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Review of BeOS Developer Edition 1.1
TweetZilla writes "Good review if you are a fan of BeOS. Not ready for regular users but tinkerers will probably love it to death.
OSNews is carrying the story."
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The "Developer Edition" and "Max Edition" are hacked together from the Personal Edition that Be, Inc. released. They are in violation of the EULA that comes with the Personal Edition, but, since they are not making the people distributing them any money, i imagine Palm, or the remnants of Be, Inc. couldn't care less.
For open-source replacements of BeOS check out the following:
OpenBeOS
BlueEyed OS
also look at the following:
beunited
yellowTab's Zeta
The guy writing the review is a horrible representative of BeOS users, i think. it's my main OS at home, and I have had little teouble with it, ever (the only time i went into Kernel Debug land was when I managed to crash snes9x with a corrupted ROM).
my pet machine
I too am at a loss to describe any existing problem which BeOS solves.
How about decent file typing? That's one thing BeOS did well, using MIME as the native file typing mechanism. MacOS had pretty good file types, but Apple seems to be discouraging it's use in favor of the lowest common denominator: file extensions. Which are frankly, crap.
Linux is probably at the bottom of the heap here. Both Gnome and KDE are starting to maintain their own databases of this stuff, which is pointless because this should be a common service OS-wide. An application should be able to ask the OS which application should be called to handle text/html for example. But there isn't any standard way to do that on Linux. As a result, different applications do different things when I click on a link. I want a Konq window to open, but there isn't any way for me to tell Evolution that. It insists on opening a Mozilla window.
I'm sure eventually this will get solved on Linux, but BeOS was handling this problem quite well five years ago. It isn't rocket science, in fact it's pretty simple.
Another example is file metadata. BeOS allowed you to add arbitrary name/value attributes to files. What's more, you could have the filesystem index them to allow you to do quick searches on them. Plus the Tracker allowed you to specify what attributes you wanted to have displayed in folder windows. You didn't have to look at the file name and size if you didn't want to. You could view only custom metadata.
This works great for audio files. The developers standarized on a set of attributes which all the major MP3 applications use. So all of my MP3 (well, Ogg actually) files have the artist, album, track, etc saved as metadata. The Tracker can be told to only display those attributes, if you want. Plus the OS can search on them. I've got a ripper thats adds the attributes when I rip a CD. I've got a file viewer, the Tracker, which lets me sift thru my collection looking at the relevant metadata. And I've got a player which lets me add file, folders, and arbitrary metadata queries to playlists.
Unfortunately, having my jukebox based on a dead OS is getting to be a drag for other reasons. So, I'll probably try to move the whole thing to Linux, but it'll be painful. I'll have to install my own database to handle the metadata. There's no standard schema so the few MP3 apps which do use databases won't interoperate. Not to mention that having the actual files and metadata completely disconnected is an extremely fragile solution. If you move a file using the normal techniques, then the metadata is out of sync and you have to fix it somehow. So I do what? Write my own interface for providing simple file manipulations so that I can keep the metadata in sync? That's not really practical either. In the end, I'll probably spend a lot of time implementing a solution that will work half as well.
Not that BeOS was perfect, far from it. Shall I discuss the pain of porting network software to an OS where sockets are not file descriptors? But it did have some really nice features which I have yet to find in any other OS.
As I understand it, we have several different variants:
And there you go.
Note that I'm not really a BeOS enthusiast, so I may be wrong about some of these. However, that's what it looks like to me.
I really liked
Boot-up speed. Turn PC on, wait for HDs to spin up, tap toes for three seconds, start doing things.
SoundPlay. World's best mp3 player bar none. Shareware yes, but it really IS worth the money for once.
Ease of use. I have never come across a network setup that was as easy as BeOS's. Enter hostname, enter domain name, check DHCP box, click apply, start the browser.
Didn't like:
Hardware compatability. If you can't get drivers (check the Hardware Matrix on here) for your hardware change your hardware or don't bother.
Lack of apps. My needs are basic so it did all I needed it to, but not all I wanted it to.
Still kicks arse. And I still use it a couple of times a week. Give it a spin, see how you like it. If OpenBeOS gets the Open Source fanatics behind it it will rule.
-Mark