4 ms·

FWIW Debian stable (esp. with KDE IMO) is now very close to this. I have no patience at all for a fiddly daily machine, and for the most part I've been pretty h

FWIW Debian stable (esp. with KDE IMO) is now very close to this. I have no patience at all for a fiddly daily machine, and for the most part I've been pretty happy with it. There are probably other Linux distributions (Mint?) that can fill this niche. I only mention this because, if people are looking for something right now, setting aside a little bit of time to try out Debian stable or Mint might be worthwhile. But yeah. I'd love to see Haiku become a strong alternative OS. I've been keeping an eye on it ever since it was announced. (I still have the BeOS R5 disc that I installed on a PPC machine years ago.)

mortyseinfeld 13y ago
The people that used BeOS and look forward to Haiku are going to disagree with you on that. I'm guessing that they look at Linux distros as a hodge-podge of various libraries without any cohesive philosophy.
- GuiA 13y ago
  Yeah, that's my position. I use OSX at work and Arch at home; and while I love Linux, it is quite messy. (Which works to its advantage in many ways- it wouldn't be that powerful and flexible if it weren't)
- pohl 13y ago
  It has a cohesive philosophy, but the philosophy says nothing about interesting matters like tradeoffs, but rather just licensing. Yawn.
cturner 13y ago
Desktops like KDE can preview images in a directory. But BeOS was on another level with this stuff. Imagine if (1) your filesystem was a high-performance nosql database; (2) your desktop was just a thin layer around this, optimised for navigating around and querying the stores. But NoSQL has never since been so smooth and beautiful to interact with. The mail system: a daemon drops files in a directory and makes a ding sound. The user then just browses the directory containing the mail messages. (The file explorer detected the metadata and displays this as columns.) When you double-click on an icon, you get a special-case form that displays the contents of the data. http://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/3q99/bemail/bemail-screen-4.html http://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/3q99/bemail/bemail-sc... If a unix were to do this stuff, it'd stop being unix: metadata on files is incompatible with the everything-is-a-stream-of-data philosophy. ryanweal writes below, "think everything is an icon instead of everything is a file". Brilliant. Haiku team should take "everything is an icon" as their motto.

mortyseinfeld 13y ago

The people that used BeOS and look forward to Haiku are going to disagree with you on that. I'm guessing that they look at Linux distros as a hodge-podge of various libraries without any cohesive philosophy.

GuiA 13y ago
Yeah, that's my position. I use OSX at work and Arch at home; and while I love Linux, it is quite messy. (Which works to its advantage in many ways- it wouldn't be that powerful and flexible if it weren't)
pohl 13y ago
It has a cohesive philosophy, but the philosophy says nothing about interesting matters like tradeoffs, but rather just licensing. Yawn.

cturner 13y ago

Desktops like KDE can preview images in a directory. But BeOS was on another level with this stuff. Imagine if (1) your filesystem was a high-performance nosql database; (2) your desktop was just a thin layer around this, optimised for navigating around and querying the stores. But NoSQL has never since been so smooth and beautiful to interact with. The mail system: a daemon drops files in a directory and makes a ding sound. The user then just browses the directory containing the mail messages. (The file explorer detected the metadata and displays this as columns.) When you double-click on an icon, you get a special-case form that displays the contents of the data. http://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/3q99/bemail/bemail-screen-4.html http://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/3q99/bemail/bemail-sc... If a unix were to do this stuff, it'd stop being unix: metadata on files is incompatible with the everything-is-a-stream-of-data philosophy. ryanweal writes below, "think everything is an icon instead of everything is a file". Brilliant. Haiku team should take "everything is an icon" as their motto.