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'Be' is nice, end of story

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Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#81

Post by KronisLV »

ilyt wrote: post #78
KronisLV wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No warnings, nothing that stopped you. I'm not sure I follow why this is a good thing. Having the option is good, but some sort of a sanity check and a warning dialog just seems like looking out for your users. For example, I recently used Linux on the desktop as my daily driver and wrote about my experiences [1]. At one point, I considered that the system was perhaps a bit of a mess in regards to the installed pac…

About Linus, I've migrated some people to Debian purely because they managed to fuck up the Ubuntu (or one of its flavours) upgrade somehow... and those were not linux-illiterate people. I dunno what it is but Ubuntu have weirdly higher rate of fuckups on upgrade than we've seen with Debian. Hell, it even survived that one time one of our admins upgraded by 2 releases of debian at once... Might be conjecture based on…

That's an interesting point of view!

In my experience, DEB distros have somehow been more stable than RPM ones, but Debian and Ubuntu wouldn't be an order of magnitude off from one another (aside from Ubuntu giving you more leeway in regards to proprietary software out of the box).

Well, maybe apart from the whole "snap" debacle, which is more of an architectural issue in my eyes, going around the package manager (and even then doing it in a way that's a bit more counter-culture than what AppImage or Flatpak does; even if I can understand their desire for automatic updates).

Then again, I have no issue using Docker containers and actually liked older Ubuntu LTS Unity desktop environment (which was stable in my experience, contrary to what others experienced), so maybe I'm a bit of an oddball here.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#82

Post by unsupp0rted »

a-dub wrote: post #38
pcurve wrote: post #25

New-ish video of actual BeBox running in HD video quality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkM9WbB8cWM I didn't know it had functional LED light meter in front of the case. very cool. Obligatory demo from the 90s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ

it can play MULTIPLE VIDEOS AT THE SAME TIME (!)

It can show the content of a folder window while dragging it around the screen!

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#83

Post by tialaramex »

Veliladon wrote: post #24

Even now over 20 years later we still haven't had anything near as cool as BeFS. Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns.

> Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns.

As it soon turned out, almost everybody. All that BeFS does, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, is BTree indexes, for each index you want your filesystem gets a little slower and bigger. It starts out "Quite a bit worse than some of the alternatives available at the time" and goes down from there. If you switch the indexing off so as to get back reasonable performance, now your email folders are just unsorted and sorting them takes forever as it would on a Windows PC (except your Windows PC has an email client so you wouldn't do that).

This makes for a cool demo of course, which is important if your actual goal is to get Apple to hire you instead of Jobs, but there's a reason why your filesystem did not add this fairly simple feature and you still have an email client.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#84

Post by tialaramex »

naikrovek wrote: post #80
Veliladon wrote: post #24

Even now over 20 years later we still haven't had anything near as cool as BeFS. Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns.

multiple comments about BeFS and none describe why it is so good.

BeFS has file attributes (so you can say this file is an email I received, add from="Bob Smith ", received="2022-11-15") and it can optionally but by default index all these attributes using an on-disk BTree.

Many modern systems do have file attributes, although they're not always as capable as the ones in BeFS, and none of them to my knowledge chose to add all these BTrees because keeping them up-to-date is expensive.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#85

Post by [deleted] »

BirAdam wrote: post #8
eduction wrote: post #5

>the next generation of Apple’s Macintosh operating system: Copeland. I’m sorry but it’s Copland, after the composer Aaron Copland. Having read altogether too many editions of Macworld in the post Steve, pre Steve era, that error (repeated later in the text) leapt off the page. (Admittedly, this would be kind of an hilarious name for a failed OS.)

Corrected.

[deleted]

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#87

Post by bombolo »

ilyt wrote: post #78
KronisLV wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No warnings, nothing that stopped you. I'm not sure I follow why this is a good thing. Having the option is good, but some sort of a sanity check and a warning dialog just seems like looking out for your users. For example, I recently used Linux on the desktop as my daily driver and wrote about my experiences [1]. At one point, I considered that the system was perhaps a bit of a mess in regards to the installed pac…

About Linus, I've migrated some people to Debian purely because they managed to fuck up the Ubuntu (or one of its flavours) upgrade somehow... and those were not linux-illiterate people. I dunno what it is but Ubuntu have weirdly higher rate of fuckups on upgrade than we've seen with Debian. Hell, it even survived that one time one of our admins upgraded by 2 releases of debian at once... Might be conjecture based on…

You can't get views with a video where you don't do anything weird and stuff just works.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#88

Post by MonkeyClub »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #77
tartoran wrote: post #15

Im itching for a simple OS that is user friendly and just simple, something that would instant boot and would be functional offline. Linux is great and all but sometimes it feels too bloated for a simple limited purpose machine..

The era of these type of "simple" OSes has come to an end. Linux is now the king of hardware support and nothing out there can even try to compete, not even Windows. And "consumer" hardware support is getting harder and harder; we did not really improve the situation at all from the 90s. Linux drivers, while some of them are not proprietary (before you ask: Android drivers are mostly proprietary), are still inseparab…

Yep, spot on!

In the next decade I see even Microsoft moving way more towards Linux.

Still unclear on whether they’d ditch the windows kernel for Windows, and adapt the UI for it.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#89

Post by monista »

rzzzt wrote: post #61
gattilorenz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application. I think after Windows 7 the processes are grouped per application in Task Manager. We’re all grumpy about the redesigns of things we are familiar with, but little UX improvements happen all the time.

Not the Details tab, though, and the name of the executable is shown there. The tree view in Process Explorer (shipped with Sysinternals) is the best of both worlds.

I wanted to point to FOSS (GPL3) alternative ProcessHacker [1] which I'm using for years, and found out that their github link [2] now redirects to systeminformer [3], looks like repo rebranding, wasn't able to find it mentioned anywhere though.

[1]: https://processhacker.sourceforge.io/

[2]: https://github.com/processhacker/processhacker/

[3]: https://github.com/winsiderss/systeminformer/

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#90

Post by p_l »

tialaramex wrote: post #84
naikrovek wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

multiple comments about BeFS and none describe why it is so good.

BeFS has file attributes (so you can say this file is an email I received, add from="Bob Smith ", received="2022-11-15") and it can optionally but by default index all these attributes using an on-disk BTree. Many modern systems do have file attributes, although they're not always as capable as the ones in BeFS, and none of them to my knowledge chose to add all these BTrees because keeping them up-to-date is expensiv…

NTFS provides on-disk indexes, that's where Windows Search stores its data... and how directories work in NTFS. Similar features can be handled in ZFS (the biggest issue is that IIRC its large K/V structure is AVL Tree, so you'd probably need to add a new object at ZPL layer).

What is the big difference is that BeFS exposed the extended attributes easily in the file manager and APIs - compare it with other systems where the APIs were little known or not used - POSIX extended attributes which are very limited (4k), Solaris extended attributes (which let you open a file as a directory) but are Solaris only, WinNT which had the issue of WinNT being a niche among windows systems, etc. etc.

BeOS in comparison required at least considerable porting work, at worst writing from scratch, and that meant the new features were much more visible.

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