In addition to OS/2 there was BeOS.

What is your thoughts on BeOS from 90s?

I wish the Ubuntu guru bought BeOS then open sourced it, rather than linux

personally i wish we could run "ubuntu" based on an open source BeOS
b/c it seems easier and more user-friendly than Linux.

Why do you consider BeOS more user friendly than Linux? What constitutes user friendliness? If you mean something about the kernel and base system, I'm interested to know how you think BeOS would be better. If you mean the desktop environment, there is no single desktop environment on Linux and you can use what you wish. There is therefore something for everyone.

everything from UI to installation to drivers. i know that linux has far more drivers but if beos had the drivers it just works. being more responsive is a plus.

Linux already "just works". I can plug in any piece of hardware older than a few months and it just magically works. 7 year old printer/scanner? Check. 13 year old webcams? Check. Laptop wireless controller? Check. Gone are the days of having to whip out ndiswrapper every time you installed a wireless device.

Have you used Linux lately? It is amazing how quickly the user experience has caught up with and (in my opinion) passed Windows. The only thing keeping me from putting it on the computers of my family and friends is that certain Windows programs are tricky to get working. (AutoCAD, Access).

No one "bought" Linux and open sourced it. The GNU project was open from the start, and they only adopted the Linux kernel because it was also open.

As far as I can tell, BeOS was written only to run on "approved" hardware, similar to what Apple does with MacOS. It is much easier to "just work" when you refuse to work with anything but a tiny subset of components. But then, you could always build a Linux or Windows machine with components which are known to "just work", or buy one from an OEM computer vendor.

edit: If you are really dying for an open BeOS-based OS, haiku appears to be the answer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_%28o ... _system%29
source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS

edit2: I agree that Ubuntu is less user friendly than many other OSs. For the same reason I dislike a lot of the recent (2007+) changes Microsoft has been making to their GUIs. Hints:
-1- Pictographs are inferior to words when representing complex ideas. This is why language was invented... If pictographs were better we would just paint out thoughts.
-2- The brain cannot efficiently scan lists written horizontally. (Ribbons! Ugh!)
-3- Display the damn hotkeys so little Timmy learns to ctrl+c and ctrl+v rather than inefficient mouse movements.

I guess my lament is that if Mark Shuttleworth bought BeOS way back say in 1999 when it was sold to Palm for like $14 million (2 years before Gasse wanted to sell it to Apple for more than $200 million) and open sourced it and made it that his Ubuntu, that would have been cool.


You got me wondering KDE or Gnome? What do you think is more user-friendly and which distribution is most user-friendly?

Haiku is too under develop for me to use. I know about the printing issue but I wonder what if Apple bought both Next and BeOS and Steve Jobs made BeOS the basis of Mac OS X with openstep and printing tacked-on from NeXT.

I think it depends on the user and what interface they are familiar with. At the moment my favorite is MATE (a gnome 2 fork/resurrection). MATE reminds me the most of Windows XP (I have a little start-button-type item, quick launch, window list, misc settings, and clock at the bottom of the screen). I would put my mother on a MATE-based system because she would be familiar with it already. It also does not bother with a lot of the fancy effects, so it runs well on all of my systems down to my d945gsejt (atom N270) board.

I have not used KDE in a long time because I liked the aesthetics of gnome a little more (and on an Ubuntu-style machine it's so easy to install programs using either library set). I have no clue what it is like these days. I only try "new" things when projects like Ubuntu, Firefox, etc., go crazy.

I guess there are arguments for the new-fangled gnome 3, Unity, etc., but I've found them frustrating. Good old gnome 2 for me

edit: Sorry, also, if my other post was in any way rude. I misunderstood your first post.

not rude.

how does this compare with os x?

If you're looking for a basic Linux distribution I recommend taking a look at Linux Mint. There are a few versions with different window managers. Easy to create an USB stick and boot into a LiveCD environment to get the feel of things. I like XFCE best myself, but MATE would have been my second choice. :)

I'm not a fan of the Apple side of things because of the lock-in. OS X is not bad I hear, but freedom and flexibility is what I want, not primarily a polished user experience for the common tasks.

So you just generally hate Linux then. BeOS is an old OS and you are confusing Ubuntu as being Linux. When it comes to UI there are many ways of configuring how a Linux system looks and feels and BeOS themes are available for all of the major desktop environments just in case you really do want to make it look like BeOS (or MacOS if you have designer spectacles). Plus the levels of configuration available mean you could make it look and feel like pretty much anything else.

As for installation, there are many Linux distros which are very easy to install and far quicker than Windows too.

Driver wise things are NOT hard. Virtually all drivers are built into the kernel rather than requiring any installation and no OS can match Linux for the amount of hardware supported. The only complications are propreitary drivers for graphics cards but this does not have to be hard either. Most distros have some easy way of installing these drivers. On Arch Linux all I have to do is:

It then lists the packages to be installed, download size and disk space required. I press 'y' to confirm and it does the rest. Far easier than the Windows way of having to manually go to a website, click through half a million links, download 300Mb (300Mb for a driver?!? Windows is mad!!!) without any idea if it'll work or not, then run it, it unpacks some stuff somewhere on the disk without clearing up after itself, you then have to read through window after window of things that aren't really important and intermittently clicking a few options to deselent things that you do NOT want. In what way is my Linux experience any harder than Windows for drivers?


This is silly. When Linux has the drivers it also just works. Good luck finding modern hardware which 'just works' in BeOS.


Please expand.

I use Arch Linux and run a KDE desktop environment. There are very few reasons why I would want anything else.

I was a big fan of BeOS back then, but in hindsight it didn't stand a chance. I recall trying to port some of my UNIX codes (command-line driven, never mind the GUI) to BeOS and it was a pain compared to porting them to Linux. Linux made rapid advances in the server arena because it was a reasonably easy drop-in replacement for UNIX. BeOS didn't seem to have this advantage.

The point of a desktop OS is to run applications. BeOS lacked applications. People aren't going to use a desktop OS if there aren't applications, and developers aren't going to develop applications if there are no customers/users. Catch 22. Even Linux on the desktop is struggling to gain traction because some high-profile applications (specifically Microsoft Office) don't run on it, and although there are high-quality equivalents they aren't a hassle-free alternative.

I also don't recall hardware support being that great on BeOS. It's all very well saying "if it had the drivers it would've been great", but it didn't have the drivers, so it wasn't great. Again, no drivers = no customers, and no customers = no drivers.

BeOSs only chance was to do what Apple has done - control the hardware and the software. I know that they had this ambition, but they failed, I think due to lack of resources.

In short - BeOS had potential, but needed a lot more luck and money than it got. I'm not convinced that it would have been better than Linux in any sense. It had its own fair share of idiosyncracies.

open suse kde looks most attractive to my eyes. i am unsure if my pc can support an os x and hackintosh seems pretty involved.

i associate a feeling w/apple products of ultra-rich high-end Lamborghini car.




u got me wondering, how does drivers and apps differ from different linux distribution.

how for example does arch linux w/kde differ from open suse w/kde or kubuntu?

beos though i thought was far superior to os/2 and win95 and mac os 7 back in the day.

i know beos had printer problems and was underdeveloped but i thought it was good foundation - that teapot demo was pretty awesome.

what would os x media capabilities be like if steve jobs bought be inc for $14 million and made beos his client os?

i wonder if beos could be used for cell phone - palm bought beos to create cobalt

It clearly wasn't superior in the ways that actually mattered, because it failed.



Good foundations and teapot demos don't sell desktop operating systems. Like I said, it was never going to win, it didn't stand a chance because the dominant incumbent OS at the time, regardless of its perceived technical flaws, was useful and usable enough to get the job done. At the end of the days that's really all that most people care about.

what u say is true. still many beos'ers like me had hoped for something like this
beos was sold to palm inc for about $14million if i recall, and palm never used it.

ubuntu's backer mark shuttleworth could have purchased beos and open sourced that way back in 1999 and put the resources in ubuntu behind an open sourced beos.

flash forward 14 years to today
where would we be today?

gassee said he'd like to open source beos but his financial investors said no.

Remember that Shuttleworth only made his money selling Thawte to Verisign in December 1999. When Palm bought BeOS Mark would not have had the money yet. It took some years for Mark to set up Canonical as he was busy going into space amongst other things. I don't think BeOS ever would have crossed his mind when he already had experience working with Debian since the early days and Ubuntu was forked from Debian.

yeah

when i saw beos i think it was in 96-97 at the time of win95 and mac os 7, it was pretty amazing.

to put things in perspective my first pc was a tandy 1000 and i used deskmate and played tandy-enhanced games w/16-color graphics and 3-voice sound like sierra thexder and black couldron.

so i have a thing for alternatives.
my family couldn't afford a mac but my rich children of medical doctor neighbors had apple iigs

tandy was non-standard w/10 inch slots nonstandard keyboards mouse nonstandard graphics and sound

for whatever it's worth i own a dreamcast

so i pick losers