then.

The hardware was fantastic in 1985. In 1990, it was OK but looking a little odd. By the time AGA finally rolled out, there were serious concerns amongst many in the Amiga community that the Amiga hardware was already way behind the PC and Mac. And, of course, infamously, it was about that time that Carmack made it clear that Doom would never be ported to the Amiga due to hardware concerns, despite it running on the lowest end PCs of that era.

An 8-core POWER7 processor is special. Most everything these days from the PowerPC series is not.

Had Commodore actually released a PPC based Amiga themselves, then there might have been a real connection between the PPC and the Amiga. But Commodore folded before they could transition off of the 680x0. So all we have are a few third party PPC processor cards and a couple hobbyist companies tinkering with it after it fell from mainstream status.

To me, I think a lot of people had wishful thinking of what could have been had Commodore followed Apple down the PPC rabbit hole. That is why they're so hung up on it. But for most people, the Amiga died when it was a 680x0 machine running 3.x.

Because back in the early nineties, we were obnoxious.

I'm not kidding. We'd bring in the Amiga into every discussion. How it was the best computer in the world. How you suck for having a PC or Mac. How Bill Gates sucks because he won't support our wonderful computer system.

We were basically the early nineties equivalent of Apple fanbois. Except worse, if you can imagine such a thing.

And I suspect there are a few Team Amigans out there who are still like that. The rest of us are old farts who post to threads like this and reminise, which makes us easy pickings both for trolls, and people who just didn't like us back in 1992.

That's not all of it of course. There's also always the MBA-who-thinks-he's-a-geek type who, on hearing someone has created a 6502 entirely out of discrete soldered together transistors, or out of Lego, posts here demanding to know WHY ANYONE WOULD MAKE A 6502 in 2012?!! And they're posting here thinking "Amiga?! But why would we want anything other than {"Linux"/Windows 8/Mac OS X}"

That's why. My advice. Ignore it. Enjoy the fact geeks are doing geeky things. And try the OS if you have a chance, you might find a use for it, and you'll certainly learn something from it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I recall from the Amiga back then (a friend had one), and what I have seen here so far, this "Amiga Experience" is all about the GUI, not so much about the underlying tech.

Everyone had a different idea of what the "Amiga Experience" was, because the machine was so striking in so many different ways.

I don't remember talking to many people who thought Intuition and Workbench (the GUI) were all that special (right-button fixed-position menus, and "screens" being the only "cool" Amiga-exclusive GUI features that I can think of off the top of my head), but OTOH in the mid-1980s there weren't that many GUI competitors, so I guess it's not far-fetched that at least some people thought that was special.

To some people, it was just the games. The Amiga had its day in the sun where it was, for a brief period, the game machine. When that day ended, those people moved on.

To me, it was all about the tech. And even within the tech, there were at least two camps and lots of people with a mix of membership in both. The custom chips were excellent -- by mid/late 1980s standards (by 1996 I had installed a graphics card and by 2000 the case was truly stuffed to the gills with replacements for nearly everything on the mobo, every Z3 slot filled and some cards with other weirdo connectors which connected to other sub-cards!).

Exec was excellent (if you ignored the issue of memory protection) and simple, and I still sometimes wish on Linux I could "nice" processes with absolute priorities. (But it doesn't matter as much, these days.)

Even AmigaDOS (!) (when's the last time you heard that part of the system praised?) had some very nice things about it, or easily added onto it. Linux finally got equivalent ramdisk tech with 2.4 but I still don't see a pipe device as awesome and convenient as APIPE. ;-) Linux finally got diverse filesystems (on of my favorite things about it) and has pulled ahead by a huge margin (I'll admit that; Linux is now the world leader in this regard) but Amiga people were plugging in, and playing with, and benchmarking different ones, years before anyone ever heard of Hans Reiser. When x86 people were working around fdisk partitioning, Amiga people had RDB -- equivalent tech is just now hitting becoming widely deployed with GPT. Some of its features seem very dubious by today's standards (I can't explain to anyone in 2012 why they would want "assigns" and not sound like a moron) but compared to AmigaDOS' comtemporaries .. oh, those people knew why someone would want a feature like that, and envied the Amiga even if they had to do it in secret.

The Amiga was plenty loved for its tech. Maybe by different people for different reasons, but the techlove was there, and I think critical to Amiga lingering after Commodore's death, for as long as it did.

One thing, though. For all the Amiga tech we don't have today, we still get by. Some of it got improved on (FFS seems so quaint now), some of it got the need for it bypassed by either new paradigms or brute force (you don't need copper lists, or to tell APIPE how much memory to use for its queue, or decent partitioning system when you have LVM), some of it is now seen as a bad idea (e.g. reading the the code which implements a filesystem, from the inserted media), and whatever we all still lack today, is mitigated by the other advantages of being the mainstream (e.g. Core i5 for $200 instead of a Cyberstorm 060 for $1000). The tech was damn fine, but it's still 1980s tech that we're talking about. It still impressed in the 1990s, but mainly because the 1990s were a semi-dark age.

Incidentally, by some accounts Commodore were working with HP to transition to the PA-RISC processor and had no plans to use PPC... Had they not folded, they most likely would have moved to HPPA, later moved to IA64 and would probably be in the process of moving again.