BeOS For Linux

Bob Gortician writes "The BlueOS guys have posted a few screenshots of their progress in porting the BeOS interface to Linux. Note that this is an intermediary step toward a BeOS clone OS. " I actually had a Be machine for a while, and played with it - nice OS, and well thought out, just a problem of very little applications for it.

Not so much applications as...

[b0r0din]

Driver support. Had virtually no video or sound support, so everything was in grey and mute. I loved the interface, and it booted up as quick as can be, but there's only so much you want to do with no driver support. Why make an application when no one else has a machine it'll run nicely on?

Fragmentation...

[Cutriss]

Not that the majority of Linux users care about the Mac, but the fact is that Mac OS X represents something I believe a whole bunch of Linux users should get behind if they want their OS to succeed - It's Linux with the useability that Joe Sixpack can handle. BeOS has its uses, but aside from the glory hack of porting its interface to Linux, I'm afraid that this can only serve to fragment the already small effort behind pushing Mac OS X as Linux's true way to combat Windows, because let's face it - Neither KDE nor Gnome are going to make my mother leave Windows anytime soon...

sad but true

[jbischof]

that the best technologies frequently are not the ones that make it in the marketplace

If it were the other way around a lot of us would probably be running BeOs on an Alpha chip right now.

Re:Fragmentation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac OS X represents something I believe a whole bunch of Linux users should get behind if they want their OS to succeed - It's Linux with the useability that Joe Sixpack can handle

It's Linux? Maybe you should get your facts straight!

PS Some of us don't care about your grandmother or Microsoft!

BeOS had the classic catch 22

[mystery_bowler]

No one would write a lot of apps until it had a larger user base, no user base would be generated until it had more apps.

It's the same set of problems Linux has faced in the past. BeOS was/is a fine OS, but it never seemed to have a good backer, nor a solid niche. Artsy types already prefer Macs, so it's hard to compete there. Ordinary desktop users have already been won over by Microsoft, so it's really hard to compete there. Linux users already had a free OS and a nice looking desktop if they wanted it (re: KDE, Gnome. You should know that by now).

I think that BeOS was a nice, stable OS that could have been a contender. It's a shame it didn't get more press or attention from major industry players. Oh well, I look forward to another nice Linux desktop all the same.

Re:the *REAL* problem

[Ranger Rick]

BS.

An evil monopoly didn't kill BeOS; Be, Inc. did. Every time they got momentum doing one thing, they decided it wasn't going to work and changed business plans. If Be had picked a good business plan and stuck to it, they could have at least carved out a niche. Instead they kept changing their minds about what their core business is.

They had a great (amazing!) piece of technology first, and then tried to decide how to make money from it, and screwed up over and over. BeOS was the nicest, cleanest, most well-engineered OS I've ever used, but it didn't have a chance.

Re:BeOS had the classic catch 22

[Anonymous Coward]

On top of these items the api was all entirely in C++. Anytime the C++ ABI changed (which as I understand it was most OS releases) then developers had to recompile their apps. So when a new version of the os came out you had to wait for all the developers to recompile their stuff. Where's the incentive to upgrade when you have to wait for the small number of apps that DO exist to start working again. I believe this is why Be was so aggressive in bundling apps with their os releases.

Re:Fragmentation...

[fader]

KDE, GNOME still lack the consistency of a real desktop environment like Mac OS 9 or X

You know, after hearing this for so long, I actually picked up an older iMac off of eBay and put OS X on it. Let me tell everyone something right off: OS X is no more consistent than either GNOME or KDE... probably less.

The Apple freaks will flame me to hell for this, but it's true. I like OS X -- it's pretty and based on Unix. But it's anything but consistent. After spending a couple of hours trying to either get iTunes to work or find a decent MP3 player for OS X, I started to understand how normal 'users' feel about computers. Half the time I couldn't figure out what was a control and what wasn't, and when I could, the controls had to be played with to figure out what they did. No tooltips, no useful icons. But they sure were pretty.

Yeah, that's just one app. But it's from the company that made the bloody OS! And don't get me started on QuickTime Player or iMovie... they suffer from the same problems, so it's not like it's an isolated case.

Third-party apps that follow Apple's HIG (you know, the document that Apple decided to ignore) are pretty good. But then, so are the GNOME and KDE apps that do the same things. OS X is decent, but it's not the end-all of desktops that some people would have you believe.