Comment by jasongill
2 years ago
I miss BeOS. I ran it as my full time desktop OS at home and work for a good 1.5-2 years and there has never really been anything like that feeling - it was so "fast" and had so many nice little touches.
2 years ago
I miss BeOS. I ran it as my full time desktop OS at home and work for a good 1.5-2 years and there has never really been anything like that feeling - it was so "fast" and had so many nice little touches.
I only ever got to play with BeOS 5 PE in Be's twilight years, but it was incredibly zippy on the 800Mhz PIII Dimension 4100 tower that was the family computer at that point in time. It handily beat Windows 98SE (what the Dimension shipped with) and was a solid step up from even Windows 2000 (which itself was a step up from 98SE). The vaguely Mac-like yet unique feel of its UI was also fascinating (and unsurprisingly worked well as a Kaleidoscope scheme on classic Mac OS).
Never was able to run it full time though.
It really was good. From a user perspective, it blew Windows and Mac out of the water. The performance and reliability were unmatched on the desktop. I remember being able to change network settings without a reboot, which no other desktop OS could do for another couple years or so. The boot speed was also something to behold. It was something like 7 seconds to a login prompt. BeOS was ahead of its time. The only real problem with it was software availability.
Have you checked out Haiku? https://www.haiku-os.org/
Does Haiku still have unaccelerated software rendering of the UI?
Edit: yes, seems their nvidia drivers don't have 2d acceleration.
Yes, I believe that's correct. There's some work on vulkan and a discussion about pulling some stuff from openBSD, but either doesn't seem to be a priority for the project at the moment. I'm sure supporting modern graphics cards isn't trivial, not a task of theirs I envy.
There is 3d acceleration, but just AMD Radeon, not NVIDIA.
NVIDIA does not document its hardware, thus why the open source driver situation is bad.
If windows failed and BeOS succeded, you would be saying the same thing about windows 98.
Win98 and contemporary Linux felt dog slow on identical hardware. I ran all three. BeOS was special.
(Actually QNX Photon came really close)
Ditto. Ran all 3, BeOS was really special.
Like lightning in a bottle.
It ain’t rose tinted glasses at work here. BeOS’s pervasive use of non-blocking message passing made its UI smooth like butter, almost no matter how much you loaded the machine up. There was nothing like it then, and outside of Haiku I’m not aware of anything like it now.