Remarks on the BeOS by a MacOS User.

The BeOS is, technologically, the most advanced operating system that will run on your Macintosh or Intel PC (I would guess that there are not too many operating systems more advanced on any platform). However, we all know that technological superiority, and for that matter ease-of-use, does not create a winning operating system. The BeOS is a nice operating system. It is relatively small, compact, and it has no bloat what so ever - it will, but it doesn¹t now. The BeOS is graphical; it has a graphical user interface, a GUI. It also has a terminal application that allows the user to control the system through a GNU Bash-shell. For this shell many applications that do not feature a user interface are available. The basic functionality of the system, however, and most included and commercial applications, are controlled through this user interface that most MacOS users will be somewhat comfortable with: with the exeption of the fact that it functions like Windows.

The BeOS is document-centric. The MacOS is application-centric. These are probably terms that only I use, so I will explain: in the BeOS when you launch an application, you get a window with the menus part of that window there is no menu-bar or the like. When you click to close the application menu, you quit the application. When you chose "quit" or "close" you also quit the application. This poses a problem to MacOS users. When I am using my Mac, I have about five apps running at the same time, most of these have no active windows. They are only open because I do not want to open Photoshop (or any other huge app) every time I have a document and quit it every time that I do not have an active document. This makes sense; this saves time; there is no way (will it might be possible but inconvenient) to do this in the BeOS. So you see that the document is the most important part of a BeOS application, where in the MacOS the application is the most important part.

The BeOS interface is also undeveloped, this is to be expected from a very new operating system, but the BeOS is worse than you would think. Besides the document-centric versus application-centric problem, there is so little consistency throughout the system and the applications. In each app things (even as simple as quitting) are done very differently. You can close the window or chose a menu option; but what is the option - "Quit," or "Close?" This is due to a lack of Be, Inc. proposed interface standards. Apple had these standards from the beginning, as did NeXT, the now-nonexistent creators of the old NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP operating system (this operating system had one of the best GUIs ever).

Another problem is what happens if an application ends up running, but without any windows? Then the only way to quit it is to open up another document by double-clicking on the correct type of file. Besides this you can kill the applications threads using the Terminal, but this is not much fun. Wait, you said that closing the document quits the application. Yes, but somehow applications can be left orphaned.

The BeOS also lacks great applications. It really has no killer application to attract users and developers, thus there are few serious users, thus few serious applications. There are some productivity applications, but very few, and these are not Microsoft Office quality, or even close to that level of functionality. There are no real graphics/multimedia apps such as Adobe Photoshop, Premier or Illustrator, thus Be's key market has no applications.

Networking in the BeOS is fully based on TCP/IP, so you can easilly use the Internet, however there is only one real browser for the BeOS and this is NetPositive, a bundled app that has little functionality. Also, DHCP is not available built-in (it can be added through another provider¹s solution).

There are many problems with the BeOS that I see, but these may be cleared up with time. The interface issues may never go away: I have talked with Be¹s interface designer and he does not agree with any of the problems that I have mentioned. Right now this is a negative review: the BeOS is great for playing around with and for learning a new OS and for getting familiar with UNIX through the Terminal. However the BeOS is unsatisfactory for real work. It might be a modern OS that is very promising, but as of now if you are not a programmer, do not like to play around with Beta software, do not want to learn UNIX, and/or do not want to learn a somewhat different system with many interface problems, then the BeOS is not for you.