The AROS Research Operating System is a lightweight, efficient, and flexible desktop operating system, designed to help you make the most of your computer. It's an independent, portable and free project, aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS at the API level (like Wine, unlike UAE), while improving on it in many areas. The source code is available under an open source license, which allows anyone to freely improve upon it.
The primary goals of the AROS project are to create an open source OS which:
- Is as compatible as possible with AmigaOS 3.1 where appropriate;
- Can be easily ported to different kinds of hardware architecture and processors, such as x86, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, HPPA;|
- Is binary compatible on Amiga, and as source compatible as possible on other hardware;
- Can run as a stand-alone 'native' version, bootable directly from hard disk - or hosted, opening a window on an existing OS, to develop software and run Amiga and native applications at the same time;
- Improves upon the functionality of AmigaOS.
