The Definitive Desktop Environment Comparison - OSNews.com

The Definitive Desktop Environment Comparison - OSNews.com BeOS clearly wins on UI responsiveness because of its extreme multi-threaded nature and its fantastic kernel scheduler (which plays very well with the app_server). Everything is just snappy. I run BeOS on a 1.6 GHz machine and it is simply overkill. No matter what I do, there is always CPU left for other things. I primarily run BeOS on a dual Celeron 533 and it is also extremely snappy. You click a window and while this application might have another window doing something else, nothing gets paused to wait for the other window to finish what it's doing. Everything is just readily available immediately. Make no mistake, BeOS is not a fast OS when it comes to server operations (except if you have installed the BONE networking stack), or when you do heavy compilations, and despite popular belief, its SMP scaling could be much better. But being a "multimedia OS", the engineers over at Be had special-cased a lot of things, making latency and UI a snap. BeOS "feels" fast to the user perspective, even though some under-the-hood operations are not really as fast as Linux or Windows XP. Check out this very recent YellowTAB Zeta DivX video from CeBIT, showing what BeOS can do and how fast it can do it.