any OS2/Warp or BeOS (5) users here?

I have the opportunity to "try out" both OSes and am interested in hearing of others' experiences with them. I am most interested in the Be offering, but I understand it is largely a volunteer effort these days, and that hardware support is sorely lacking (it will be useless to me if it fails to recognize my NIC). I know NOTHING about OS2/Warp, but would like to see if it stands any chance at replacing my goddamned windoze box.

Anyone ever played with these before? Your thoughts?

Worked 18 months of 60hour weeks.....

Damn fine operating system. Fucked up marketing.

I am looking to go to Apple myself....

the apple software could be made functional with the x86 architecture, I'd give it a try. The hardware exclusivity thing is a major turnoff for me.

OS/2 Warp is going to be even more sadly out-of-date than Be, at least as far as drivers and hardware recognition is concerned. There are no apps of any significance for OS/2 unless you can lay your hands on Office 95 or thereabouts. Newer, 32-bit versions of Windows apps don't run on OS/2.

I don't know much about Be, but at least it's current and has a developer base.

Me, I'm running SuSE Linux right now and I'm pretty happy with the KDE desktop and Open Office.

although I have temporarily abandoned it because NO distributions currently available recognize my NIC (a MS (ptooey!) MN-130). Something about the linuxweenie community not wanting to pitch in to write a driver for a card that says "MS" on it, despite the fact that it's a dirt cheap card (mine was free+tax after rebate), and fairly popular. First distro that will recognize my NIC, I'll install.

... that's the extent of my knowledge of that OS. Purely anecdotal.

Sorry.

-- Allen

Linux or Apple
OS/2 used to be called half an Operating System

...released. Had a couple of major hardware issues. Spent days on the phone with IBM support (and the toll free number on the box was bogus, leading only to a recorded message directing callers to a long distance call!). IBM support never did resolve one of the deal breaker issues, so then I spent 2 mos arguing back and forth between IBM (money back guarantee) and the reseller (no refunds if the package is open), with IBM ultimately agreeing to refund the sales cost themselves-- took another couple of months to get a check. One of the support managers admitted that they were having lots of problems, especially with laptops (like mine) and that IBM knew the OS was still buggy when it went out the door, but they rushed it out in time for the Christmas buying season.

Sorry to hear you have hardware problems with Linux-- it's the ultimate solution IMO.

great for anything multimedia related. I have it installed on a separate partition, and dual-boot BeOS and WinXP. Hardware support is not THAT bad, really. Largely a volunteer effort, but lots of BeOS specific drivers are continually being written...there's also a drive for a functional open-source version of the BeOS, which I would definitely use.

If you're looking to try out BeOS5, here's a link to the Personal Edition "Max Install" version. Comes with many updates drivers, and a kernel patch for AMD Athlon XP processors. Works quite well on my system (Athlon XP 2400 on a micro-ATX board with integrated NIC and audio, NVIDIA GeForce 3 Ti200, 256M RAM).

http://www.bebits.com/app/3148

Edit: Forgot the link.

but I'll be receiving a copy of the "Professional Edition" of BeOS 5 in the coming days to check out. I HOPE it has decent hardware support, although none of my hardware is terribly exotic.

bebits.com has a database of updated drivers for BeOS, and links to various other resources around the Web.