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yellowTAB's Zeta 1.0 Reviewed
Provataki writes "OSNews' Thom Holwerda posted the first in-depth review of the recently released Zeta 1.0. He goes over installation, impressions, usage, application and hardware support, BFS queries and concludes that yellowTAB's Zeta is the deserving future of BeOS; plus, it's the only one based on the original source code by Be, Inc."
However, I noticed a few niggles.. The fact that minor oversights like videos being image/jpeg instead of video/mpeg exist suggest more testing is needed. I would expect more of a major version release, even if it is only Version 1. (Being that it is based off a relatively well aged code base) I really do hope this does succeed - I would hate to see the developers waste their hard work.
From the Zeta FAQs:
"The Home Edition and Developer Edition don't have all the applications the Deluxe Edition does."
That's fine, I just want to poke about with the OS and see if I want to go further.. Developer edition will be fine thanks.
Pop to the Shop section.. Alas, only the bloated Deluxe edition with 3Gb of apps I'll never look at is for sale.
Back to *nix..
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I admit that I'm totally ignorant of BeOS - all I know about it is the name.
Who is this for and what kind of things are they supposed to do with it? What does it offer that current operating systems with lots of applications don't offer? From the GUI orientation of the article I suppose this is not for some specific server need.
Variety is good, but what (good) variety does this bring?
I don't feel the need to pirate from a small and specialized company....I just don't feel the need to give over my hard earned cash to try some marginal OS that (by your statistics) less than 5% would use, only to find out that....I'm part of the 95% non-Zeta users out there. If I like it and there's enough support for it to get things working, I'll think about it. But hey, I already run a small-market OS that actually has plenty of support. And guess what.....it was free.
No thanks, zealo.....uh, passionate BeOS user.
I think the reviewer is probably a former BeOS user. He used to have problems with programs such as Firefox (display bugs).
This comment is interesting for people like me who used BeOS before, but stopped because of the lack of support of the open source comunity.
However I agree this is not an in-depth review, just the experience of a user.
As review are often biased, I prefer to know what the review did or experienced rather than having a lot of numbers and charts that often don't mean anything since you may have a lot of different hardware configuration.
What I can say about BeOS is that it was really good (back in the 2000) for realtime audio compositing, with really low latency. Even with my low-end computer, I managed to get good multimedia performance.
I think it is worth trying, just to feel/know that a system can be/behave differently with another OS, even on the same hardware.
I would have liked to have seen the review done on modern hardware. Large SATA hard disk, dual core or hyper-threaded CPU, Nforce chipset, PCI express graphics etc..
It's popularity will be severely limited if it doesn't support as much hardware as Linux, never mind Windows.
Firefox used to suck on BeOS; it was sluggish and crashed if you looked at it the wrong way. Obviously yT has fixed it.
An OS that's not encumbered by the baggage of Unix or Windows is an OS that:
1 - does not take advantage of decades of POSIX normalisation, made by hundreds of thousands of high-level developers and designers.
Strong argument, I guess the BeOS people agreed with this and your other points about POSIX, they included a posix api in their OS.4 - Re-implements design flaws that have been already been purged out of Unix or Windows (well, just Unix)
Ofcourse fixing design flaws in unix and especially windows requires backward compatability, which slows down the fixing process enormously. BeOS is about revisiting the design decisions made decades ago with what we now know about how computers are used and programmed. This ofcourse means there are gonna be millions of implementation flaws that you don`t have in a mature UNIX implementation. But those are bugs, you can fix them with a debugger. There is no need to get out a drawing board and restart a fundamental design flamewar if you make the right design decision right away, which you can becouse the wrong one is already madeThe effort invested in BeOS is worthwile, because BeOS doesn't feel anything like Linux or Windows. It's the most respnsive desktop OS I know, with it's great emphasis on multithreading and it's near-realtime scheduling (but not completely realtime - it's tweaked for responsiveness, not hard-realtime).
I have heard and read arguments like yours, and without a single exception, they came from people who did not use BeOS (booting it up is not using it). Those who used BeOS apps for at least a few hours, understand why BeOS is worth the effort.
The other remark I would make, is: having people experienced in a certain area/product is useful, but sometimes it's much better to take the leap into the new area, instead of regurgitating old ideas and contents. That's the only way to progress. Otherwise, we would still use (very advanced perhaps) core memory and valves in our computers today. At the advent of semiconductors, valves were a really mature technology, but semis were so much better that the choice was clear, at least for computers. Valves are still in use today (as will UNIX be) because they offer unparalleled performance in high-power high-frequency applications.
Sigged!
Although I like the look and concept of Zeta, where does it fit into the OS ecosystem? Unfortunately it does not. Zeta may be doomed to a novel hobby OS. It has several disadvantages in competing with other operating systems. (Assuming it is competing.)
1. Look and Feel - OSX hands down is better. Dare I say, even Windows XP is better?
2. Drivers, Support, Compatibility - Windows XP
3. Cost - Linux
4. Stability - Linux, OSX
5. Security - I'll give Zeta this category, only because there would only be a few niche virus writers / crackers who would even attempt compromising a specialized system like this.
6. Interoperability - OSX and Linux are better
I am glad to see someone attempting to compete (assuming they are competing) on the desktop, but to succeed they will need a contemporary OS, not a circa 2001 OS.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
May I suggest the readers to read about MY (negative) experiences I had with this Zeta-OS?:
http://tinyurl.com/dx2ol
Thanks
Uwe
-- Watch me working: www.magerquark.de