Linux, as you may know, is a ground-up reinterpretation of UNIX. It's worth playing with just for the cleanness of its desktop, and there are working web browsers and media players, although it's still rather experimental and many of the features of BeOS haven't quite been fully realized as yet. In fact, even the second beta release of its under-development branch was released almost two years after the previous one. It’s been a while since the OS had a stable release. The spirit of the closed source BeOS lives on in the form of Haiku, an open source re-implementation which began development immediately after Be's demise, and it has been in development since.īuilt from the ground up but designed to be backward-compatible with its classic quarry, Haiku follows BeOS' lead in its entirely modular design, allowing different components of the OS to be developed concurrently. A stylish multitasking OS that introduced a whole host of features that Windows, Linux and macOS would later adopt for their own, BeOS was a true multimedia innovator that left the market with a whimper when its rights were sold to Palm in 2001. We're a bit sad that BeOS didn't take off.

The personal edition includes 6-months support and maintenance, while the commercial edition includes one-year of priority support and maintenance. There are two editions available: Personal, which retails for $129 per license, and Commercial, which retails at $229 per license, though volume discounts are available. Though its native file system is JFS, it ships with drivers for the FAT32 file system. While OS/2 barely survives as a legacy system, even after being extended for a while as eComStation, ArcaOS is still being actively developed with Spanish and German language editions currently under beta testing and scheduled to be released in the next update.ĪrcaOS includes a robust Unix compatibility subsystem, featuring a variety of ported Linux (opens in new tab) apps and some drivers, but still features the OS/2 Workplace Shell.ĪrcaOS is a 32-bit OS that runs on the x86 processor architecture, so should be compatible with some particularly old PCs. ArcaOS is an operating system based on the last IBM release for OS/2.

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