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."

Good

[kahei]

Look, a faint dim spark that still lights the way toward the wondrous land of OSes that are not encumbered with the baggage of Unix and Windows.

The forward thinking population of /. will now mock it because:

* It's old.
* It's not Linux or OSX.
* It's not free.

They will ignore the fact that:

* Much of what OSX has just started to do, in terms of usability, BeOS explored all the way back then.
* It's really easy to develop fast GUI apps for.
* And to develop for in general.
* Diversity is good, and a billion people writing GNU-style apps for Linux is not diversity.

In summary, I -- hey! Get out of my yard! Damn kids these days.

I would love to try it

[castlec]

Unfortunately, the price is just too high to justify. The effort required to customize a linux installation is well worth 99 eur in my opinion. If they survive, I may try them in the future but not right now.

Re:Hobbyist OS ?

[dysprosia]

Well, BeOS's target was always in high-end multimedia, and old boxes aren't always the best for that sort of thing, regardless of OS...

Re:Good

[drsmithy]

The forward thinking population of /. will now mock it because:

The only reason I will mock it is because it isn't multiuser.

Re:Such a waste...

[ssj_195]

I'm not sure if this applies to Zeta or not, but to make a point about this argument that crops up whenever someone forks a project or appears to re-tread old ground: Programmers are not interchangeable, especially if they are programming for free, and in their spare time. Such programmers will tackle the projects that interest them, and if deprived of such projects, may well opt to not tackle anything at all rather than help with an (to them) uninteresting project.

Re:Good

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Look, a faint dim spark that still lights the way toward the wondrous land of OSes that are not encumbered with the baggage of Unix and Windows.

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.

2 - does not take advantage of the huge existing base of developers who know the POSIX and Windows API inside and out the world over.

3 - can't run any of the good, and not-so-good software written on any OS for the last 30 years.

4 - Re-implements design flaws that have been already been purged out of Unix or Windows (well, just Unix)

Personally, I wish they didn't waste their time reinventing the wheel. Other designers have already been there, and while there's a lot to say about the heavy legacy of various existing designs, they work and have billions of man/hours put into them.

Re:Zata as download image

[Aluminum Tuesday]

It's actually easier than that - if you give them some money, they'll mail it out to you on a physical disc. They even throw in a manual so morons who can't even get the OS' name right ("Zata"?) are at least in with a chance of understanding what it's about.

I can understand you wanting to pirate from big faceless corporations, but geez: YellowTAB is a really small and specialised company. If you like their stuff, buy it.

"In Depth"...

[Mike Connell]

For the MTV generation maybe, but I didn't see a great deal of depth there: filesystems? 3D support? network stack quality? hardware coverage? It looked a lot more like "I installed some CD and this is what happened" to me.

Not to mention that a review containing "Firefox 1.0.3 requires no introduction, however, a few notes on it are justified: fast & stable. I do not know what the yT guys and girls have done, but they made Firefox on BeOS stable and usable. And that's a great achievement." strikes me as a little suspect. Is Firefox not normally fast and stable, or is the reviewer really stuck for good things to say about Zeta?

Re:Hobbyist OS ?

[tha_mink]

The sad part is that you can hardly run it on an old box. To run it properly you need at least a good video card (which I never spent much on).

Actually, the sad part is that you have to pay out the heinie (~$114 USD I think) for it. I give YellowTab props for picking up the project but damn...I can buy Windows XP Pro for $85 USD.

Re:BeOS is not Linux

[Aluminum Tuesday]

"I'll just hack together a distro"

And for media pros without the skill, time or inclination to do that, here's BeOS! Ready-made for what they need. Understand?

And maybe BeOS was offering this stuff before the others were; did you think of that? Maybe there's an established user base of people who want to keep using the OS they're used to, rather than switch to one you'd like to see them using. Maybe they don't like your choice of OS, and maybe they wouldn't like the one you'd put together for them.

Maybe Be and YellowTAB "get it" in the exact way that you don't.

Re:Good

[jedigeek]

Actually, a lot of the things in BeOS had been copied from what Apple started in the 80s. And what do you mean by "what OSX has just started to do, in terms of usability"? os x has been basically the same (although it has clearly evolved) for nearly 5 years now. I'm just wondering: have you even used a mac?

If you take time to read the badly written review on OS News, you'll notice that Yellow Tab seem to have totally derailed what made BeOS good, and made a bizarre version of BeOS mangled with terrible open source fonts, icons and themes. And it costs more than an OEM copy of Windows. Consider that 100% of consumer peripherals support Windows, and Windows has a simple UI that nearly everyone finds easy to use, Zeta pretty much fails it on every account. I don't really understand the argument of using BeOS over Windows, other than a lot of noise created by disgruntled anti-Microsoft slashdot posters. What does it have going for it that the end-user cares about at all? Absolutely nothing.

99 euro?

[Zedrick]

"For only 99,- Euro, a bargain."

Even compared to FreeBSD or how much a Linux distro would cost me?

Sounds nice, but for 99 euro I would at least want a time limited installation to try out, before taking out my VISA.

Re:BeOS is not Linux

[wiit_rabit]

I think Roscoe has probably never used BeOS, much less Zeta. Although I will sound like a fanboy of BeOS (or Zeta), I encourage everyone to experience this OS. Other posts and the article talk about low latency, but you need see the OS first hand to understand what this really means. Secondly, with millions of PII '440BX' or similar based systems out there being tossed in the trash pile for no good reason other than they won't run XP very well, they should sing running this OS.

Re:BeOS is not Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

First, let me say I have a dual 133MHz BeBox at home and used to think it was a wonderful system. So I'm not an anti-BeOS zealot.

But exactly what apps are these media pros using on BeOS? The OS can be designed for that kind of work as much as you want, but without the apps to take advantage of it. Correct me if things have changed, but what replacement would any 'media pro' have for any of Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut Pro, Shake, Motion, Logic, Cubase, DVD Studio Pro etc etc? Because those are the apps all the media pros I know of use.

It's nice that BeOS has a fast system-wide search with live queries, and it's nice that it had it before other systems (I remember using it back in 96 or so). But most 'media pros' don't spend all day searching for files.

No matter how great the OS is, no matter how great it is at running on an old machine, it's the apps that matter. Sad, but true.

I might consider installing it on an old machine for my dad who surfs and does nothing much more. But it'd be useless for any 'media pros'.

So?

[Willeh]

While it's a nice thing to have for the former BEos enthusiast, the rest of the world shrugs and says "So?" I think that with the pool of apps ported to all platforms (Firefox, VLC, Thunderbird et al) A modern platform has to have some significant advantages to stand out.

I just don't think that having a Spotlight(c) like functionality in the OS is much of a selling point, neither is "Good video editing" capabilities. For all i(and everybody else) know it's just another video editing application, when in the rest of the OS world there's already plenty to satisfy the budding Spielberg or (god forbid) Uwe Boll. It's just an example to illustrate the lack of REAL tangible selling points this OS has. Any of the real BEos fans want to educate a sceptic with some real advantages instead of that subjective "It's just a better experience for ${APPLICATION}" garbage you hear in every platform discussion?

Nice, but where is their market?

[starseeker]

I'm glad BeOS still lives in some form - it deserved to survive. But it will be forever a niche OS.

a) Expensive. Sorry folks, but however nice BeOS was it wasn't enough of a leap ahead to make people want to pay for it instead of make do. DOS taught the world this decades ago - cheap wins in any mass market environment.

b) Driver support. Linux has enough trouble in this regard - how does BeOS (pardon me, Zeta) plan to do it? By becoming like Apple and selling box+hardware? If so they'd better get moving, because Apple has had tha market locked up for years now.

c) The "why should I bother?" effect. Switching OSes is a MAJOR task for all but a very small subset of us. Guess how many people are going to bother with this, without a compelling reason?

I think there is one, and only one, way to get people to switch operating systems on a massive scale - mathematically provable security and quality. A system that can be proven uncrashable and unhackable will change the world, since that is currently the great unmet need. People have good enough, in both commercial (Windows/Mac) and free (Linux/*BSD). It's going to take a leap to the next level, and that's so difficult I doubt we are even training computer scientists in the right tools to attempt it. We need the Final OS - the one where an upgrade means you swap in a new proof that impliments the previous behavior more efficiently, or provides more functionality while still proving out on security and previous functionality. Upgrade bugs need to become not just unheard of but mathematically impossible. Then people will pay attention.

Re:Be, A Member Of An Elite Group

[BlowChunx]

...errr, I get passionate about my wife, not an operating system.

The OS is a tool. In that light, it's like getting passionate about a cordless drill. And you need to get out more.

Re:Zata as download image

[Aluminum Tuesday]

"I want an OS that does what I want."

Sounds good to me. Here's hoping YellowTAB releases a live CD demo of Zeta, like Be did with BeOS R4.5.

Re:A little review of Zeta/some issues I've notice

[Anonymous Coward]

You sure pride yourself in pirating everything that is piratable, don't you? And I'm guessing now you're gonna bitch about people commenting on you pirating, rather than on your review. Or smile, knowing that someone noticed.

Re:Good

[ltbarcly]

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).

Every time I've heard someone say turds aren't good to eat, it's been someone who doesn't even eat turds (tasting it and spitting it out isn't eating it).

And now hopefully you see why you are wrong.