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Review: SkyOS Beta 9

  Submitted by Tomasz Dominikowski SkyOS 51 Comments

“The general feeling that SkyOS gives is… Simply great! A lot of work done under the hood seems to be paying back with a solid, responsive operating system. It scales very nicely, opening up a lot of OpenGL demos and other applications at once doesn’t seem to affect stability, however it is currently very resource hungry (600MB RAM usage and up isn’t anything strange while using Firefox, Gaim and having a few more apps open). Let us not forget that this is a debug build. It is completely usable and boots blazingly fast (~15 seconds from GRUB to desktop) though.” My take: The best change? The new versioning scheme. Really.

About The Author

Thom Holwerda

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51 Comments

  1. 2005-12-04 7:32 pm
    Anonymous

    theres a lot of legal open source parts of this OS, and license requires you must display source… rather than just having everything compiled onthe cd.

    • 2005-12-04 7:37 pm
      Anonymous

      The source is available by request only while SkyOS is in beta.

      • 2005-12-04 7:40 pm
        Anonymous

        so when it goes live they walk away with the code? how nice.

        • 2005-12-04 7:43 pm
          Andrew Youll

          I think that should have read:

          “by request only, while SkyOS is in beta”.

          also the code is only available to those in the beta program… which does comply with the GPL.

          • 2005-12-04 7:47 pm
            Anonymous

            Thanks, thats what I meant.

          • 2005-12-05 1:32 am
            Anonymous

            Just to clarify, the GPL application source is available to anyone who requests it. Not just the beta testers.

      • 2005-12-04 8:34 pm
        somebody

        Got… to… bite… this… one… ;)

        The source is available by request only while SkyOS is in beta.

        Does anyone remember SkyOS not being in beta stage?

        After relicensing I mean. Sorry, but some jokes just have to get out.

        …

        Now more serious one… Doesn’t this feel strange?

        Tomasz Dominikowski = SkyOS QA and Translation Team Leader = Review writer

        When a review is done by one of team members, I can’t help my self but to think “This sucks, if no one but team members wants to review it”. Team members are biased, even MS pays for (:non-biased:) (:thrird party:) (:reviews:) to at least look (:unbiased;).

        • 2005-12-04 8:43 pm
          Thom Holwerda

          When a review is done by one of team members, I can’t help my self but to…

          Yup. So, read this review any way you want. To say it’s unbiased is probably not true. It’s just that there aren’t many reviews of these sorts of releases, so we gotta do with whatever we have. Biased or not.

        • 2005-12-04 9:03 pm
          Tomasz Dominikowski

          Of course I cannot be truly unbiased but then again I can’t help that SkyOS doesn’t have any major flaws and that it works reasonably well.

          I did this review, because I have promised a few people to do so. No, not to the core team.

          PS If you refresh the page you will notice that Robert corrected a factual mistake in the review.

          • 2005-12-04 9:16 pm
            Anonymous

            “I can’t help that SkyOS doesn’t have any major flaws and that it works reasonably well. ”

            Well thats all well and good. But until a third party can review it and test your statements its all hot air.

            everything runs great when the tester can create the test environment. All OS’s run great until you try to use them for something that is outside the scope of the “QA”/developement team.

  2. 2005-12-04 8:00 pm
    Anonymous

    Ignoring the licensing, the lack of applications and all the other crap you can fling at SkyOS, I still think the GUI is ugly.

    How about some more work?

    • 2005-12-04 8:17 pm
      hollovoid

      you know, it is still in beta, so nothing is really *final* and every time ive seen the licensing issue come up they have been very informational, and responsive on why it isnt on thier site yet, and what the status is. its a very interesting os, designed by very few talented people, give it time.

  3. 2005-12-04 8:44 pm
    GreatBunzinni

    Is it just me or isn’t SkyOS getting a lot of coverage from osnews.com?

  4. 2005-12-04 8:46 pm
    Anonymous

    Gnome is my skyos

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/62853542@N00/70103245/

  • 2005-12-05 2:16 pm
    Anonymous

    What window theme are you using? Looks interesting.

  • 2005-12-04 8:51 pm
    Anonymous

    Virtually everything in the operating system world is a variant of Linux, it gets kind of dull hearing about yet another distribution of Linux, so Skyos at least is an alternative operating system.

    Those OS that are not Linux distributions are mainly also very similar, such as BSD, NetBSD, freeBSD, PCBSD, OSX, Solaris, OpenSolaris XXXsolaris etc.

    It would be more interesting on OSNEWS to hear a bit more about some of the architecture or design of each OS.

  • 2005-12-04 8:52 pm
    Anonymous

    Let me get this straight: the reviewer doesn’t understand the difference between app-used and disk-cache RAM (as evidenced by Robert’s correction at the bottom), and yet he leads the ‘QA team’?

    With all respect guys, I think you should find someone with a modicum more operating system knowledge to look after your quality assurance… 🙂

    • 2005-12-04 9:01 pm
      hechacker1

      I think what Robert meant is that there is no distinction between disk cache and memory usage at the moment. Perhaps the same display is used for both.

      I too am a beta tester and this release is very impressive and much more stable. The only thing I have to bitch about however is the lack of support for my high end video card (6800gt). Unfortunately though, it’s up to nvidia to provide open source drivers, or Robert to hack up a drivers for unsupported hardware.

    • 2005-12-05 10:10 am
      Anonymous

      He also doesn’t know the proper meaning of the word “scale”. I guess he just thinks it sounds cool.

  • 2005-12-04 9:36 pm
    ferrix

    My one problem with SkyOS is how much computing power it seems to require. I am one of the beta testers, but the machines I can dedicate to SkyOS have at most 256MB of RAM and that officially is not even enough for SkyOS Beta 9. Unoficially, it probably would work, but very, very slowly.

    I haven’t tried beta 9, but I installed the previous one and at the time I thought performance was nothing at all to get excited about. If anything, it seemed slower than Linux distros I usually run on that machine… I was a bit disappointed.

    Yes, I realise this is a beta build, probably with debugging bits left in, and I hope things will improve. Because I feel a brand new system with no legacy issues (the usual excuse for bloat in other OSes) ought to be perfectly fine in 256MB or RAM – otherwise, something is wrong somewhere.

  • 2005-12-04 9:39 pm
    Andre Silver Supporter

    SkyOS has not enabled its swap function in its betas

    so that is why it uses, and needs, lots of RAM.

    I got some troubles with the nvidia drivers,

    but for the rest it works fine, well, it

    is suitable as a surf os, but that is it.

    Well, it is still beta, keep that in mind.

  • 2005-12-04 9:52 pm
    Anonymous

    Apologies, maybe this has come up a hundred times before, but why doesn’t the developer open source the software (GPL or whatever) to allow others to work on it?

    A non-Unix-based desktop OS that isn’t Windows is sounds very interesting to me, but I’m disappointed about the licencing conditions. And it seems pretty self-defeating in the end. After all, desktop Linux adoption is hardly skyrocketing, and that’s a far more mature system that’s available absolutely free. Who on earth is going to pay for SkyOS when it’s “finished”?

    • 2005-12-04 10:04 pm
      ferrix

      >Apologies, maybe this has come up a hundred times before

      It certainly has come up before, and the answer is, because he doesn’t wish to. That is his right, and that’s all that needs to be said.

      However if the licensing is the issue for you, try Syllable instead. It is also a non-Windows, non-Unix system with functionality and goals qiute similar to SkyOS – and it *is* open source.

      I keep an eye on both projects, and I must say, SkyOS might be a closed project with small team of devs, but it seems to progress somewhat faster than Syllable which is open for all… Not that I’m writing Syllable off – I have high hopes for both.

      • 2005-12-04 10:45 pm
        Anonymous

        Just out of curiosity, in which areas do you see SkyOS as ahead of Syllable? Aside from subjective stuff like the GUI, the only significant advantage SkyOS has (as far as I can see) is the ports of some popular Gtk apps.

        And even that is a debatable advantage — they’re useful, sure, but it’s better to have native software.

        As for Haiku, it’s making faster progress than it appears. Although currently we can only try out the kernel with a GUI strapped on top, many of the other subsystems (‘kits’) are quite mature and being developed in parallel, so they’ll be slotted in soon, making it a much more powerful system very quickly.

        • 2005-12-04 10:55 pm
          ferrix

          > in which areas do you see SkyOS as ahead of Syllable?

          Just in the area of actual useability as a desktop, due largely to porting some GTK apps, as you mentioned. Just as an example, SkyOS *has* useable (and standard) web browser, functional Email, and now even a web server. Syllable’s browser situation is not pretty at all, while native email program is in very early development and although I think there was a port of Apache for Syllable early on, I suspect it is no longer functional.

          I do realise Syllable (and Haiku) teams take an approach of building solid system fundations first, and adding apps later. I also agree that developing native apps is preferable in a way to just porting Unix ones. However the fact remains, as it stands now, SkyOS is the most useable one.

          • 2005-12-05 8:00 am
            Vanders

            Syllable’s browser situation is not pretty at all, while native email program is in very early development and although I think there was a port of Apache for Syllable early on, I suspect it is no longer functional.

            Syllable currently has ABrowse, which is based on a recent KHTML engine and works very nicely. Whisper (The native email client) is functional and stable. As for a web server, Syllable isn’t a server OS. However Apache 1 was working long ago and the important parts of Apache 2 (APR etc.) are already ported, so if someone really wanted to they could build Apache 2 for Syllable. Or any of the other small web servers available, for that matter.

        • 2005-12-04 11:19 pm
          Thom Holwerda

          Just out of curiosity, in which areas do you see SkyOS as ahead of Syllable?

          SkyOS’ main selling points over Syllable are, as far as I’m concerned:

          1) Searching & indexing: SkyOS has Spotlight/BeFS-like searching functionailty built-in the operating system. There are currently only three operating systems that feature this: OSX, BeOS/Zeta (even though BeFS’ queries don’t search inside documents), and SkyOS. No, Beagle doesn’t count, as it is a pain to set up. You could add in Vista, but normal people cannot buy Vista yet (but they can obtain SkyOS/BeOS/Zeta/OSX).

          2) Firefox & Thunderbird. Syllable has little to offer in this area.

          3) Gimp/Pixel. Syllable also has nothing to offer here.

          4) The easy-to-use services framework (or whatever it’s called). I can only think of one operating system that also offers this ease-of-use: OS X.

          But there are also selling points Syllable has over SkyOS:

          1) Syllable is free in every sense of the word. Allthough the license they chose isn’t exactly my personal preference, it is in any case more than SkyOS can offer. As an individual, you can potentially influence Syllable’s direction pretty much by contributing. Aside from a few publicity stunts, SkyOS is and always will be Robert Szeleney’s brainwork, and there is little to no way to influence him (don’t get me wrong: it’s his god-given right to have it this way, and I fully respect it, and I am not passing judgement on it either).

          2) Because Syllable is GPL, it can fish from a large pool of stable and well-tested Linux drivers. SkyOS must resort to bsd/mit-licensed projects, vastly decreasing the size of the pool it can fish from.

          3) Completely subjective: as a whole, the Syllable community is much more grown-up than the SkyOS community. Allthough things have been getting better, the SkyOS community is much more like a playground, ruining it for the actual team-members who are generally normal and grown-up folk.

          —

          Just a few that came up.

    • 2005-12-04 10:13 pm
      DigitalAxis

      Because he wants to write it, and he wants to use his skills to make a product that he can sell.

      I mean, Robert seems to be an extremely gifted programmer given that this is his fifth try at writing an operating system and now we have, with additions of GPL’d artwork and some toolkits, an apparently usable functional OS. Now, he wants to sell his labor of love, and I guess everyone will get to see if anyone wants to pay. People have already paid to be in the beta-test program, remember.

  • 2005-12-04 10:08 pm
    Andre Silver Supporter

    Yeah, syllable is open source, but GPL.

    that means they can legally port linux drivers etc.

    but still… has the same licencing restrictions as linux.

    I prefer a more open licence like zlib or mit.

    take a look at the haiku-os project, open source beos clone.

    and there are lots of os’es at http://www.altos.tk

    • 2005-12-04 10:20 pm
      ferrix

      > take a look at the haiku-os project, open source beos clone

      Well, Haiku seem to do many things right, just very, very slowly… it is really in a different league from SkyOS and Syllable. These two can already be installed and actually used, if in a limited fashion, while Haiku is still at the stage when they get excited because Tracker actually started up without crashing…

      Edited 2005-12-04 22:26

      • 2005-12-04 10:30 pm
        Andre Silver Supporter

        That;s true, but well

        take a look at syllable, i have about 5 computers,

        and only on one of it, syllable runs fine.

        well.. skyos is a little hard with its lack of swapping support,

        but just take a look at altos.tk they got the complete list. Visopsys sounds interesting, but refuses on all my computers.. and i am waiting for triangleos 0.0.5 release, since 0.0.3 is rather old,

  • 2005-12-04 11:14 pm
    Anonymous

    Hmm. A review of a struggling operating system, written and submitted to OSNews by one of its own team members.

    This sounds like a cry for attention, if you ask me.

    • 2005-12-04 11:25 pm
      ferrix

      OK, time for some new rules:

      1. It is WRONG to submit articles related to Operating Systems to OS News.

      2. Furthermore, if OS News *must* publish any articles related to Operating Systems, they should only concern the most popular one.

      3. Last but not least, articles can only be submitted by people completely clueless regarding the topic at hand.

      Edited 2005-12-04 23:26

  • 2005-12-05 2:53 am
    Anonymous

    Did anyone else find the tone of the article a bit… unprofessional? Each criticism of SkyOS seemed to be followed close behind by a quickly slathered excuse like how its pretty good for just beta software, and inbetween the general information there are quite a few would-be segues into how awesome SkyOS is.

    Is it just me?

  • 2005-12-05 3:22 am
    Anonymous

    From the review:

    Processor: Athlon XP 2000+ (@2140MHz)

    From Google:

    AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.667GHz)

    I thought this seemed wrong……and I’m quite sure it’s nothing more than a typo….but 2140Mhz does not equal 1.667Ghz. In fact, given google’s acertation that 1 megahertz = 0.001 gigahertz, then 2140 Mhz would mean the chip runs at 2.14 GHz, which, in fact, it does not.

    Sorry to be that guy, but I felt it my duty as the nitpicky and annoying guy to point that out.

    • 2005-12-05 3:26 am
      Anonymous

      wait…..maybe perhaps overclocked?

    • 2005-12-05 10:05 pm
      Tomasz Dominikowski

      It is overclocked. FSB 171MHz*12.5 = ~2140MHz. I would not point the clock out if it wasn’t overclocked.

  • 2005-12-05 3:37 am
    Anonymous

    As I see it and had learned from analysts and from own experience SkyOS would be nothing in the OS market it will be forgotten very easily after it first release. Nobody wants another closed source OS with a mastermind that can not be influenced or can be in just a very little way. Lets face it the only people using it will be Linux users (which I am one but have no interest in SkyOS) that will keep using Linux but will try SkyOS. There will also be lots of torrents of SkyOS cracked and freely available which will decrease the little people that will buy it. It will be to expensive to Robert and will make it an OpenSOurce project maybe. And at the end maybe he can get even worst and go to work for Microsoft. Just mark my words like it will happen almost exactly that way.

  • 2005-12-05 3:59 am
    Anonymous

    sky os is a great thing, i hope the open sourced parts are still available to the publice once they’re out of beta and im sure they will comply with all licensing issues……i apologize if i caused a lot of fuss—-but you must relize that somebody’s gotta do it or it will bite you on down the road by someone else.

    robert also told me a long time ago that there will be a free version of SkyOS. I hope this is still the case.

    ALSO: I liked the old skyOS.org design, the new one is ugly i liked the pretty clouds.

  • 2005-12-05 4:19 am
    Sandwich Boy

    news:alt.os.syllable exists, along with a bunch of BeOS-related newsgroups, and alt.BeUnited. I’m going to newgroup alt.os.skyos, next. Fire up Xnews. Pineapple News, Slrn, something and get involved. Together we can fight the monolithic menaces dominating the OS landscape, to put an overly dramatic point on things.

  • 2005-12-05 9:57 am
    agentj

    I think that people are simply jealous that someone has coded goo app and they get angry that they can’t get pirated version for free.

    I remember the battle over making SkyOS open source. Why would you need that code ? IMO some people wanted to take it, and make a fork which would probably end up in changing UI theme and adding names to the authors section and/or porting tons of unix apps.

    I doubt that anyone will put SkyOS on torrents, because it’d be easy to track where has the leak occured. If I were Robert, I’d put some customer identity into each compilation, so when any version is leaked, he can look up the sucker.

    • 2005-12-05 11:11 am
      Anonymous

      The UI Theming can be changed, there is current a document on development that details how this will work, the theme engine can be replaced.

      There have already been beta versions of SkyOS 5 out on the Torrents.

    • 2005-12-05 12:41 pm
      Anonymous

      Ohhh, please some young 14 year japanese hacker can put torrents of skyos everywhere. He just haven’t done so because of the insignificance of SkyOS. SkyOS philosophy “We take from the OpenSource community but never give back”. To tell you the true I’m a big Gentoo Arch Linux and Debian user from long time and now I will buy an OS for the fist time and it will be Novell’s Suse Linux. So I sure can pay for an open source project like thousands and thousands of Linux users do via donations or buying their favorite distro. SkyOS just won’t ever be athread not even to Linux nor BSD’s so lets not talk about something that doesn’t exist.

  • 2005-12-05 5:04 pm
    Anonymous

    bah you can get beta8.2 and 8.4 also its cool load it up in vpc check it out but there aint much to do with it i would definitly like to try the new beta but like alot of those Os as long as it cant replace atleast 90% of what the major player do i dont see why would anyone buy and use it as its main Os …maybe security wise it could have an avenue but aside from that i dont see this is more of a fun thing to play with but replayability is pretty low i mean when you look at it even linux as a hard time making its place as a general public Os and even among those that use it on a day to day basis most of them also run a win or a mac machine also take into account the ,and yes i maybe totally off track ,but the arrival of mac Os on a X86 platform ,for now “on a X86” but that may eventualy become “on X86” ,will have a great impact on what whe will see in the next five years as much on the big player side ,microsoft ,then on the small player side ,linux smaller distro and smaller Os tendency.

    so basicly SkyOs as its merite since as you can see it doesnt leave anybody indifferent but so do a couple of alt Os out there and atleast one thing whe cant say about it is that i aint evolving cuz there sure is alot of Os out there that are in stagnation stage.

  • 2005-12-05 5:15 pm
    Anonymous

    I know it probbaly has a niche market of people that don’t particularily care about how it looks. But the GUI is ugly and incredibly boring. Let a graphic designer loose on it and give it some flair!

  • 2005-12-05 9:10 pm
    Andre Silver Supporter

    not everyone likes the same,

    there are more themes, so you can set it to another you like better, but i do like the default gui.

  • 2005-12-06 12:13 am
    Anonymous

    Then as soon as they had a following they escalated their system requirements into the realm of the absurd. 600mb ram???

    go to hell

  • 2005-12-06 4:01 am
    Anonymous

    As I searched I found lots of torrents of it available so sorry, SkyOS is never going to succeed, as sad as it looks it is a reality.

  • 2005-12-06 8:24 pm
    Zedicus

    Background

    I’m a Linux convert from Windows, its been about 3 years now I suppose. I started with Mandrake to learn the ropes. Now I run Debian.

    Installer.

    Very easy to use, simple, well laid out. This reminds me of the Lycoris installer actually. Its very friendly looking.

    First boot.

    Boots fairly quickly on mid range hardware. Very impressed with the simple layouts. Easy to navigate menus. color sceme is bright and friendly with out being hard on the eyes. Very friendly colors in default gui.

    Usefulness

    A bit lacking but the basics are there. Im not sure rather the final plan of this is OS is to be an easy to use for simple web browsing and email, or not. But it has come a long way and is marching forward. While I love the general look and feal of this OS, I doubt I will ever use it myself. I could easily see setting it up on grandparents/parents computers, possibly in school settings and libraries.

    Tools and features.

    I like the layout of the tools menus etc. again a bit like, say, some of the KDE control panels. Very easy to find your way around in. very friendly looking, and mostly in what would be considered common sense areas.

    Final thoughts.

    Very awesome considering the team of one developing the entire OS. I hope some day it becomes a finished, usable, widely excepted product. While it may not be for everyone, I love it for its easy, user friendly, friendly looking UI, nice themes