BeOS and hardware (Score 2)

I really hope that Be makes it, but lately I've not been too happy with them. I bought R3 as soon as it came out, and happily played with it for many months and starred at the pretty rotating cube that was playing movies. then R4 came out, and I bought that too, but this time it wouldn't even install. aparantley, one of the new features of the upgrade was the fact that most of the intel drivers were rewritten, unfortunately my specific (and rather old) motherboard wasn't fully supported. They were nice enough to send me a free copy of R4.5 though, but that didn't work either. I guess the point of this little story is this, Be will never make it anywhere if they don't take a step back and say, stop, we need to get this thing fully functional as it stands. support all the basic hardware we can (motherboards, ide controllers, etc...), and stabalize it all. then start adding the nifty new APIs. as it stands, BeOS is nothing more than a really big demo OS. until they stabalize development, and make sure it runs on most systems, it will remain this toy that people look at and say "damn, I wish my primary OS ran this fast and could do this neat little demo", then reboot to their primary OS and do some work. Linux was able to get by because it was completely open, so if it didn't do something, somebody with the proper skills could make it do it. BeOS doesn't have that luxury though. I really hope that Be can make it, but they have to reevaluate what their goals for each release are. anyway, I'll be ordering a copy of R5 even though its free, and even though R4.5 wouldn't run on my box, just to show my support, in hopes of a better OS (not that Linux isn't great). Tim Malone