A long time ago, I actually bought a copy of BeOS 5 Professional to run on a pair of Pentium 3's. I really did quite enjoy using it, it was snappy, however, ro

A long time ago, I actually bought a copy of BeOS 5 Professional to run on a pair of Pentium 3's. I really did quite enjoy using it, it was snappy, however, rough parts, ... there was a leaked 'Dano' release that fixed some of these problems, but it was too late. Rough Bits: - Limited Software. Gobe Productive as an office suite was quite nice, but not anything like Word Perfect or MS Office, and importing stuff was limited. The web browser Netpositive was behind Netscape / Internet Explorer - no Flash, or Java - it had limited Posix support, so command line utilities could be ported from Linux/BSDs, but no X or GTK/QT - no 'killer app'. - No Colour sync, little/no accessibility, localization. - network stack was slow - even Linux was getting way more commercial software Limited hardware support - no 3d acceleration (at least released publicly) - limited drivers for other hardware - e.g. printing support was .. limited - USB support was limited So, for day to day use, it was fine by me, especially for ripping CDs, BeOS had a feature where CD Audio tracks would appear as AIFF files in the Tracker, and could lookup the names with CDDB (before gracenote killed that), There was a bash script by BeOS evangelist and author Scott Hacker(?) that would rip tracks, edit the MP3 metadata and the Be Filesystem meta data, so you could do mp3 tracklists by query. It was/is used as a Radio Station automation software, called Tune Tracker[0] though they may have switched to Haiku [0] http://www.tunetrackersystems.com http://www.tunetrackersystems.com