Once upon a time, I was devoted to BeOS. The desktop PC competition in the late '90's was Amiga OS, Mac OS, Windows 98/NT, OS/2, early BSD, and NT/AIX/Unix/Netware/Solaris at the server tiers....
Once upon a time, I was devoted to BeOS. The desktop PC competition in the late '90's was Amiga OS, Mac OS, Windows 98/NT, OS/2, early BSD, and NT/AIX/Unix/Netware/Solaris at the server tiers. NextSTEP was the only one I didn't use personally, and a friend was running what was probably the largest corporate collection of NeXT systems extant - he acknowledged that Sun Sparcs running Solaris would have been better for the purpose.
Both BeOS and OS/2 were very cost-effective and simply felt smoother, more refined, functional, and reliable than the crash-prone, sluggish alternatives on affordable PCs.
There's an interesting discussion here about roads not taken, and why each choice had competitive advantages or disadvantages at the time.
I've been trying Haiku on and off for several years. Window management is a pleasure there, my only issue with it is the default position and size of the tracker. I prefer it to look like a...
I've been trying Haiku on and off for several years. Window management is a pleasure there, my only issue with it is the default position and size of the tracker. I prefer it to look like a taskbar because it takes up less space that way (you can do that by dragging it by the handles it has on the sides). Since you are going to give it a try on an old laptop let me know if your WiFi works well, the only reasons Haiku is not one of my main OS are that I could never get WiFi to work and that the touchpad driver doesn't support right click and scrolling.
My ThinkPad is quite old indeed, it's an X61t, so about 10 years, but I can confirm wifi worked just fine out of the box. Scanned all the nearby networks, was able to seamlessly join and hop right...
My ThinkPad is quite old indeed, it's an X61t, so about 10 years, but I can confirm wifi worked just fine out of the box. Scanned all the nearby networks, was able to seamlessly join and hop right onto the internet. Sound works fine, it played a YouTube video in the default browser, and it recognized the resolution and utilized the intel driver without any configuration. Only hiccup from a hardware perspective is that the touchscreen and scrolling for the TrackPoint don't work, but that's to be expected I guess, the touchscreen can be kinda finnicky even in some Linux distros.
I was pleasantly surprised at how usable and powerful it is out of the gate, but I'm a little let down by some of the customizability tbh. I couldn't figure out how to disable anti-aliasing, they don't seem to have a setting for it and it ignored fonts.conf even after I replaced the stock one, it doesn't ship with any kind of stock themes or wallpapers except for the single default, and the default browser doesn't support any of my extensions, so I probably won't be able to use it as a daily driver. But I'll continue to experiment with it over the coming weeks and see what I can squeeze out of it. I have to say, if I were a few years younger again before I got so picky over my workflow, I probably would've been quite happy with it tbh. And it does have some really neat features, like being able to stack windows together and share just a single one. The way you can resize them and group them together is brilliant, way better than Windows or OSX's snap, and in a far older OS too. :D
The default browser is more limited than that, it doesn't even support web fonts so websites using custom or icon fonts won't look good. I think there's a fontawesome package in the depot to fix...
The default browser is more limited than that, it doesn't even support web fonts so websites using custom or icon fonts won't look good. I think there's a fontawesome package in the depot to fix some of the icon font issues.
The way you can resize them and group them together is brilliant, way better than Windows or OSX's snap, and in a far older OS too.
They were way ahead of their time, that's one of my favorite features.
Once upon a time, I was devoted to BeOS. The desktop PC competition in the late '90's was Amiga OS, Mac OS, Windows 98/NT, OS/2, early BSD, and NT/AIX/Unix/Netware/Solaris at the server tiers. NextSTEP was the only one I didn't use personally, and a friend was running what was probably the largest corporate collection of NeXT systems extant - he acknowledged that Sun Sparcs running Solaris would have been better for the purpose.
Both BeOS and OS/2 were very cost-effective and simply felt smoother, more refined, functional, and reliable than the crash-prone, sluggish alternatives on affordable PCs.
There's an interesting discussion here about roads not taken, and why each choice had competitive advantages or disadvantages at the time.
This article motivated me to finally give Haiku a try on my old ThinkPad, and perhaps you guys will find it interesting too!
I've been trying Haiku on and off for several years. Window management is a pleasure there, my only issue with it is the default position and size of the tracker. I prefer it to look like a taskbar because it takes up less space that way (you can do that by dragging it by the handles it has on the sides). Since you are going to give it a try on an old laptop let me know if your WiFi works well, the only reasons Haiku is not one of my main OS are that I could never get WiFi to work and that the touchpad driver doesn't support right click and scrolling.
My ThinkPad is quite old indeed, it's an X61t, so about 10 years, but I can confirm wifi worked just fine out of the box. Scanned all the nearby networks, was able to seamlessly join and hop right onto the internet. Sound works fine, it played a YouTube video in the default browser, and it recognized the resolution and utilized the intel driver without any configuration. Only hiccup from a hardware perspective is that the touchscreen and scrolling for the TrackPoint don't work, but that's to be expected I guess, the touchscreen can be kinda finnicky even in some Linux distros.
I was pleasantly surprised at how usable and powerful it is out of the gate, but I'm a little let down by some of the customizability tbh. I couldn't figure out how to disable anti-aliasing, they don't seem to have a setting for it and it ignored fonts.conf even after I replaced the stock one, it doesn't ship with any kind of stock themes or wallpapers except for the single default, and the default browser doesn't support any of my extensions, so I probably won't be able to use it as a daily driver. But I'll continue to experiment with it over the coming weeks and see what I can squeeze out of it. I have to say, if I were a few years younger again before I got so picky over my workflow, I probably would've been quite happy with it tbh. And it does have some really neat features, like being able to stack windows together and share just a single one. The way you can resize them and group them together is brilliant, way better than Windows or OSX's snap, and in a far older OS too. :D
The default browser is more limited than that, it doesn't even support web fonts so websites using custom or icon fonts won't look good. I think there's a fontawesome package in the depot to fix some of the icon font issues.
They were way ahead of their time, that's one of my favorite features.