YHK - yet another hacker news clone

BeBox is a Haiku application that emulates Be Inc.'s BeBox

89 points rguiscard 1 day ago 32 comments

mlmonkey 1 day ago | parent

"Be" .... now that's a blast from the past! :-D

alberth 1 day ago | parent

I recall dual booting BeOS circa 1999/2000, on my 486dx2-66.

It was shockingly performant, especially with anything graphical.

The difficulty was no apps.

Brings back fond memories, nonetheless.

multiplegeorges 1 day ago | parent

It had a decent number of apps, I drove it as my primary OS for a while.

Ended up using Linux, but it was a great OS for its time.

ErroneousBosh 1 day ago | parent

I've moved back to Haiku as my daily driver for a lot of stuff. Unfortunately it doesn't really have a good video editor yet, so I'm stuck with Linux for that at least.

mdp2021 1 day ago | parent

> Haiku as my daily driver for a lot of stuff

Can you expand? What works well, what may need more work, what is not there...

ErroneousBosh 20 hours ago | parent

Python, Vim, and a web browser, which is fine for developing Flask apps ;-)

It's not great for running virtual machines, but then it's not Linux.

On my laptop it's not great at power management and it doesn't suspend when I shut the lid.

So far there isn't video editing package, so really it's just down to sticking with Linux for DaVinci Resolve.

ButlerianJihad 6 hours ago | parent

"I don't have a Start Menu. This is a Haiku install, but that's not import--" https://m.xkcd.com/806/

cosmic_cheese 1 day ago | parent

It was ridiculously fast on my family’s Dimension 4100 tower, which had a 750Mhz PIII in it. The 98SE install that machine shipped with was glacial in comparison, and though Win2K shrunken the gap dramatically it still wasn’t as fast as BeOS.

I was able to find a decent number of apps on BeBits but a lot of stuff was missing.

d3Xt3r 1 day ago | parent

Was blazing fast even on my 450MHz PIII. But QNX was equally fast too on the same machine, if not faster. I think I enjoyed using QNX more at the time overall. Oh, and DOS too, late 90s/early 00s DOS was surprisingly decent with tons of cool thirdparty apps. There was even a quirky graphical web browser called Arachne that I thoroughly enjoyed using.

majorchord 1 day ago | parent

I'm fairly certain that BeOS never supported the 486

nrr 1 day ago | parent

Specifically, the BeOS required support for the rtdsc instruction for its timing, and that was only available on the Pentium chips or later.

alberth 22 hours ago | parent

Whoops, you're right. I was confused which machine I had BeOS on.

This was my Pentium III.

My 486 was the machine immediately before my Pentium III.

I installed BeOS when I got my new Pentium III in 1999/2000.

MomsAVoxell 1 day ago | parent

There were a few apps, a word processor, a 3D modeling and rendering application, some media players, a basic DAW and so on .. but the web browser situation kind of wasn’t so great, and there were still holes in the OS where future features had been promised, a bit too long imho ..

(Disclaimer: you can pry my still-functioning BeBox from my cold dead hands.. okay, I admit, I only use it a couple times a year just to be sure it still boots..)

ardenpm 1 day ago | parent

Reminds me I should probably make sure mine still boots, been a few years now.

Everytime I have to re-find all of the adapters for the keyboard, mouse and monitor. Always amazed how fast it boots when I do get it going.

JKCalhoun 1 day ago | parent

I've been told that, circa 1996 or so, there were a lot of holes in the OS. It demoed well, but…

Related: I've been enjoying, the Designed in California podcast [1]. Link below is "Part 3" wherein Apple is circling the drain in the mid 1990's (when I started at Apple, BTW) and is desperately looking outside Apple for the operating system they hope will save the company. Be (and Jean-Louis Gassée) look like they will win:

[1] https://youtu.be/5IFxwnXASyQ

mdp2021 1 day ago | parent

> difficulty was no apps

Well, how fortunate we are now, being able to do simplified coding through LLMs. AROS and Haiku and MenuetOS (etc.) could get a boost in software availability soon.

throwaway270925 1 day ago | parent

> It was shockingly performant, especially with anything graphical.

I had the same experience.

Only few things came close since: QNX, my M1 MBP when it was new and a fresh MXLinux installation (no idea how they do it, maybe some low latency scheduler?)

Those felt similarly instant GUI-wise as BeOS did, while unfortunately current MacOS and Win11 feel glacial compared to it.

ranger_danger 1 day ago | parent

Now just combine it with Cosmoe[1] so you can run it from Linux too.

[1] https://pappp.net/?p=95060

PAPPPmAc 1 day ago | parent

How odd to come into a thread and find a link to my share-with-note (see name/url) instead of a link to the OSNews article it's a share of.

thisislife2 1 day ago | parent

Check out https://v-os.dev/ - it's been adopted to create a new Linux distro that's a hybrid of Linux and Haiku. Pretty light on resource and the Be / Haiku GUI feels so good.

0x445442 1 day ago | parent

However the kernel differences between Linux and BeOS/NewOS are really part and parcel of Be/Haiku. It's like running Smalltalk in the terminal.

hexapus 1 day ago | parent

I really do need to play with Haiku more.

hdjdnxjzhzhs 1 day ago | parent

I want to make haiku.rs

YVoyiatzis 1 day ago | parent

If only for the UI. Back then, all bring white and beige and Windows blue screenofdesthblye. Be OS was pure joy, if only to play around with. Many third-party developers (remember sharewsre) took s liking to the Be aesthetic and ran away with it.

alfiedotwtf 1 day ago | parent

What the hell happened to BeBox and QNX?! They were the pinnacle of blitz. I’ve got a beefy machine to run large LLM models, but recently installing a new Debian, Gnome struggles after booting because of their packaging manager running 100% for a few minutes, following by random lag. Like wtf we had speed 26 years ago :(

mdp2021 1 day ago | parent

I understand that part of the latest efforts in Linux have been to use NNs to analyze code in order to speed up subsystems.

alfiedotwtf 22 hours ago | parent

I’ve found LLMs have been incredible in speeding up code. Hopefully they’ll end the past decades of software performance expanding into the hardware it’s give

thinker5555 1 day ago | parent

I was just telling my 10 year old about QNX last night, and how it was an amazing feat to have a whole graphical desktop with apps all fit on a 1.44mb floppy disc. Since he's missing so much of the context of "the ancient times", he didn't exactly share my enthusiasm, but at least he humored me a bit for my trip down memory lane.

pjmlp 22 hours ago | parent

QNX keeps going on high integrity computing, a domain where hypervisors and microkernels actually matter.

https://qnx.software

https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/8.0/index.html

alfiedotwtf 22 hours ago | parent

That warms my heart

cbm-vic-20 1 day ago | parent

The BeBox was so cool. I'm surprised no gaming-oriented PC builder has replicated the CPU activity LEDs. The GeekPort was also fun- in my dorm someone on my floor had a BeBox and used the GeekPort to control a robot arm. At least that came back in the form of the Raspberry Pi GPIO connector.

pjmlp 22 hours ago | parent

As if they already don't have enough colours, agree with the BeBox remark though.