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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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too bad nobody can love it back to life
Shouldn't "Be" be called "HasBeen"?
Trolling is a art,
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.
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
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.
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
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.
--
Daniel
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.
No shit. As an OS/2 user, the BeOS fans make me look like the popular kid in high school!
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
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
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
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