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'Be' is nice, end of story

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Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#111

Post by anentropic »

tialaramex wrote: post #83
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 an…

Naive question... if your email client would have to do that anyway, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, does moving that responsibility to the OS make a net difference?

Is it that BeFS was indexing everything and not just the folders that needed to be indexed?

macos spotlight is also routinely indexing the file system, doesn't seem so different to me, naively

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#112

Post by anentropic »

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

Dude sure has enough plants on their desk

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#113

Post by throwaway82388 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #108

> but he also stewarded many great projects: [...] the Macintosh Portable My understanding was that the Macintosh Portable was an awful product, because it was just too big and the screen wasn't backlit. I never saw one myself, though.

I got to use one, and my impression was that it an expensive, impractical, heavy, underpowered machine with a low contrast lcd that made the cursor difficult to see when it was in motion. It was also cool, futuristic, like nothing I’d seen before. It was a novelty, people crowded around it.

But you’d have been better off lugging around an SE/30.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#114

Post by Someone »

georgeecollins wrote: post #67

This is a really interesting phrasing: >> There were problems within Apple that made the development of the OS nearly impossible, and to solve these problems Apple sought to purchase something that was close to their own vision. I think the truth is that Apple, and Apple + IBM worked on operating systems in this period and had trouble making a good one. Why it is hard for a mature company with legacy systems to creat…

> Why it is hard for a mature company with legacy systems to create a new operating system is a difficult thing to explain

In general, the hardest problem for such companies is backwards compatibility.

In the case of Apple, it was doubly so: they tried to build a pre-emptive multitasking operating system with memory protection that was backwards compatible (both for applications and system extensions) with an existing OS that had cooperative multitasking, did not have memory protection, and had OS support for patching system calls (a feature that allowed third parties to develop of such things as Switcher (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...), After Dark, Adobe Font Manager, and RAM Doubler).

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#115

Post by zozbot234 »

dominicm wrote: post #51

I worked on Haiku this summer as part of Google summer of code, and it just made me wish their attitude towards user experience was more prevalent in mainstream OSs. It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application. There's sensible UX that doesn't expect me to be a wizard to understand what's going on or how to dig deeper. Obviously it…

> It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application.

SerenityOS is also doing a lot to perfect their UX. It might become at least as popular as Haiku down the line.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#116

Post by macintux »

allenbrunson wrote: post #100

i worked at be, in the year 2000, for seven months. i got laid off when the company went out of business and got acquired. a few relics from my time there. my business card https://platinumball.net/be/business_card.jpg third floor break room. i saw jlg sitting on that couch, holding forth on the company, once or twice. https://platinumball.net/be/break_room.jpg a clipboard made out of a bebox motherboard. yep, i stil…

I can confirm that I now see your images.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#117

Post by anthk »

amatecha wrote: post #60
helf wrote: post #27

BeFS was amazing. I miss BeOS, TBH. I ran a heavily customized BeOS R5.05 install that had upgraded bits from OpenBeOS (later, HaikuOS), ZetaOS etc. I ran it as a daily driver on a Dell GX1 SFF that I swear was designed for BeOS: Max RAM the BeOS kernel supported without hackery was 768MB - The GX maxed out at 768MB; The GX1 had a Rage GPU that BeOS natively supported (Including 3D Acceleration!) which was a very sho…

You daily-drove a NeXTstation until 2008?! That's badass! kudos. I always appreciate people using stuff for as long as possible, especially when it's something awesome like a NeXT system, haha :) Dude.. just found the "for ebay" album on your Flickr profile... omg :( (Oooh also SGI Onyx2.. nice. I search the term "sgi" on Craigslist every day. All I have is a pair of O2's)

People used freebsd in 2004 with lynx under a 486.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#118

Post by anthk »

prox wrote: post #96
duped wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio has been a disaster on Linux for a long time (yes I know about jack, ardour, pipe wire, and so on). It's not surprising that pro audio applications ignore it wholesale.

Graphics are also so-so. Unless you do really specific graphics work (like movie cgi) it’s a no go for a lot of professionals.

OpenGL, Vulkan, CUDA, colord...

People used Cinelerra and Cinepaint. Now you have Krita and Blender.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#119

Post by tialaramex »

anentropic wrote: post #111
tialaramex wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

Naive question... if your email client would have to do that anyway, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, does moving that responsibility to the OS make a net difference? Is it that BeFS was indexing everything and not just the folders that needed to be indexed? macos spotlight is also routinely indexing the file system, doesn't seem so different to me, naively

I believe Spotlight has a full text search, which is a pretty major improvement, at of course a considerable price. Feels like a reasonable choice for My Novel/ and not a sane choice for Movie Downloads/ (unless maybe Spotlight can read subtitles???)

Also, an actual email client can specialise. BeFS is very general, the attributes can be typed but there's only one string type (other types include 32-bit and 64-bit integers, floats) so a Subject and a Sender email address both get indexed the same way. An email client might reasonably optimise for @corp.example type address searches for example, but then also do some simple keyword optimisations for subject line too.

You could not turn off indexing for some/ all folders in BeOS only for an entire filesystem (and if you do a bunch of stuff doesn't work)

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#120

Post by psd1 »

yafbum wrote: post #18
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..

Raspberry Pi distros are nice for this

My Pi4 is a good minute to the login prompt, I would not call it "instant boot" in any way!
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