201–210 of 223 posts
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If you like Snappy, try Bodhi Linux with the Mosksha desktop. https://www.bodhilinux.com/
Why is this downvoted so badly?
Beautiful to see such passion and great execution, especially for 20 years in a row. It's like a piece of art. I suspect the company that created BeOS actually lost the source-code and that's potentially the real reason they don't want to share, because from an economic perspective there does not seem anything of value there.
Nope. The source code exists. You can find rather corrupted chunks of it archived on a very famous archiving site. The other posters are correct - it belongs to someone and they don't want to release it because it contains a lot of proprietary code and cleaning it up to make it releasable would neuter it in a way that makes it pointless. That and the ~24 years where nothing was done to it making is way past useful even to Haiku.
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I think it's more likely the original BeOS source code contains proprietary code licensed from third-parties, which means someone would have to spend significant effort on figuring out what can and cannot be released.
Much worse, it's likely the BeOS code includes a bunch of unlicensed stuff. Be had been caught more than once "accidentally" including GPL'd code in their proprietary OS back when they existed. I doubt it's just GPL code that "accidentally" gets copy pasted into a codebase like that. If somebody has the code (e.g. from a previous job) it's getting pasted in "Just temporarily" and never being removed because there are…
(though to be honest, Android has a lot of BeOS concepts in it because the same engineers ended up working on it too. It has Binder, and Intents are basically BMessages - there are all the Loopers, Handlers and Receivers too...)
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The apps were snappy, but the hardware wasn't. Every menu/window opened immediately and without unnecessary animation... unless it needed some unexpected processing - then you were potentially waiting for the spinning rust to handle the swap file.
The UI was minimalistic, but with better hardware we also wanted nicer fonts, transitions, wobbly windows (I actually miss those) and countless other nice things that take time. Also, it’s pointless to open a menu in less time than it takes the screen to refresh.
https://userbase.kde.org/Tips/Enable_fun_desktop_effects_on_...
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Palmsource did open-source Binder, which is still around, and widely used.
Thanks for that history. I was under the impression it was an Android, Inc. invention, but that it came from BeOS is blowing my mind.
You also have most of the Intent system, the Receivers and Handlers as well as a lot of the general Android API to thank Be Inc for. When you look at the Be API, you can find analogues to most of the Android API, and once you realise that a bunch of the key developers were ex-Be Inc refugees it becomes a lot harder to see what is independent development, what was influenced by and what is a straight up clone of the Be API.
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I actually hope that history does repeat itself, and google gets severely punished
Well, it would appear that Google will be forced to stop paying companies to make Google the default search. This is actually kind of a death for Mozilla as that’s where most of their money comes from.
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The raspberry pie is a very odd computer which is hard to develop for. There are much better targets that are both simpler to develop for, cheaper, and easily available.
And we never really got any of them working, so I would contest that. Many years ago, I asked about Pi 2 support on the Haiku forums and there was a lot of ill will towards Broadcom closed binaries. I pointed at the Plan9 port and a couple more examples and nothing happened. I tried the same thing several times with the Pi 3 and the Pi 4, and someone more vocally pointed towards RISC-V. Some four years later, there i…
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Exactly what I thought as well. UIs get increasingly slower as time passes, not snappier. We had snappy UIs in the 80s and 90s.
We had bloated UIs in the 80s and 90s, it's just that what's come after is so much worse. Try using the old analog control systems where responses are basically instant. It feels like the controls are reading your mind.
We could have really snappy stuff today, but have gotten enamored with our latency inducing abstractions and haven't really gone back to fix it.
80s and 90s bloated UIs sure seem snappy and miniature by today's standards.
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That sounds more like licensing issues than "being 20 years in the past."
The result is the same for users, regardless of where the blame lies.
It's a network problem. Manufacturers aren't gonna care unless it's a big OS with lots of users. Your OS won't get a lot of users unless it has drivers. So the result is stagnation, and only the Big 3 OS continuing. Well... really the Big 2. Mac OS is a unique situation.
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See for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933 - Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened? (2023-06-23) Follow up to the above by the original author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 - Fast machines, slow machines (2023-06-28)
They're opening Notepad and Paint, very simple apps even for the time. Try MS Word. Also Windows NT was released in 1993 when typical PCs were more like 100MHz, so this is getting a 6x speedup from the designed experience.
https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html
The point is that the good old days aren't just pure nostalgia, some parts were genuinely good compared to modern bloated software.