BeBox is a Haiku application that emulates Be Inc.'s BeBox | Hacker News Reader

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

github.com

94 pointsrguiscard34 comments

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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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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.

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

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.

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.

I'm fairly certain that BeOS never supported the 486

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

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.

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..)

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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

Try MiDesktop (modern port of KDE 1.x/QT 2.x) - had the same experience, everything is LIGHTNING fast, going back to standard xfce/plasma/whatever feels glacial

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.

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

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.

I really do need to play with Haiku more.

I want to make haiku.rs

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 :(

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

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

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.

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

That warms my heart

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Linux has more platform portability that Haiku (or any new OS) struggles with due to which they can't become popular. If the Be/Haiku GUI and SDK can be fully ported to run on the Linux kernel (like V is attempting), it's a good compromise in my opinion.

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

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