My friend the other day told me about BeOS and said "It was the best operating system I have ever seen!" I had never heard about it but he was telling me about all the features. Seems interesting and useful.

What got him really excited was when he told me about a group trying to bring it back with Haiku. It is an open source version that will not use the Linux kernel.

I am curios to hear what the Linux community thinks about Haiku and BeOS? Will you use or develop for Haiku? Is this something you are excited about? Do you think it can get popular?

http://www.haiku-os.org/

"BeOS" appears to be one of several good-looking operating systems that just did not catch on, and probably never will. Instead, what you see consistently being done is to gather around the Unix model-of-the-world and to implement that in various different ways. By now, there is tremendous momentum behind this unifying concept, on more than 25 very-different hardware platforms now in the case of Linux, and, at the end of the day, that's really what matters. You want to write your program and you want it to run "there." The engineering need is a serviceable operating system model that already runs, wherever you want your software to be.

BeOS was the most fantastic OS at the time it was introduced. They threw away any legacy ideas and made one of my most favorite OS's. They almost sold out to Apple but bid too high.

That was like back in 1995 and the open beos team has worked slowly for this long to make a BeOS replacement. The thing that killed BeOS was hardware support and lack of java.

Today it is still fast but doesn't have some of the great features BeOS had. Worth a try in a usb flash or virtual mahcine. Some odd issues that you just have to learn to get used to. First tends to be how to move the taskbar. Grab it with your hand and pull it to any side.

I've installed Haiku in a VM and it looks pretty good. However, in the years I have been aware of it there has been no real development in the OS that I can see and certainly I've seen no mainstream releases for it, as you do Linux.
As far as "alternative" OSs go I've played with ReactOS, Plan 9 and QNX, amongst others. Only QNX has any money and energy behind it that I can see and I still don't understand their business model or aims at all.

Probably just needs to find a good niche market.

To my knowledge, you pay for non-commercial (OOPS, read: commercial) use. Solid business model in my opinion. And they don't aim at the desktop or the server market; used mostly in embedded systems.

And it has / can have a small foot print; years ago they had a 1.44 MB floppy disk containing an OS with GUI, web browser and email client. Nowadays we're lucky if we can find something below 50MB (or whatever).

I suppose I'm just surprised they have enough customers to keep it going, given that Linux seems to find its way into most devices nowadays. I also don't recall seeing it running on anything and I tend to be curious about POS terminals and the like.
Still, I'm glad QNX exists and should probably find out more about it.

There seem to be a pretty hardcore group of BeOS fans who want to see it make a resurgence. The trick will be convincing non-tech people to use it though.

One problem for Haiku is software. The BeOS stuff doesn't all run yet, it's a bit old, and a lot's not free. For a word processor, you have a choice of Globe (2000) that's discontinued or a port of Abiword that doesn't work. Basically, you've got a browser, email client, media-player, and text-editor.

Hardware support is poor, too: I had no sound and no ethernet port!

I used to visit BeBits.com once in a while for BeOS apps.


Not sure of QNX's fate. It was supposed to have an OpenQNX but that faded out. Rim will have to sell QNX I'd think.

Funny you should say that:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08..._license_bb10/
I still get email from QNX marketing based on my downloading it to try in a VM so I hadn't put two and two together.
From the article I linked to it would appear I owe them an apology as QNX is used in cars [I don't see all that many but come to think of it I may have seen it in a Mercedes], media players [been years since I bought one], military drones [will only own one if I become a super villain] and Nuclear power plants [never been to one, sadly].
So, that tells me! QNX is doing fine.
Would like to say the same of BeOS and will certainly try bebits.com, thanks.

I was a BeOS user back in the day, I still have the boxed versions. It was never really much more than a hobby OS though, because in spite of all the money they spent on it, there were never any drivers for much of anything, and very few applications. It could do amazing things though, considering the abilities of other systems at the time, like streaming many channels of audio with no dropouts, running 8 cpus, 64 desktops, and had a true 64-bit filesystem when even most mainframes didn't. There just wasn't much you could DO with it, though. I don't remember ever getting on the internet with it, except with a dial-up modem with configurable hardware, because there were no drivers for anything else. They wasted a lot of money in the beginning trying to sell computers using expensive proprietary hardware, and then developing and selling a version for the PowerPC architecture. It wasn't till they ported it to x86 that it took off at all, but by that time they were mostly out of capital and decided to work on Internet Appliances. We all know how that worked out. A sad case of what could have been a great company if they had done a few things different. A lot of people who bought the boxed versions were really disappointed by how underdeveloped it actually was. With almost no applications or drivers, you were just kind of stuck looking at a few demos, unless you were trying to develop for it. Imagine running a basic install of Windows 98 in safe mode with no Internet and you have a good idea of how stripped down it was. I have also tried out Haiku, but I really don't know where that's headed either. There were a bunch of projects to recreate BeOS, but since BeOS was never open source they all have to be from clean-room scratch to be legal. Haiku is the only one to make it to square two, even, but unless they can port a LOT more apps to it, I don't ever see it going anywhere. Building an OS from scratch is a MAJOR undertaking.