Or Not

After spending last evening working with BeOS, I have more details to share. The OS is incredibly stable and fast, even when running a whack o' applications, much faster than the install of Windows 98 on the same machine.

The problem, I discovered, was the amount and quality of applications available for Windows totally dwarfs that of BeOS. This wouldn't be much of a factor if the applications offered a level of sophistication above their Win32 cousins, but that is just not the case. There are no real equivalents to Photoshop or Illustrator, which I spend a great deal of time working in.

Curiously, the GUI is essentially fixed, allowing very little customization of your environment. During my quest for an acceptable look, I noticed another little annoyance: every folder you examine opens a new instance, resulting in a heap of windows on the desktop. Clutter City.

Worst of all, the browsers for BeOS simply suck. As BeOS development has slowed to a collection of enthusiasts contributing what they can, browser technology is pretty far behind. Flash can be installed, but only version 4. JavaScript is not supported in NetPositive (BeOS' built in browser) and Style sheets are essentially ignored. Both NetPositive and Opera suffer from slow and buggy performance, the latter especially so.

Having said all of that, the environment is certainly attractive and easy to work in. I'm still impressed with the speed of the system and the relatively small file sizes of even the largest applications (Blender, a powerful 3D creation and editing program is only 1.3MB!). Another great program is Pe, fast becoming the standard for HTML development. It contains some impressive features, but at US$50, I'm too cheap to shell out for something I might not use next week.

Overall, I am impressed by the operation of the system, but dismayed at the lack of customization and browser development. I will likely continue to hack at it for a week or so, but Windows won this round.