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"and his laptop was working very well"

Bull. It's crap like this that makes people not listen to BeOS fans. The BeOS never had power management for laptops. It was publicly stated many times by Be that they were not focusing on laptops. My HP laptop, running WinXP, had all sorts of power management features that BeOS fans can only dream about. And don't even get me started on wireless support. So yeah, laptops can work "very well" if you conveniently ignore two of the essential features of modern laptops (I won't even get into things like display management, CPU speed reduction, and so on). The fact is that there are a lot of details in a complete modern OS, and fans seem to overlook them as necessary. What favor are you doing potential users by lying to them?


"Give me one good reason to support BeOS or any of its clones. Its just an unfortunate example at how capitalism hurts us all."

It's because of Capitalism that you had BeOS in the first place. And also that you have Linux and BSD, too (those computers they used when programming the systems weren't built by volunteers, you know). This is certainly not the place for a political argument, but I strongly suggest you do some serious reading/research on the subject of capitalism, socialism, and other systems.


Every time someone posts about the BeOS it's the same old thing. "It's dead! It's not dead; the clones are making impressive progress! I don't see that progress! Well, what do you care about what they do with their time?" I'll tell you why we care. Because the BeOS fans simply won't shut up about their system. On every post about a different OS, some BeOS fan has to say, "ha, my OS did all that back in 99!" or some such remark. It gets pretty annoying, and even more so when no real progress has been demonstrated in years (guys, R5 was just about two years ago, not "about a year").

Look, I used the BeOS for many years (before most people here, I would wager), I'm friends with some former Be employees, and I was fairly involved in the old community. I know enough to know that half of what's said are lies; or, at best, truths stretched far beyond their capacity. The BeOS never played videos well (nearest neighbor doubling as opposed to hardware overlay, for one). Almost no computers will be able to run it fully; something won't work. It might be the printer, maybe the modem, possibly the network card or CompactFlash reader. Something. But you don't hear about that. And most importantly in this day and age, it's an extremely mediocre platform for the internet. Just compare BeZilla to IE or Mozilla on WinXP; there's a world of difference. I could go on and on, but I think you see my point. We BeOS fans have been lied to for years, by Be, by our own hopes, and by countless groups who found it easier to put up a webpage and a hopeful mission statement than to actually make anything (Be3D? BeDTP? Unreal Tournament? Neverwinter Nights? Black & White? Opera [good version]? Gimmick? etc. etc.) It's a great system, but lying about its faults (or conveniently omitting them, as often happens, helps no one).

And let's face it; groups like OpenBeOS have a daunting task. From the engineers I've talked to, Dominic spent two years designing and implementing BFS. It's taken OpenBeOS a little under a year now, and they're almost done. And, I might note, they seem to be one of the most active teams within OpenBeOS. You do the math. It's going to be a long time, if ever. And if that day comes, great! Until then, I urge the fans to dispense with the statements of granduer. It might be all well and good to litter these forums with "you'll see," but I'll remind you that the last time that happened was when H-Kon misinterpreted a typo in a readme file.

So I have a favor to ask of all BeOS fans: I think the majority of us who read this site would be more than happy to let you do your own thing if you just do it without constantly talking about how other OSes are so old and crappy, and how the new BeOS release that's right around the corner is going to rule the world. It's irritating, and it's prevalent. That's a bad combination. If and when the new BeOS releases are ready, and if they're worthy of recognition, they will certainly get it here. Until then, stop with the grandeur and adopt a more objective view of the competitors; to see them as your potential customers will see them--that is, objectively, and without predisposition--will only do you good.