14 Jun
2013
14 Jun
'13
6:23 p.m.
On 15 June 2013 00:14, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:
BeOS was sort of a single user Unix: it was
sufficiently POSIXy for me to fire
up a shell prompt and feel at home, although it did not support multiple users
at all.
For my money -- as someone whose hobby is OSes, basically, and who has
played with as many as I can lay hands upon for about 30y now -- BeOS
is the most important OS for home/personal computers in the last few
decades.
Which is, naturally, why it's obscure, dead & forgotten.
It had many of the best aspects of xNix -- it was POSIX-like, had a
familiar shell, etc. -- but was free of all the decades of cruft
around Unix. I mean, Mac OS X is a gorgeous OS, but it's huge, vastly
complex, not very flexible or customisable, and it's only quick
because it runs on massively powerful hardware.
I don't need a network-transparent GUI. I'm sure it's a great thing,
but in some 20y of using systems with X.11 available, I've /never/
needed that.
I don't need a multiuser PC. It's mine. I'm the only user. I only need
multiuser servers. It's great but it's baggage. Security, sure, some,
but not a minicomputer/server OS on my desktop.
I don't need paging/swapping any more either, TBH.
I don't need 80% of everything that Unix or indeed Linux gives me, in
fact. Don't need it, don't want it.
I was an Archimedes user, and I'm nostalgic for it, but while I'd like
RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi as a toy, I don't /miss/ it. I miss some of
its features, but not the OS.
I miss some of the features of classic MacOS.
I have a QL, Amiga and ST, and they all had strengths and good aspects
-- but I don't miss anything from them, partly because I was never a
full-time user of any of them. I got them all late, as a collector.
Sure, it was impressive to see how much AmigaOS could do in 512kB of
RAM on a pair of floppy drives, but it's 2013 -- I don't need that
now. I don't want the constraints. The QNX demo floppy was impressive
too, come to that.
I miss my ZX Spectrum, but I'm glad I'm not using one any more!
I want a solid, multitasking, multithreading OS, running on lots of
cores, delivering a fast, responsive experience. I want rich media. I
want productivity apps, but Linux and C21 FOSS delivers all I want and
more, really. I don't need anything proprietary. I want flexible
networking and plug-and-play hardware. I don't need a huge fat
dual-slot GPU -- I just want 2 or 3 smallish cheap monitors.
BeOS delivered all I really wanted /out of the OS/ and the only
problems would have been resolved if there had been LibreOffice,
Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin & a few other modern Linux apps for it.
(And perhaps a hypervisor. Back then, DOS boxes would have done.)
/And it *didn't* have a couple of gigabytes of cruft I *didn't* need
and don't need now./
That was why it was lovely.
The snappy performance but cheap standard components of an ST, the
multitasking power of an Amiga, the responsiveness of an Archimedes --
and all on commodity PC hardware. My PC never felt as powerful, before
or since. My Core 2 Quad Extreme with Ubuntu is less responsive than a
133MHz Pentium-1 was under BeOS.
I really hope that Haiku one day delivers on that promise again.
Linux is a great server OS, but it's not a great desktop. Never was.
It's better than it used to be but it's still not great. It's good
enough, no more.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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