Linked by Scot Hacker on Mon 17th Dec 2001 17:34 UTC
The story of how a BeOS refugee (and not just everyone, but the author of the 'BeOS Bible' book) lost faith in the future of computing, resigned himself to Windows but found himself bored silly, tore out half his hair at the helm of a Linux box, then rediscovered the joy of computing in MacOSX. Scot Hacker will describe his personal adventures with today's operating systems after he was set out to find an alternative to his beloved (but with no apparent future) BeOS. Update: Make sure you read the second part of the article, a rebutal, found here.
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1. Great article and tribute to a great system. BEOS was beautiful and fast, albeit the software was lacking.
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2. Perhaps Offtopic: I hope that Palm opensources BEOS which would really kick it open for software development on a superior graphical architecture, and adopts its BEIA architecture for a StrongARM based alternative. I say this as a 4 year palm/handspring user that has just traded in his 33Mhz 65K Prism for a Sharp SL5000D Linux based StrongARM handheld.
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(I agree with Scott, X is bleacherous and consigns otherwise quality software to an interminable war of usability "standards", to use the term in its loosest possible sense. Nevertheless, I think that one of the competitors will eventually get it right by effectively delivering a "complete" desktop solution. I think KDE will win out in the end for stylistic and strong technical reasons, but I admit that I use a lot of Gnome software because KDE's Office 1.1 is buggy and crashprone, and Gnumeric is way more ready for primetime then KSpread.)
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3. I don't understand Scott's assertion that the "drag to eject" complaint has been cleared up. If one were wiping a CDRW, then fine, but now you are burning a cd image (i.e. permanently archiving a bunch of files) by dragging it to the trash. Than's even more unexpected than ejecting the disk.
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4. Redhat Linux 7.2 is nearly there. It is a matter of two or three releases from the kind of usability that will (for the first time for RH) make Windows look clunky again. Installation is already far better than Windows, and takes about as much time (fifteen minutes) as a Mac Install or even BEOS. (You can probably tell that I am an OS fetishist). Old windows requires 5 to 10 reboots. I had to pull an all-nighter to fix all of "the easiest windows to use ever"'s [XP]piss-poor default choices. Anyone who claims that RH is difficult to install hasn't ever installed any version of windows. And speaking of browsers, Konquerer is as slow as Internet Explorer, but so superior feature wise that I am noticing Konquerer feature ripoffs in IE 6. Even CDRoast (Graphical Gnome CD Burning tool) works better than Adaptec's proprietary CD copying software. The old version would terminally bluescreen any NT or 2000 system. The new version just screws the pooch and destroys the CD if you try to test before you burn. Gee, you would think that would be a feature they might want to actually verify as functional before they burned their CD's.
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5. Don your asbestos suit:
Jean Gassee is completely clueless as to how the market works, and is soley to blame for the collapse of this technically inspired system because he failed to learn any of the lessons which Microsoft and the Opensource community brutally taught its competitors on multiple occasions to which he was a witness. From the proprietary BeBox, to the more expensive PowerPC, to the "appliance market" (read "desperate hype-r-jump"), he has single-handedly managed to be 4-5 years behind the curve of everything that actually is shown to work with consumers. But what can you expect from the man who singlehandedly consigned the Mac to "toy" status in the business world by killing DB4 for the Mac in favor of that glorified flatfile wannabe RDBMS, FileMaker?
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Some background for those who want to flame me as a clueless idiot:
I am a former machead (from Sys7.1) who migrated to...
-> windows, realized all I had been missing (please read before lighting torches).
<li>preemptive multitasking,
<li>cheap hardware,
<li>abundant software.
(deny this and look like an idiot)
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I got sick of M$'s licensing crap and decided to flee Egypt yet again (for personal, not business)->
Redhat Linux (since 4.2). Got sick of it. tried BEOS 4.0/4.5/5.0, like it, but gave up on pathetic browser. Went back to RH Linux 6.2.
Recently I have tried FreeBSD, which I find clean, but too spartan. Returned to RH 7.2, which I love, want to move into the business side of things, and have become a willing and slavish apologist for. I am an OS refugee. I have found the promised land, which is actually filled with that thing called promise.