SenVa Posted July 15, 2006 Share Posted July 15, 2006 What would you guys say is the best non mainstream OS? I guess what do you guys this is the best not counting any Windows or MacOS? I would have to say BeOS R5... It seemed if you had compatible hardware it was super stable and just worked... it felt like mac osx for the pc... The file system was great, BeFS.. and a site like bebits (had anything you were looking for) made it easy to find apps and drivers. I'm sure if I made a poll I'd be missing a lot of OSes... so for the sake of fairness I'm not going to make a poll. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwhsh8r Posted July 17, 2006 Share Posted July 17, 2006 Yellow Tab Zeta (BeOS the newest, newer after R5), PC-BSD (i prefer it over linux), plan 9 is interesting but never took off (it was designed to be the replacement to Unix) sky os (in beta right now, looking like a good windows replacement).... i could name alot more including linux variants, but those were the three that stuck out to me. but my choice goes to PC-BSD because i have never actuially got beos to work on my hardware... max Edit: oh, and i couldnt use r5 because i dont have a floopy disk drive Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SenVa Posted July 17, 2006 Author Share Posted July 17, 2006 I disliked Zeta due to buggyness of newer drivers it had... SkyOS seems like it will be good... I'm hopeing enough people will start to develop apps for it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bliss Posted July 17, 2006 Share Posted July 17, 2006 i was once a big beos fan and i also bought zeta. but now with sata and so on i cant use it anymore. pc-bsd ist the best unix based os for useres after mac os x i think sky os... well i hope it gows soon well, BeOS WAS great once and it should once be the replacement for the old Mac OS... but then steve came back to apple with his fresh nextstep and BeOS and Be inc. was gone. very sad. i really loved it... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwhsh8r Posted July 17, 2006 Share Posted July 17, 2006 linspire too... but i think that it is just a wanna be windows... and i also classify server 2003 as an alternate os because i do not know anyone who runs it, but if set up properly runs much better than xp and if anyone has run skyos or knows how would you please pm me, im having a problem with it... thanks maxx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnniecarcinogen Posted July 18, 2006 Share Posted July 18, 2006 Definately openSUSE. In the last year mono, banshee, f-spot, betterdesktop.org, and of course XGL has brought more change and progress to the open source movement since Firefox. All of these have come out of Novell and are graciously shared with the entire community. Ubuntu may be more trendy but Ubuntu really is not doing anything new. Even though I understand why Mark Shuttleworth will never allow flash, mp3's, or other non-free codecs and applications to be a part of Ubuntu, it is a reality that most of the world will still use these things. The fact that banshee can play mp3's out of the box and is the default media player now in openSUSE and firefox on openSUSE has flash preinstalled (although still flash7) will make the expeirience for new users looking for a Windows replacement much more pleasant. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwhsh8r Posted July 18, 2006 Share Posted July 18, 2006 Definately openSUSE. In the last year mono, banshee, f-spot, betterdesktop.org, and of course XGL has brought more change and progress to the open source movement since Firefox. All of these have come out of Novell and are graciously shared with the entire community. Ubuntu may be more trendy but Ubuntu really is not doing anything new. Even though I understand why Mark Shuttleworth will never allow flash, mp3's, or other non-free codecs and applications to be a part of Ubuntu, it is a reality that most of the world will still use these things. The fact that banshee can play mp3's out of the box and is the default media player now in openSUSE and firefox on openSUSE has flash preinstalled (although still flash7) will make the expeirience for new users looking for a Windows replacement much more pleasant. I can verify that opensuse is a good windows alternative, it was my first linux install (last month) and i enjoyed how it is basicially a right out of the box experience (although the screen {censored} was wack 1024x768x32 and it was all not fitting my screen, unlike all other oss that i have tried that is the only one to do that (and it did it on both installs i did) max Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnniecarcinogen Posted July 18, 2006 Share Posted July 18, 2006 Well, the first thing you should do is install the proprietary ATI or Nvidia driver for your video card. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baliw Posted July 19, 2006 Share Posted July 19, 2006 Here is one OS that is ligthweight and non Linux, MenuetOS. try it , its a blast Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwhsh8r Posted July 19, 2006 Share Posted July 19, 2006 Well, the first thing you should do is install the proprietary ATI or Nvidia driver for your video card. ya... I did that and it had the same problem, i could get it to fit on my screen but it was a pain... but i did it... now i am playing with pc-bsd witch i like alot more than linux. max Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BRP Posted July 20, 2006 Share Posted July 20, 2006 Plan9 from Bell Labs is great for just pure geek cred (but not much else at present). Of course, playing with VMS is weird enough, too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SenVa Posted July 20, 2006 Author Share Posted July 20, 2006 @ donicci I used MenuetOS... it was extreamly fast and lightweight.... due to being 100% x86 asm... but I couldn't find a use for a OS that is less than 1.4 megs. @ Bliss The opensource version of BeOS is really coming along... after 3 years. you should check out the nightly disk images of Haiku OS (formaly OpenBeOS)... it is completely driver and binary compatable. http://haiku-os.org/factory/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BRP Posted July 20, 2006 Share Posted July 20, 2006 And of course, there's the mind-bending properties of ALTIMIT Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sHARD>> Posted July 20, 2006 Share Posted July 20, 2006 Man, a lot of BeOS fans here. I'm impressed. Now...if it had full POSIX with all Linux libs and a good package manager I'd use it in a heartbeat. But even Zeta doesn't have all that Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwhsh8r Posted July 21, 2006 Share Posted July 21, 2006 Man, a lot of BeOS fans here. I'm impressed. Now...if it had full POSIX with all Linux libs and a good package manager I'd use it in a heartbeat. But even Zeta doesn't have all that Ive heard alot of good things about BeOS and how it could have been a windows killer, but it wont run on my hardware... sata and some other problems. PC-BSD is my favorite so far (im going to test the x64 menuetos tomorrow) max Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bliss Posted July 21, 2006 Share Posted July 21, 2006 yea i was a long time with BeOS. i first ran BeOS in about 1998. R4,5 i think. since then i used it permanently until zeta came out and went bankrupt. so i have every zeta version until 1.0 here i was a really big beos and later zeta fan but now you can forget about zeta... sadly the only chace to get back to beos is Haiku OS - thats OpenBeOS - a complete open source rebuild of BeOS R5 http://haiku-os.org/learn.php Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwhsh8r Posted July 22, 2006 Share Posted July 22, 2006 yea i was a long time with BeOS. i first ran BeOS in about 1998. R4,5 i think.since then i used it permanently until zeta came out and went bankrupt. so i have every zeta version until 1.0 here i was a really big beos and later zeta fan but now you can forget about zeta... sadly the only chace to get back to beos is Haiku OS - thats OpenBeOS - a complete open source rebuild of BeOS R5 http://haiku-os.org/learn.php What are you talking about? yellow tab is still activially developing zeta (theyre name of beos) it can be found here: http://www.yellowtab.com/ they are on release 1.2 i think.... and they havnt gone bankrupt ether. max Haiku looks pritty good too Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rick taylor Posted July 22, 2006 Share Posted July 22, 2006 I have to agree with previous posters, Suse is great. I installed it after reading reccomendations on this site, it works really well and installation was relatively painless. I just wish I could intergrate it into my work flow better, it's tough finding replacements for the Mac and Windows programs I use. Any tried Amiga recently? I came across this blast from the past, now for PPC and x86 systems http://www.aros.org/. I've not tried it, but I bet it would be a lot of fun. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bliss Posted July 22, 2006 Share Posted July 22, 2006 What are you talking about? yellow tab is still activially developing zeta (theyre name of beos) it can be found here: http://www.yellowtab.com/ they are on release 1.2 i think.... and they havnt gone bankrupt ether.max Haiku looks pritty good too no they're not. magnussoft bought zeta. http://www.zeta-os.com/ they will release 1.21 and after that noone knows. but i dont give hope in it. BeOS and Zeta are fully dead soon except haiku. when the first distro with Haiku (WalterOS - Windows alternative OS) is out i'll try "BeOS" again. but until that i will ride with os x86 and linux Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amdprophet Posted July 22, 2006 Share Posted July 22, 2006 SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop FTW! Yea, it's about $60 to buy, but it is the best distrobution that works straight out of the box. I like Gentoo as well, but typically only for server machines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwhsh8r Posted July 23, 2006 Share Posted July 23, 2006 no they're not. magnussoft bought zeta. http://www.zeta-os.com/ they will release 1.21 and after that noone knows. but i dont give hope in it. BeOS and Zeta are fully dead soon except haiku. when the first distro with Haiku (WalterOS - Windows alternative OS) is out i'll try "BeOS" again. but until that i will ride with os x86 and linux oh, yea, thats sad, and i guess i should have done my research but yellow tab kept popping up... that sucks, cause from what i hear beos was extremely good. max Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BRP Posted July 28, 2006 Share Posted July 28, 2006 BeOS to me was, in a way, what a user OS really should have been (like Amiga). Fun but not stupid. Sort of the niche that OS X fills now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwhsh8r Posted August 1, 2006 Share Posted August 1, 2006 Windows Fundamentals.... its a vlk only copy of xp sp2 that is stripped down to the bare minimals but still retains full functionality! max Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rhapsody Guru Posted August 22, 2006 Share Posted August 22, 2006 Man... you oughta check out Visopsys! It is a decent non-unix OS based on the GPL license. It is a one man project and it is currently at version 0.63. http://www.visopsys.org Guru Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hobofuzz Posted August 22, 2006 Share Posted August 22, 2006 no they're not. magnussoft bought zeta. http://www.zeta-os.com/ they will release 1.21 and after that noone knows. but i dont give hope in it. BeOS and Zeta are fully dead soon except haiku. when the first distro with Haiku (WalterOS - Windows alternative OS) is out i'll try "BeOS" again. but until that i will ride with os x86 and linux Um, no This is from the yellowtab site: "22. May 2006 Magnussoft now worldwide distributor of ZETA A new distribution partner for the alternative operating system ZETA OS has been announced. The worldwide distribution rights for the ambitious Operating system have been granted to Magnussoft Germany. This also means that the continuation and future of operating system ZETA, despite the problems of yellowTAB GmbH, has now been secured." Magnussoft is porting games to Zeta, how is that possibly the death of Zeta? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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