Recently i've started to see how usefull OS4 is by trying software thats out there that can be used instead of using a PC. So as one of the most commonly used programmes used after web browser is wordprocessing i thought i'd try one for OS4. As there are no commercial software out there it had to be shareware so i DL'd Abiword which also includes a web browser. then i DL'd the update to Abiword. Then i had to download x11 as Abiword needs this to work. Then i DL'd the x11 update. Thats about 200 MB worth of downloads which considering the size of classic wordprocessing software is a lot. So i run Abiword only to find that x11 and cygnix are another OS which loads before abiword (I didn't know this as i'm not very knowledgable about all the seperate OS's there are out there) only to find that whilst x11 loads and works abiword doesn't and just causes a crash. Now even if Abiword did work then this is the most convoluted way i've ever known for getting one piece of software to work. Imagine if to get Word to work from windows it started Unix. I know that the easiest way to get software to run on different systems is just to port but to port the OS as well just for one piece of software??? It'd be quicker just to go through the code and rewrite it for the OS the machine you want it to run on uses.
I'm dreading testing other pieces of software for OS4 now.