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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
It's main benefits are:
Very good with all things video
Fast, especially at GUI tasks
Very good filesystem, such that you can define a folder as 'everything in
Easy to write for
SVG graphics! Okay, not really a solid benefit but a cool technology; graphics are vectors and therefore zoom and scale as you would expect.
It was designed to be an efficient single-user graphical OS, specially for use in multimedia (ie they couldn't think of any other niche for it). As a result it's much faster than Unix/Linux and much cleaner and freindlier than Windows for doing GUI tasks and as a platform for video codecs.
In terms of apps, the big open source projects (firefox, vim etc) are all there, but there's precious little else.
The main DISadvantage is that nobody uses it and there's not the slightest chance that anybody ever will
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
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.
Firefox used to suck on BeOS; it was sluggish and crashed if you looked at it the wrong way. Obviously yT has fixed it.
The 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!