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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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For one thing, developers wouldn't be able to look at the source, because it would taint anything they would put out.
More importantly, the BeOS relied on a lot of proprietary, third party components. The BeOS developers pretty much said that it would be virtually impossible to disentagle the proprietary stuff from the Be stuff. Even if that were possible, you wouldn't have anything useful.
Besides, the Open BeOS is making good progress without the source code.
I am a fan of the BeOS of yore. I liked it more than I liked linux, though things have changed. But just where does the author get off calling himself 'I was deputy Linux champion'. The guy can't spell, has worse grammar than me and doesn't understand why his winblows cd burning app cant fit two disks of binary data onto one cd! So does this make me 'Certified Linux Champion'? No, but this guy's fud never should have made it to OSNews let alone slashdot.
Fnord.sig
Unfortunately, I have to agree. I used to have a full 8 GB BeOS partition on my machine which I was happily neglecting until news of the BeOS MAX! "Distribution" fell on me, and I had to install it.
Well, right after I installed it was treated to booting into an OS that thought I was in France. Fine, not a big deal, but it would have been nice if the documentation (all in English) had mentioned this and maybe even described the process by which you fix it the language settings.
Then I got to experience the full glee of BeOS resending 16 email messages I had already sent from its mail program... about two years ago! I emailed the developers about this and got no response.
This is usually where the Be apologists will insert some vague praise of it's microkernel architecture. Yeah, it's great I can drag and drop a driver into the system folder and have it start working right then, but so what if it's totally impractical to actually *use.*
So I blew away the partition and said, "Goodbye BeOS, it had been fun." When an OS is new, you can forgive it for having no application support and no hardware drivers. Now, 2003, we're nearing 8 years with BeOS on the PC and almost all of the drivers we have today we had back then (exception: a non-accellerated nvidia driver). Application support continues to hover around the few commercial apps it had three years ago (though I believe Gobe has dropped BeOS support for Productive). When I last ran the OS, most of the software for it suffered from the same Windows delusion that every schmuck who downloads a shareware program is willing to chip in $10 for it. Consequently, actually achieving productivity with BeOS was difficult because you'd wind up paying hundreds in piss ant shareware fees to unlock the full features of whatever it was you wanted to use (see BeXL, all of the good code editors, SoundPlay).
So BeOS lost a fan in me. The only chance for redemption will be when OpenBeOS starts making releases, but even then it will be a long shot. If you doubt me, check my previous posts and you'll see, I used to be one of their supporters around here, but I give up. OS X certainly kicks BeOS in the nads, thanks in no small part to NEXTSTEP. I haven't used WinXP but wouldn't be surprised if much of what made BeOS advanced almost a decade ago had finally been integrated into Windows.
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Daniel
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