I was browsing Slashdot saturday, and came across a posting about the BeOS. The BeOS, in case you don't know, was an alternative Operating System that was semi-popular, kinda, a few years back. Unlike OS/2, it seems to have been aimed squarely at home users.

So I read the article, and posted a comment. The comment was modded up to +3; Interesting for a while, but eventually settled down at +2. Still, not bad.

But everything I said in that comment is true. And I got flamed (mildly) by some Be zealots, but they were pretty off the mark. I mean, seriously, how can you ship an OS that has support for a total of 2 (!) network cards. And ISA cards at that. Maybe the full edition came with more (I was trying the Personal edition), but wouldn't you want the "Personal Edition" to work for everyone? And if ya threw in a dozen or so network drivers, how much more space would that have taken? Maybe a few hundred K. If that.

But anyway, out of fairness I installed the personal edition again (after some digging, I found it on bebits.com). I did manage to get my video card (GeForce 2) working this time, so horray for thousands of colors. I didn't get sound working (Solo-1). I didn't get my network card working (no idea what it is, but it uses the ne2k-pci driver in linux). And while there was a NE2000 driver in BeOS, it was for the ISA card and did not work. So no net, no chance to check out Opera for BeOS, and no chance to check out the (supposedly killer) multimedia features.

And, this is just my opnion here, but I didn't find it all that impressive looking. Certainly no more impressive than OS/2. And definetly not any better looking than any of the KDE 3.x desktops. And I found navigation around drives to be horrible, and confusing.

I'll uninstall it soon. If I can't see the internet from it, and can't figure out how to set that up, it's not a keeper.