There is a big community of people supporting the 8-bit home computers too. I'm subscribed to r/c64 on Reddit for example, and people recently posted a "top 10 C64 games released in 2019" video, for example.
What makes the Amiga interesting, though, is that it represented a transition from the 8-bit environment to modern machines that is modern enough to resemble modern systems (GUI, multitasking, reasonable graphics, lots of people had harddrives etc.) and that was revolutionary at the time.
At the same time around 5 million Amigas were sold, making it one of the most successful lines of home computers ever; not that many of the alternatives have as large a pool of potential supporters, and many of the rest are "too old" in that their users had one of the earlier ones and moved on to one (or more) of the later ones, and their nostalgia may have another focus.
E.g. we first had a VIC-20 briefly, but I really started with a C64, and while I love the C64 too, you can't imagine the C64 as a replacement for a PC. But my Amiga stood up very favourably to PCs for years, even after Windows gained traction. It was faster for a while. It had better graphics. It had proper pre-emptive multitasking. It had better sound. More of my nostalgia is focused on the Amiga.
Part of it is probably also down to what and how you used them. For the first years we had a C64 I mostly used it for games. I spent more time on my Amiga on creative endeavours, from writing code to drawing in Deluxe Paint, and writing.
And in retrospect there are still aspects of the OS that feels ahead of today. E.g. one of my favourites includes pervasive scripting. OS X comes closest to that with AppleScript, but on the Amiga AREXX become so integral that some applications have their central event bus built around AREXX to they point where every keypress and every menu action gets passed through the same mechanism as the AREXX commands. Another is datatypes: You'll find Amiga applications published in the 90's that happily supports WebP images for example, because someone wrote a datatype library for it, and so every application that supports datatypes can load WebP without modification or recompilation or anything.
But of course there is an element of rose tinted glasses and all that, which I think largely comes down to how big a part of your life it was, and to what extent it was part of your formative years. For me, my computing interest dominated my life (and still does), and so the Amiga dominated my life from I was 13 until I was around 20, and it was practicality more than anything that made me switch (to Linux): I moved to a smaller flat, and I could only fit one machine and needed a Linux machine due to work, and it had to take preference.
> that was revolutionary at the time.
Amen to that. An Acorn Electron was what got me hooked on computers and programming. The Amiga was a giant leap forward and dominated my life as well, during the same period of my life.
I guess I'm just not a nostalgic type of person, so I never bothered to make it run again. One of these days I'll have to go up to the attic of my mother's house to see if it is still collecting dust.
What makes the Amiga interesting, though, is that it represented a transition from the 8-bit environment to modern machines that is modern enough to resemble modern systems (GUI, multitasking, reasonable graphics, lots of people had harddrives etc.) and that was revolutionary at the time.
At the same time around 5 million Amigas were sold, making it one of the most successful lines of home computers ever; not that many of the alternatives have as large a pool of potential supporters, and many of the rest are "too old" in that their users had one of the earlier ones and moved on to one (or more) of the later ones, and their nostalgia may have another focus.
E.g. we first had a VIC-20 briefly, but I really started with a C64, and while I love the C64 too, you can't imagine the C64 as a replacement for a PC. But my Amiga stood up very favourably to PCs for years, even after Windows gained traction. It was faster for a while. It had better graphics. It had proper pre-emptive multitasking. It had better sound. More of my nostalgia is focused on the Amiga.
Part of it is probably also down to what and how you used them. For the first years we had a C64 I mostly used it for games. I spent more time on my Amiga on creative endeavours, from writing code to drawing in Deluxe Paint, and writing.
And in retrospect there are still aspects of the OS that feels ahead of today. E.g. one of my favourites includes pervasive scripting. OS X comes closest to that with AppleScript, but on the Amiga AREXX become so integral that some applications have their central event bus built around AREXX to they point where every keypress and every menu action gets passed through the same mechanism as the AREXX commands. Another is datatypes: You'll find Amiga applications published in the 90's that happily supports WebP images for example, because someone wrote a datatype library for it, and so every application that supports datatypes can load WebP without modification or recompilation or anything.
But of course there is an element of rose tinted glasses and all that, which I think largely comes down to how big a part of your life it was, and to what extent it was part of your formative years. For me, my computing interest dominated my life (and still does), and so the Amiga dominated my life from I was 13 until I was around 20, and it was practicality more than anything that made me switch (to Linux): I moved to a smaller flat, and I could only fit one machine and needed a Linux machine due to work, and it had to take preference.