I know Microsoft was really big back then, but why BeOS and OS/2 Warp never get into and GNU/Linux did?
BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
241–250 of 430 posts
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#242Haiku is really good. Would recommend anyone to try it out in a VM (I had it running on my actual laptop for a short time, but unfortunately my job pretty much requires me to run Linux so it couldn't stay). Haiku has a really responsive UI with a 90s look so you can actually tell what is a button.
How painful was it to get it running on a laptop? I've been interested in Haiku for a long time now, but I don't really have a place to play with it except on my laptop.
You have to have the right laptop. At the time I had a Thinkpad (X1 IIRC?) which fairly much worked out of the box, but I'm fairly sure it won't work on $random laptop. For best results and the lowest barrier to entry try it first in a VM.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
We still wouldn't have it; no way Apple w/o Steve Jobs but w/ BeOS survives.
If Apple had failed, I wonder what Steve would have done after Pixar. Start a new computer company? Could he (or perhaps a better question: would he) have swooped in with Mac compatibility mode? The real win was a mobile future sans Microsoft. I doubt smart phones would be what they are today if not for the iPhone, and the iPhone required huge resources and a maniac cracking the whip. Would Jony Ive leave a failing A…
Nokia is still around, and working from the offices I used to visit regularly in Espoo.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#244BeOS was really something of what the future 'could' have almost been. Too bad that it was killed by better competitors. But again I think its fair to compare with the lessons learned from its successor 'Haiku' that can be learned by many other OSes: From what I can see from using Haiku for a bit, it has the bazar community element from the open-source culture with its package management and ports system from Linux a…
I installed BeOS when it first came out. To me it was a cool tech demo, but it was fairly useless as it didn't have a usable browser (NetPositive was half baked at best), couldn't play a lot of video codecs and couldn't connect to a Windows network share. I feel like if they launched a better experience for existing Windows users, it would have done much better.
There was a version of Opera 3.62 for BeOS around 2000. At the time, Opera was a great browser.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amiga did this in 1985. It's just that for compatibility reasons Apple couldn't do this. Even funnier: the fastest hardware to run old MacOS (68k version) on: an Amiga computer.
A non-Apple computer? Was "Hackintosh" (presumably under a different name) a thing back then?
I sometimes used my Atari ST with an emulator called Aladin.
"Cracked" to work without Mac ROMs. But wasn't really useful to me because of lack of applications (at the time).
IIRC there were solutions like this for the Amiga too.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
The money wasted on the BeBox killed BeOS
Apple began to re-kick ass when they made an amazing laptop (tiBook). This was the first truly viable Unix laptop, with promise to be a cut above the competition (there was none) in terms of style and usability. tiBook was bonkers. Suddenly, I didn't really need to sit in the room, surrounded by boxes, but rather could go to the park and access the room from under a tree. If Be had managed to capture that, I think it…
Toshiba was selling Solaris laptops.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#247I actually bet a little bit of money on that alternative universe. I used to jokingly recount the lesson learned: “Never bet against Steve Jobs.”
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
OS X was around in the days of XP and Linux was perfectly usable on the desktop. A few years earlier things were a little more bleak.
> OS X was around in the days of XP and Linux was perfectly usable on the desktop. > A few years earlier things were a little more bleak. I admit I was unclear on the time I was talking about, and probably inadvertently mangled a few things. As for Linux in the XP era, I was using it, yes, but I wouldn't recommend it to others back then because it still had pretty hard sticking points with regards to what hardware it…
Yeah Wifi on Linux sucked in those days. For me that was the biggest pain point about desktop Linux. In fact I seem to recall having fewer issues with WiFi on FreeBSD than I did on Linux -- that's pure anecdata of course. I remember the first time I managed to get this one laptop's WiFi working without an external dongle and to do that I had to run Windows drivers on Linux via some wrapper-tool (not WINE). To this day I have no idea how that ever worked.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
But a bunch of the methods we have for securing, say, mobile phones, grew out of user accounts. Personally I don't know Android innards deeply, but when I was trying to backup and restore a rooted phone I did notice that every app's files have a different owner uid/gid and the apps typically won't launch without that set up correctly. So it would seem they implemented per-app separation in this instance by having a u…
Or just take a Docker-like approach, where each app thinks it is the only user and intra-app communication is where you put the security functionality
But the predecessor to containers were features like having daemons chroot into somewhere else and drop their uid to something that can't do much. That very much grew out of the Unix solutions. If Unix daemons were written for decades assuming all processes have equal privilege maybe we wouldn't see that.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#250If you are interested there is a way to make linux look like BeOs [0].
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/d8e54k/window_mak...