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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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Be, to me, brought a Mac-like interface to the PC with *nix capabilities.. (I guess you could think of it as os X on pc?) The only real pitfall was the lack-o-software and poor hardware support.. but.. the OS was almost worth building a box with supported hardware for it.. (well.. at least it was for me.. >=) )
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
You're absolutely right, but to this day, I haven't found an OS that was as fun as BeOS. It just had a certain quality about it made it really fun to use.
The review is interesting but it's been a while since I've seen such a glaring example of bad spelling and grammar actually make it as a live article in a high-traffic website dedicated to technical stuff.
You may want to look into Mac OS X then... it has GNU software, terminals and the company that owns it is not dead in the water.
I keep seeing stuff about new BeOS variants on the street, but the most "official" thing I have heard is that Palm owns it.
What gives. Are these rouge distros or what?
Are they legal? Is there any reason to belive that Palm won't pull the plug on any variants out there at any given time?
I'm sincerly trying to understand the situation. Links are appricated.
-Peter
uh? i started using beos just the other day(couple of weeks ago) on my irc/mp3 machine.
i was quite amazed by the amount of opensource/community developed drivers for it(obviously lot of 'em derived from linux driver sources), and the whole community actually being there in general.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
All said and done, I think the developers of BeOS did a really great job. I recent got the chance to go over the Be File System (BeFS) for class and was amazed by what they did in a short amount of time (less than a year). If you want to look at a short presentation on the file system, you can grab it (in ppt) from here.
Can anyone briefly tell me what is great about BeOS?
I so want to like this OS, but when I installed it, it didn't strike me as more usable, faster, or anything.
A brief list of what its users really like about it as opposed to the billions of desktops (Windows, all the linux ones, OSX) might be beneficial to more than just me. I guess what I am asking is, where should I be looking for the greatness, or even novelty.
This is it! A legacy-free, fast, UNIX-y OS, that could easily be used by casual(ie non-programmer/UNIX Admin types) and novices. If half of the Open-Source proponents out there really wanted to "make a difference" Open BeOS would be the project theyd be contributing to.
I love Linux, love Open Source and all it stands for, but I'm sorry to say, it will never be able to deliver an elegant desktop sulution.
As far as I'm concerned BeOS, could have been the most perfect home-PC solution. Regardless of whether it could ever find mainstream acceptance it not the point.
Sure, no driver support, and nothing but half-assed apps to play around with, but still. The OS achieves a kind of balance, "perfection" if you will...
Any group or company looking to overhaul Linux for _actual_ desktop use should take a very close look at BeOS. The way the OS is structured, the way deviced are handled, the simplicity and flexibility of the GUI, the way the shell coexists with the GUI.
I don't want "full" UNIX, just the stuff that matters to me: A quick, good and consistent user interface, modern applications/drivers/utilities/, a clean directory structure, a refined, legacy-free configuration options to mess around with... and who knows? maybe even some ports of Linux apps
Why isn't there a program called "start" or "open" that takes a url and does whatever would happen if the user double-clicked on it? Then all the desktops could call this program. And the program could be replaced (there is no need even to agree on the implementation, both KDE and Gnome could put out their own "start" program and the user decides).
Even Windows has a "start" program. Why does the supposedly CLI-based Linux NOT have one?
and you're lying if you say that BeOS has a hand-up on OS X
But OS X is fucking slow. So slow, in fact, that I've stuck with Linux and never looked back on fifteen years of Mac usage. I installed BeOS on my old 300Mhz Dell Latitude, which fortunately has one of the rare combinations of hardware that BeOS supports. It is blazingly fast. It blows Win2k right out of the water, and is very competitive with Linux. In fact, the only reason it isn't necessarily faster outright than Linux is that I'm using WindowMaker and not bloated crap like KDE or GNOME. Too bad it isn't actually useful enough to replace Linux.
OS X has been a huge disappointment for me. The lack of customization is painful. The speed is horrendous. The Unix compatability is so broken as to be virtually useless. I'd take it over XP any day, but I'm sick of hearing about how great Apple is for bringing Unix to "the masses". It's markedly inferior to BeOS and IRIX from almost any perspective except application availability. I find little to admire in any user interface released since, say, 1993/4, and of course consumer OSes are just now catching up to features that enterprise OSes had long before then, like not crashing every few hours.
I compromise with Linux and IRIX. I may have to recompile the kernel just to link with my Zaurus; I have to jump through hoops to handle Word documents- I find using Crossover less painful than using StarOFfice. And the SGI, of course, can't even do most of this. But I can always be certain that, once I've spent two weeks setting it up, my computer works the way I want it to, not the way the trained chimps over at Apple and Microsoft dictate, and that it won't creak to a halt when I try to edit a file because 90% of the CPU is stuck rendering antialiased menu bars.
Your comment about metadata is apt. However, it's not Linux that's at fault (nor BSD, nor Windows). The fault lies squarely with the filesystem. In Linux, the filesystem is driven by one of many different drivers, each with their own support (or lack) of metadata.
This is the direction that ReiserFS is moving toward.
However, Linux's inherent view of files (ie. everything is a file) is not necessarily wrong. This allows many very easy solutions to problems. It makes it easy for applications which want to use a device; they simply read or write to a file. It also makes it easy to monitor your system; just read proc files with a text parser.
So in conclusion, Linux's current view of files is not incompatible with metadata, and there are many advantages to viewing files in the way that Linux does.
Tony