morphos

MorphOS is a proprietary Amiga-like operating system designed for PowerPC computers. It was developed by the MorphOS Team and first released in 2000 for the Pegasos platform. Since then it has been ported to a range of PowerPC-based systems, including certain Apple PowerPC Macintosh models and dedicated hardware such as the Efika single-board computer and Acube Systems’ Sam boards (Sam440ep, Sam460ex).

MorphOS presents an Amiga-inspired environment with its own kernel and a comprehensive set of native libraries. The default graphical user interface is the Ambient desktop, built on top of the MorphOS libraries and the Magic User Interface (MUI) toolkit, which gives MorphOS a distinct, lightweight GUI while maintaining compatibility with many AmigaOS-era applications through a large subset of the classic AmigaOS application programming interfaces.

The operating system emphasizes speed, low memory usage, and responsiveness, aiming to provide a capable desktop experience on modest PPC hardware. It supports multi-core PPC systems and offers features such as preemptive multitasking and a modern runtime environment while remaining tightly integrated for multimedia and development workloads.

MorphOS is a commercial product with ongoing development and releases. Its ecosystem is niche, centered on hobbyists, vintage-computing enthusiasts, and developers who value Amiga-like systems on PowerPC hardware.