Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 2nd Jun 2003 06:10 UTC
No, BeOS is not dead as many will speed to the forums and proclaim. YellowTAB's Zeta is the true inheritor of BeOS 5's fortune, as it is based directly on Dano/EXP's codeline (which was supposed to be BeOS 6 but was never finished as Be sold its IP to Palm). At last, I got my hands on Zeta Beta-5a, and here is what I found and think of it so far. You might need to have some experience with BeOS in order to follow this article, but screenshots are included to make it easier for everyone.
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Nice review, Eugenia. Gave a pretty good overview for us old BeOS users what using Zeta is like. Personally, I'm saddened by it. It seems that practically everything that made the BeOS neat back in the day has been laid to waste.
I mean, look, for example, at http://img.osnews.com/img/3692/zeta4.png. What do we see? Some programs have menus, some use tabs instead, and some don't deal with that kind of layout. Of those with menus, one has a help menu, and the others don't. Every program using any kind of toolbar-ish buttons rolled their own. Or do you like how the ffmpeg GUI (great name, btw!) window has some options capitalized, others not, and lots of the options just thrown into random groupings? Etc. etc. etc. There's just no consistency whatsoever.
Or look at, say, DVDRip. "Write to standard output"? Now, what the hell does that mean to anyone except a total geek? Why would you want to do it, anyway, if you weren't using something else on the command line? Oh, and you just have to love how ffmpeg GUI shows you the command-line output it'll use. WHY? So I can pat it on the head and say, "Good boy, you correctly translated the options I selected into the appropriate command-line string. Have a biscuit!" A good GUI is more than just a listing of all the command-line program's flags with checkboxes and radio buttons; it's about making choices. To me, Zeta looks like a mediocre Linux distro that doesn't use X11 and uses a different threading model. Yay. It seems the days of, "yeah, the BeOS is technically awesome, but the interface kicks ass too!" are long gone.
But you know, I think the best thing said here was when Eugenia mentioned that Be used to have some 100 employees, while yellowTab has merely a handful. Back in the day, the BeOS was competing against an unstable and partially unadopted Windows, a Mac OS that had a pretty sad underlying structure, and a Linux without a decent desktop interface. Now we've got a rock-solid Windows and Mac OS, both of which do thousands of things the BeOS never dreamt of, and a Linux community that it hard at work to bring Linux to the desktop. Our expectations have grown far higher. Sad as it is, the BeOS's capabilities simply haven't caught up.