It’s been about 18 months, but we’ve got a new release for MorphOS, the Amiga-like operating system for PowerPC Macs and some other PowerPC-based machines. Going through the list of changes, it seems MorphOS 3.19 focuses heavily on fixing bugs and addressing issues, rather than major new features or earth-shattering changes. Of note are several small but important updates, like updated versions of OpenSSL and OpenSSH, as well as a ton of new filetype definitions – and so much more.
Having a release focused on fixing bugs and addressing smaller issues isn’t exactly a bad thing though – I’ve used MorphOS on my 17″ 1.25Ghz PowerBook G4 often enough to know MorphOS is quite complete, stable, and a ton of fun to use, and much more capable than it has any right to be considering what must be its relatively small developer team and user base. That being said, I do wish MorphOS was available on hardware newer than 20 year old PowerPC Macs, because as much as I like me some classic hardware, the world’s moving on and even basic web browsing requires much more performant hardware now.
Maybe I should try and buy one of the supported Apple PowerPC G5 machines to see just how much better MorphOS runs on that than on my G4.
AmigaOS and MorphOS are tied to the PowerPC architecture in the same way MS-DOS is tied to x86-16: Too much assembly language of that architecture and too many assumptions tied to that architecture to port to anything else without massive effort.
That said, if you want new hardware for AmigaOS and MorphOS, the Sam460 boards from A-cube systems are a thing:
https://www.morphos-team.net/hardware
https://www.amigaos.net/content/72/supported-hardware
https://shop.acube-systems.biz/5-sam-motherboards
But very few people want to pay close to 900 euros (plus memory modules and case) to run AmigaOS or MorphOS.