i know many old beos users would be lurking around here. so i am asking a question to them. when did you stop using beos? which os did you use? and do you use haiku now?. by my thinking, beos should have been impossible to use by the early 2010s as thats when the internet (and flash) became so intertwined with daily use of a pc. i could be wrong tho
- Still have Yellow Tab last Zeta CD and original BeOS 5.1. That was biggest disappointment ever - the OS was incredible but isolated. I did have a 4 processor Pentium motherboard to run it, but could not do much with it.
For hobby switched then mostly to BSD and Linux, both very usable already then, for work it was and is always Windows (business software). In the meantime using MacOS, sometimes MorphOS (actually close to Haiku in terms of quality and speed, although an Amiga at heart), not counting longer encounters with QNX6 and later for automotive, obviously Rapberry Pi (with Linux and fun to play RISCOS) Solaris and derivatives, some high performance computing on Beowolf clusters and a lot of fun (for 5 months) on Cray machines (well , actually Linux terminals just writing and running programs on Cray). Oh, forgot Haiku!
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2001 - Windows 2000 / BeOS/ PhOS by @looncraz / mandrake / QNX / SkyOS
2005 - Probably stopped using BeOS
2006 - 2018 -. mainly Ubuntu
2020-2021 - Clear Linux
2022 - present - Cachy OS / Haiku real hardware and VM / Windows 11 but only when necessary.
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I ran BeOS daily from 2000-2009 when I got my first duo core. If I had realized it was most likely SATA holding me back and not the processor with patch, I likely would have gotten an IDE card and used it for a few more years. I tinkered with Haiku alphas and betas, but did not really get back to using anything until May of this year. I did get a laptop to run BeOS r5, but I have been too busy with the Media-OS project to even get it setup and running. I would like to though, so I can eventually attempt to backport some of my drivers.
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When R5 became impossible to use on then current generation laptops.
Zeta had a year or two more of hardware support but I found a lot of the changes very annoying; and only really used it to update the VLC build that came with Zeta itself.
I was too late,so I could never enjoy the original BeOS.
I’ve never even heard of BeOS before I came to Haiku,and Haiku I also discovered quite late.
I started with Windows XP,then Windows 7,then many different Linuxes.
Everyone is talking about Linux if you’re unhappy with Windows,but stuff like Haiku or the BSDs you only find if you explicitly search for something that isn’t Windows and also not Linux.
Took me too long to even discover that something like that exists,but I won’t ever go back to Linux.
I was also late, but I think I discovered the BeOS story right when Haiku (OpenBeOS at the time) was starting. At that time I was a lot more hopeful towards Linux, the FSF and Gnome as more humane projects than the proprietary alternatives of the time, and they had the momentum of their communities to keep me orbiting that space.
But I always had the impression that the BeOS legacy was more human-centric, and I have the suspicion that if Be Inc continued into the XXI century somehow, It could become just as corrupt as Apple or any other tech company right now, or maybe it would even have to in order to keep existing in the current environment. [Edit: not accusing anyone of anything, of course, organizations go through Systemic Capture all the time especially with market pressures and stuff]. So I’m glad Haiku is developed as it is, so it can take a harder stance on things they believe makes the project great.
I discovered BeOS from a PC magazine that had a BeOS PE CD. My day-to-day PC could run it but not my gamer PC due to incompatible hardware. That would have been about 1999. Fell in love with BeOS v5 so I bought the Professional version. I used BeOS for three years before my hardware no longer supported it.
Then Zeta OS from 2007 till now.
Haiku A1 thru A4 then hardware changed that prevented me to install Haiku. On different hardware, Haiku B2 to B6 now.
I used it from the late 90s/early 2000s. I used it as my primary OS for most stuff till probably 2007 when I got an MacBook (Santa Rosa, black) and I will have used Dano, Zeta and PhOS too. I probably stopped using it for Intel in the mid 2000s, but I kept on using PowerPC. I only stopped booting PowerPC in around 2014/2015 because I moved and a lot of my older hardware was in storage or went to pasture.
As previously mentioned in other threads, I own a PM9500 with a dual processor (stock) from back in the day and a 7500 with compatible processor card and Umax C500 that all boot BeOS. I also owned a BeBox 66 for a number of years (2004 I thing I got it), but let that go in 2007.
I was getting all the Zeta updates as I wrote some software that Bernd wanted.