Forum Moderators: bakedjake
Has anyone played with this yet? It's 90 euros, and I'd love to get BeOS back on my desktop as soon as they have decent Wireless support and a decent browser (Opera 3.62 was the last Opera).
I'm a bad, bad moderator... Removed link drop.
[edited by: bakedjake at 5:23 pm (utc) on May 7, 2004]
Trouble is, BeOS has had more comebacks than Cher, and it is still looking terribly marginalized compared to Linux. I'm not sure many people are going to pay 90 Euros for such an orphan system with so very little software available. At least it looks pretty (but no more so than KDE).
Of course, as for Opera 3.62, it was one of the best versions they ever did. WebmasterWorld displays perfectly in it, so why the need to upgrade?!
<added>From their product page: (includes) "New Versions of the Browsers Mozilla and Firebird"</added>
LOL. I ran BeOS up until September of last year. The one (and only) reason I dropped it was for lack of Wireless support.
BeOS 5, which was released 2.5 years ago or so, is simply amazing. Most people don't understand BeOS until they actually run it, which is a shame. The filesystem alone is enough to make you a convert, not to mention the incredible multimedia capabilities. And, stuff just works.
KDE is slow (I know, I'm running it as I type this to you!). BeOS is literally multiples faster than any X-derivative running on any free operating system. There's tons of speed tests to prove that.
As far as limited software support, nah. Everything worked fine - no interoperability problems with GoBe and Office as far as I can see. The browser situation got me down, but alas. Opera 3.62 was good to me.
If you haven't tried it and like to play with new OSes (like I do), download the personal edition (free) from BeBits. It'll run in a Linux or Windows enviornment without having to re-partition or anything.
Linux is what I run...
If you're concerned about speed but still want a fairly full-featured desktop environment/window manager in Linux, you could try XFCE4 (a fairly minimal desktop environment that manages to still be chock-full of features) or WindowMaker (a little different, good-looking, fast window manager).
Also, speed between the Linuces seems to vary greatly. The fastest overall (IMO, IMO, IMO :) ) is Arch Linux, which is only at v0.6, but has been great to me and supposedly v0.7 is coming out soon. Also, Crux is fast as all get out and just released a new version.
If you want something stable, tried and true and fast, nothing beats Slackware (IMO, IMO, IMO :) ).
Check 'em out, none of these have shown me any noticeable slowdowns, ever. None of the above distros are for newbies, though, but in my experience are actually all three very clean and easy to figure out.
