Hmm, nope. A bunch of bank branches got remodeled after a merger and a local gas station is being torn down and replaced, but nothing new.

Oh it absolutely is. Bringing files into Be is fine. The file type sniffer runs in the background and adds whatever metadata it can in a lightweight quick way. IIRC there are addons for specific file types like media files that add nice things like author, runtime, etc.

Sending them out is a pain though. All the metadata is usually lost and from what I recall even emailing a file from one Be machine to another could be difficult. IIRC you could zip them and the metadata would make it, but raw files and tgz would lose it.

Redox looks really interesting and I’d like to give it a try, but it has so little hardware support that I don’t have a machine that can run it. Considering their driver model, I’m really curious as to their long term hardware support plan.

My college roommate got an install CD of the first version that ran on x86, maybe 3.0? I tried it on my computer and became an instant convert. It was so astoundingly much faster and stable than Windows was on the same hardware, had a decent free IDE, and could play MP3s without skipping while compiling, browsing the internet, and spinning a GL Teapot all at once on a Pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM. Nothing else even came close for a desktop experience. I bought a copy for myself and every version that came out.

I’ve been daily driving Linux for a long time now, but I still look back and wonder what could have been. There are still things to this day that BeOS did better and faster in the ‘90s on single core sub GHz machines with spinning rust than Linux, MacOS or Windows can on top end modern hardware.

I think there are a couple of reasons. First, the Linux kernel doesn’t support resource forks at all. They aren’t part of POSIX nor do they really fit the unix file philosophy. Second, most of the cool things that BeFS enables are very end user desktop oriented, and Linux leaves that desktop environments, not the kernel. BeOS was designed as a fully integrated desktop os, not a multiuser server os. Finally, I expect that they are a security headache, as they present this whole other place that malware could be stored. Imagine an innocent looking plain text file that has an evil payload sitting in an attribute.

If you are nostalgic for BeOS, then the elevator pitch is, “It’s Be, only on modern hardware and more software support.”

If you are unfamiliar with BeOS, the pitch is: “Imagine an extremely lightweight desktop is with all of the things you would expect in a modern environment with none of the legacy. In an alternative universe, BeOS would have become OSX.”

There are so many things that Be did right from the very beginning that other OSs have adopted, but never as cleanly as Be did it.

For example, its file system. Most people don’t really notice or care about the file system, they all have directorys and hold files, maybe with permissions. BeFS does that as well, of course, but so much more. The entire file system acts as a database, so you can easily perform fast queries on it. You can also create virtual directories that are the result of those queries.

You want a “folder” that contains every markdown file created after 2020 between 20 and 1000kb in size? Bam, instantly done and live updated whenever something accesses it. The files aren’t actually copied there, just appear there to normal tools, almost like soft links.

BeFS also supports a resource fork system that it calls attributes. These can also be queried using the same database like tools as the rest of the system. File typing is done this way, every file gets a MIME type attribute and there is a daemon that sniffs them when a new file is downloaded or copied over.

Even more, this allows some crazy things like plain text files that have font, color and other formatting elements because all that is stored as an attribute.

Or their contact information app, which stores every person as a zero length file with details as attributes. You can create a virtual folder of all your contacts that meet a certain criteria and have other applications use that folder for whatever.

Or the email app which stores each email as a file, and adds the basic metadata like to, from, subject, read, etc as attributes. Then you can have different virtual folders based on those. This also means that the basic file system browser is the default way to view email, because it supports all the attribute viewing, queries and such you would need. Or you can do it all from the command line using either basic cli tools or some slightly specialized ones.

Combining attributes and virtual directories makes for a fantastic media library system, all built into the os for free. Imagine a directory that contains “Every metal song I have, from 1989 to 1993, that I haven’t played in three weeks” or whatever else you want.

Back when people used files and all applications were local first, this was probably much more exciting, but it’s still pretty cool.

Oh fuck yeah, especially for laptops. I was pleasantly surprised when all of the hardware on my new to me 13 year old laptop just worked out of the box with Debian 13. I was expecting to have to fix something.

At one point I thought like the middle guy, but I didn’t have the money to do it so my computers were made from whatever parts I could scrounge up from dumpster diving, school auctions, or whatever. I was building or upgrading my computer every six months or so with what I found.

Once I had the money to buy basically whatever computer I wanted, I would build a high end machine and then not bother to upgrade it until I had a friend who needed one. I pass my old one on to them and the cycle repeats.

My laptops are still random auction finds. My current one came as a pair for $40. I popped in a new SSD and battery in one and have ignored the other. I should see if Haiku supports it well enough to be worth daily driving.

Mines about half way there. Debian, i3, kitty, fully Tokyo nights themed, lots of stickers. I haven’t tried playing with transparency and backgrounds yet due to the quite low end video card, small screen size and iffy color quality.

That’s my technique as well.

Mine is 13, Debian flies on it.

I had a Bosch I loved for years. It had a feature where it would slightly open the door at the end of the cycle so everything could air dry. It also had a red light that it would shine on the ground because it was so quiet that you couldn’t tell it was running. When we moved out, it was still running like it was brand new after five years of use in multi family home where we ran it twice a day every day.

Our new house has a basic GE, and it’s fine, I guess. There are a lot of other things that are higher priority than replacing a working dishwasher, but once it goes I’m replacing it with a Bosch.

Edit: That Bosch also got the dishes cleaner than anything else ever has, even with the cheap detergent.

I just went to my cabinets and counted. I have a set of 12 each of three sizes of plates: dinner, salad and saucer. Same for two sizes of bowls. Additionally I have some non-matching bowls and a couple of toddler plates. I only run my dishwasher when full, which is usually once a day but sometimes twice. Of course, it’s not just plates but also mugs, glasses and cookware.

Uh, I’m pretty sure that is a jacemat.

There are dozens of us!

May I recommend Helix? It’s a modal editor like vim, but has a better out of the box experience, better discoverability for commands, and uses an easier to understand select->command syntax.

How do you not? A text editor and a browser are the two programs that I use the most, both for work and at home. And while most browsers have pretty similar UXs nowadays, the different editors are vastly different. Helix, EMacs, vim, StyledEdit, Notepad++, Kate, etc all have radically different approaches to basically everything.

I would also add that the presidents party almost always loses votes in the midterms. This is particularly true for republicans since 2016 because a lot of trump’s supporters only care about him and won’t bother to fill out a ballot without him on it.

When I was a kid I bought an Atari with the cartridge holder stand for it and a ton of games for $5. ET was fucking awful, but there were a few gems in the collection.

Oh, of course. Thanks!