My first memory of BeOS was that it could play media independently. You could play a video in one window, and an MP3 or another video in another, and they'd both play audio at the same time.

I don't know exactly why, but child me thought that was so interesting, since every other OS at the time seemed unable to.

For me it felt like it was going to be my next Amiga, in kind of experience, something that GNU/Linux never did it to me, where CLI reigns and multimedia was always looked down upon, Windows and Mac OS weren't quite there as well.

Another cool one that was around was QNX.

If I recall directly, Apple was between buying BeOS and NeXT. Would be interesting what would have happened if they went the Be route instead of the Unix route. (But given that MacOS and BeOS were both fringe at the time, perhaps they would just have gone bankrupt…)

You can pretty much just use Haiku as a daily driver these days, if your demands aren't too great. It runs really well on older hardware too.

And of course you can just spin it up in a VM if you only want to play a bit.

I just found my BeOS 5 and BeProductive CDs from the late 90s. I wish I had something to run them on.

On many Linux desktop environments it is the default - or can be configured: To hold the Windows Key ('meta') and left-mouse-drag a window around from _anywhere inside the window_! No need to get the mouse into the 'title bar'!

Additionally, meta+middle-mouse-drag allows one to resize a window from anywhere in the whole window!! (it chooses the closest corner when the drag starts) and this, being able to resize a window without needing to put the mouse in a usually-very-thin window border, is extremely liberating in my opinion! To the point where I really miss it on sub-windows where the app is handling resizing/etc itself!

There's a Windows app I used to use that supports the same kind of thing for Windows (different key I think), no idea if there's one for Mac I'm afraid - or whether it can be configured to work that way, but there probably is one so it would be worth investigating if this sounds useful to you I'd say!

To be fair that's one more corner than Tahoe.

Yes! I was racking my brain trying to remember what it was called. Back in the early 2000s I ran BeOS on my desktop and absolutely loved it. Then when they went under, I followed the effort to come up with an open source version with guest interest. There was one effort that wanted to build everything from scratch. That's what was later renamed into Haiku (I think initially openBeOS maybe?). There was also BlueEyedOS who thought you could get there faster by building on Linux and X11.

I think Haiku got more traction because at the time people felt that it should run BeOS software without recompiling. I have long wondered what would have happened if BlueEyedOS would have gotten most of the effort.

it's the real app_server running :) so you have everything you'd expect

Haiku's are even better. They have been remade in a scalable vector graphics format, but one that is still very compact: often smaller than the comparable pixmap.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40196333

Another thing that survives is that they wrote Java as if writing C++ with m_ prefixes, and several other Cisms, which prevail to today.

It’s Linux, with all of the support that provides. Not a knock on Haiku, but if I can have a BeOS window manager and Tracker, while running modern Linux binaries natively, I’d be a happy.