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MacOSX Vs BeOS ShootOut
Jolie writes: "After Palm purchased Be's assets, the future of BeOS became uncertain and a lot of users have left the platform. One of these users was Scot Hacker, mostly known for his 'BeOS Bible' book among other things. Scot tried to stick to Windows, then to Linux but he ended up with MacOSX. He has written a long and detailed article comparing, from the user's point of view, his beloved BeOS to his new favorite, MacOSX."
The story of how a BeOS refugee (and not just everyone, but the author of the 'BeOS Bible' book) lost faith in the future of computing, resigned himself to Windows but found himself bored silly, tore out half his hair at the helm of a Linux box, then rediscovered the joy of computing in MacOSX. Scot Hacker will describe his personal adventures with today's operating systems after he was set out to find an alternative to his beloved (but with no apparent future) BeOS.
Out of the Frying Pan...
Most users of Mac OS X come to it evolutionarily -- they've been using Macs for years, enduring the slings and arrows of Win32 and *nix users who complained that Mac OS had terrible memory management, an antiquated flavor of multitasking known as "cooperative" (which was usually anything but), and a slow file system. To rub salt into wounds, Mac OS opponents have historically loved complaining that the Mac was saddled with ill-conceived evolutionary sink-holes like the single-button mouse and the coup de grace, a total absence of anything resembling a command line.
I know all the snarly, bitter epithets that have been hurled at Mac OS because I used to be a Mac-hater. I admit it. At cocktail parties and in columns for other publications, I have publicly declared my dislike for the Macintosh and all things Mac OS (though I've always been honest about how much I appreciated the velvety feel of the Mac GUI).
The Germans have a word for this sort of self-indulgent vitriol: Schadenfreude -- a handy word which translates loosely as "taking pleasure in the misery of others." For many Windows and Linux users, it's not enough to simply refrain from using Mac OS -- you have to slander it before a large audience to really drive your point home.
Okay, so I indulged in a little Schadenfreude against the holy Mac universe from time to time, pissing off thousands. I'm not proud. But neither am I a bad person. I've just always wanted the most from my computer, and it always seemed like the Mac offered very little of the best, and a whole lot of the worst. But recently I've seen the light, and am here to make amends for my blasphemy. I hereby publicly apologize for my past life as a Mac-hater. Not only that, but thanks to OS X, I'm now a bona fide Mac OS lover. Bygones.
It's worth pointing out that I never criticized the Mac as a typical Windows- or Linux-loving Mac-hater. I was a BeOS-loving Mac hater. For, although I disliked the Mac, I harbored plenty of distaste for Windows and Linux as well.
In the mid-90s, I discovered BeOS and fell in love. Here, for the first time, I found a truly fast and efficient OS, designed from a clean slate to meet the needs of the future of computing, incorporating a raft of modern technologies and design concepts, and which also had a Unix command-line. At last, I had found the grace of the Mac and the power of Unix in one place (many years before the Mac got around to delivering same). I began to write professionally about BeOS. I created the BeOS Tip Server, and wrote The BeOS Bible. BeOS really was the promised land of operating systems, as far as I was concerned, and it was only a matter of time before the rest of the world saw the light. Or so I thought.
If you're not familiar with all the technology that made BeOS great, I'm not going to re-hash all of that here. For a quick summary, read BeOS: The 10,000-Foot View. In fact, if you're not familiar with BeOS, I'll consider that piece required reading for this one.
Needless to say, not everything went as planned for Be, and by the late 90s the BeOS movement was no longer on the upswing. Be wasn't getting the market buy-in they had hoped for, and the VC well was running dry. When Be announced they were going to focus on delivering an OS for Internet Appliances, most of us saw the writing on the wall. App developers and users began to pull out of the platform, and talk changed from what it was going to be like when half the world was running BeOS to how in hell we were going to keep the platform alive.
After the "focus shift," the BeOS scene became dreary. Rather than mounting a revolution, BeOS users were reduced to begging for crumbs, resorting to work-arounds for all the unfinished bits in the OS, trading pirated copies of the never-released replacement network stack that had been in development at Be prior to the shift, and watching as more and more unsupported hardware emerged on the landscape.
I decided it was time to move on and re-join the world of the living. After a five-year hiatus, I went back to Windows (Win2K). For a while, it was fun. Windows had become much better in the years since I had last used it, and the abundance of software was almost overwhelming. I had become so accustomed to making do with limited software options that I had forgotten what it was like to be able to do basically anything I wanted with my computer.
But the fun was short-lived. Within weeks, I became bored. Sure, Windows got the job done, and the cornucopia of software was definitely worth exploring, but the user experience was monotonous. All function and no form. I felt like I was working in a clip-art factory. I missed the love affair aspect of using BeOS. And while Win2K was far better than the Win95/98 crap I had used in a previous life, the politics of using Windows had become too much for me to bear. My intimate involvement with BeOS had given me a too-close glimpse of the depths of Microsoft's business practices. I couldn't shake the feeling that I had just rolled over and capitulated to that which bothered me so deeply. Something about using Windows made me feel hypocritical and slutty. Between the boring user experience and the politics, I knew I needed to find my way back to more exciting, less noxious territory.
... And Into the Fire...
So what did I do? I went and made things worse. I decided to switch to Linux full-time. What was I thinking? I had dabbled in Linux enough to know that, while I appreciated many of the benefits of open source software, there were also deep and intractable problems in the open source development model that resulted in a terrible user experience. But I did some reading, learned that Mandrake was considered to be the most user-friendly of the distros, and went for it.
After a few false starts, I had a running Mandrake box. But contrary to its reputation, Linux was crashing and freezing on me left and right. I had made the mistake of thinking that Linux had evolved enough by then to offer dual-processor capabilities as sophisticated as Be's. Wrong. Moving to a single-processor box fixed the stability issues, and I was free to explore the OS.
While I staunchly disagree with RMS et al. that all software must be free on principle, it's very inspiring to become immersed in a global community effort of volunteerism and charity, not to mention the contagion of revolutionary zeal. And it felt good to be able to download and use pretty much any software I wanted. Everyone likes free beer.
So while the politics of Linux felt good for the most part, virtually everything about the user experience drove me bananas. It was impossible to cut/copy/paste between apps cleanly without banging my head against disagreements in the CLI / Gnome / KDE models. Nothing in the desktop experience felt finished or composed. RPM software installation was an endless hell of conflicting dependencies (yes, I know apt-get is much better, but my Debian experience as a whole was far worse than the Mandrake experience -- don't get me started). In some cases, not even continuous correspondence with the app developers themselves could figure out why I couldn't get their software installed and working. I was spending more time wrestling with the desktop than I was actually getting work done (some Linux zealots appear to believe that wrestling is the whole point).
Don't get me wrong -- I don't mind having to use the command line. In fact, I'm very comfortable in bash and tcsh, and don't have much interest in using an OS without a Unix shell. But I'm not at the command line most of the time, and my guess is that very few users are. The rest of the time, I just want to get my work done cleanly, quickly, and efficiently, with mature apps that work the way I expect them to. I like all my apps to follow a coherent set of human interface guidelines. But Linux apps are not developed under a single roof, and lack a consistent vision of how things should look and act. Bio-diversity is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of open source software. It is what will keep Linux thriving no matter how depressed the tech industry gets (unlike Be), but it is also that which practically guarantees that the Linux experience will never feel internally consistent.
Despite my complaints, I did manage to get the Mandrake box set up as a PHP/MySQL web server running betips.net (which I sadly had to move off its former BeOS web server because BeOS was never really up to the task of full-time serving). I also set up a Samba network / print server on the Linux box.
So where did that leave me? BeOS was dead. I couldn't deal with the politics of Windows and had sworn never to own a Passport. I had given Linux a four-month opportunity to impress me on the desktop, and it had utterly failed to do so. It wasn't that there weren't enough apps, and I don't mind compiling software. In fact, I like getting guts all over my hands from time to time. But I don't like being forced to strap on a tool belt and wrench around when all I want is to get an app installed and start working.
Slashdotters, the parent was made by a Scot Hacker imposter.
Please disregard its message and mod down accordingly.
Smells Like Home Cookin
Tech workers spend all day, every day dwelling within the environments provided by their operating systems. After a while, that environment needs to begin to feel like home. Linux never felt that way for me. Never felt like a place I'd want to hang my hat. Linux just has no feng shui. No sense that all the pieces were ever meant to hang together, to work together as a unified whole. I missed that feeling I got from BeOS, that me and it were somehow destined to be together, as if I had found my dream home. In BeOS, I could have all the Unix power I wanted (or nearly) and still feel like I was enjoying myself. In Linux, I had plenty of Unix power, but very little enjoyment. And my wife was getting tired of hearing me swear at the computer.
Half a year before, I had written a piece for Byte on Mac OS X, about how pleasantly impressed I had been with my early exposures to it. My conclusion in that piece was that OS X might be destined to become the BeOS that never was. Both BeOS and OS X were designed to address shortcomings in Mac OS. BeOS was designed and built by a team of mostly ex-Apple engineers, and Be's CEO had been head of product development at Apple for many years. Both offered Mac-like grace coupled with a Unix shell. Both were committed to providing a great user experience. Both put the goals of media content creation and consumption high on the list of priorities.
In October 2001 I took one last look at the Linux box, then reached for a kitchen cleaver, cut off its head, and bought a Mac. The Linux box still hums along happily beside me, doing its work in a lightweight, GUI-free environment, never complaining, never crashing. I love having a Linux server in the home. It's quiet, reliable, and fun to tweak on from time to time. But it will be a while before I try to use Linux as a desktop OS again.
Like many people, I had always been hesitant to spend premium bread on a proprietary machine, but I decided to put my reluctance aside and go for it. I bought a new PowerMac G4 867 with 60GB HDD, a DVD-writing SuperDrive, and 640MBs of memory. MacWorld SF came up days before my machine arrived, and I was able to pick up the OS X.1 upgrade CD just in time.
I didn't know it at the time, but the next few months were going to be a weird mixture of elation and disappointment. Some of my prayers were about to be answered, and I was about to discover that the Mac could do things I had never imagined. I was about to begin discovering what I now firmly believe is the best consumer desktop and (almost) server operating system currently available. But at the same time, I was going to find disappointment lurking in unexpected corners.
There is no such thing as a perfect operating system. All of them have their advantages and disadvantages. Similarly, there are good and bad evangelists for every OS. You can tell the bad ones because they're basically apologists for the OS for which they're soap-boxing. They'll trumpet the advantages of their favorite OS 'til day breaks, but they always have a litany of excuses at their fingertips to explain away the bugs and bad design decisions (Hint: It's never the fault of the OS vendor, and all the crucial fixes are always right around the corner).
Like any operating system, OS X is a mixed bag. The only way to describe the experience of the BeOS migrant is to describe what I like and don't like about OS X. Despite its limitations, BeOS sets some very high standards in certain departments - -- expectations that are bound to be disappointed. My initial - -- and incorrect -- assumption was that OS X would have most of the modern technologies found in BeOS, but coupled with the magic of industry momentum. My thinking was that Apple had had the same opportunity that Be had had - -- to start over with a clean slate and do everything right this time. To not saddle the user with the leftovers of poor decisions made in the past. But I neglected to account for one important fact: Apple did not have the luxury of starting over. They had backwards compatibility to worry about, not to mention the responsibility of satisfying the expectations and habits of millions of Mac users and two decades of noble Mac tradition.
But I digress. This is all very simple. I'm going to jump up and down and whoop about OS X, and then I'm going to bitch and moan like nobody's business.