The odd thing is that a lot of Linux software does have Dbus support, but it somehow feels like the barrier is a lot higher and buy-in a lot worse. Just throwing together ad-hoc scripts w/dbus feels like it has a higher barrier.
Datatypes is another obvious one - present-day Amiga's can support modern image formats in apps that haven't seen updates for 25+ years...
I recently added hacky assigns to my (very hacky) little shell, as an experiment, as it's one of those features that feels like it's "just" link symlinks setting an environment variable to a path, but as it turns out it really is a lot more ergonomic (to me at least).
I've settled on a tiling wm w/one floating desktop to sort-of emulate how I typically used my Amiga screens, and that I like.
> if only I could run OS4 on an x86 PC*. I would definitely try it out.
AROS would be the closest thing. E.g. AROS One (a distribution)
https://sites.google.com/view/arosone
It's been many years since I spent any time on AROS, so I don't know what it's like at the moment. Back then I could boot the Linux-hosted version of AROS with a startup-sequence that booted straight into FrexxEd (editor w/extensive AREXX support co-written by the author of Curl) faster than a default install of Emacs would start on the same machine.