Stack size: a few programs require a lot of stack, but most do not. They only eat a few kkbytes (< 10). For those who build AROS from sources it is possible to check stack-usage by using debug build (./configure --enable-debug) or at least stack debug build (./configure --enable-debug=stack). This causes stack of tasks to be prefilled with some magic value. Then when running the tool c:stacksnoop checks are done to see how many of these magic values are still there on the stack of the various tasks -> total stack size - magic values still there = stack usage.

stability: AROS should in theory be very stable. But since most coders like me mostly work under AROS hosted under Linux or have never even installed AROS native on HD (again like me), there might be cases (like AROS native installed on HD) where AROS is not stable, because of maybe not enough tested/debugged AROS modules used only there.

Many things require a HUGE stack. I usually enter "stack 600000" in the CLI before running stuff. Quake requires you to set the memory zone size because the default memory zone size is insufficient. I always set it to 16M. I typically use "quake -mem 16 -cgfx -winsize 800 600" with no trouble.

DOOM is slow starting up because the native filesystem is damn slow. One of these days, I'll finish the changes I'm making to the cacheing to speed it up. You can slow down DOOM by increasing the screen size. I typically run DOOM at 960 x 720.

Depending on how much drive accessing programs do, they will have the same slow-down problem as DOOM.

At the big bash 2 show I had it running alot of load without rebooting for gaps of up to a couple of hours (with people playing about with it too), and didn't have any problems apart from starting over 20 demos at the same time - Window focus needed 2 clicks instead of one.

For Doom I have a little script that copies the lot to Ram then runs it, it's quick then For some reason Quake doesn't have this problem!

After a few days and a lot of grief I've finally managed to get AROS installed on harddrive. Seems the "trick" to it is to format the partitions via a shell. It seems very nice, but somewhat unstable. Is this normal? or should I re-install ?? My system did crash during the installation and I never bothered to redo the installation, I just copied other files to harddrive manually, so I may have missed some. What works does work well, but it seems fairly crashy most of the time. Also software takes a long time to run. Doom2 for example takes roughly 10-15 minutes before it's up and running. Runs too fast to be playable once its running, but takes a long time to get there. Quake simply wont run, and other stuff runs for a few sconds and then crashes the system. Ive tried setting a decent sized stack, but to no avail. Im using the latest AROS-Max version of AROS. Im also wondering if there's any resources along the lines of aminet for AROS software... all that s/w on the CD has to come from somewhere.
Thanks in advance.