Now imagine macOS progressing to the point where title bars have been replaced with toolbars, and buttons no longer have borders, so you have to guess what part of the window will drag it.
:-|
I remember using the fluxbox wm like this back on the university Sun machines
I loved the tabs on BeOS.
And yes I know it's not really a linux specific thing, but that gets the point across. It is very common on linux. I could twirl my os/desktop hipster mustache and say "my obsd/spectrwm desktop handles no window chrome really well" but then I feel really pretentious instead of only slightly.
Beyond that, I'm not sure if buying Be would have fixed the managerial problems at Apple. Would they have been able to add the required features to BeOS to turn it into a production OS without the project turning into another Copland? Would the existing Apple management have slimmed down the massive Apple product line that had dozens of nearly identical models? Would it have gotten rid of dead-end projects like Newton and Pippin? Etc.
Jobs is what makes or breaks Apple in that critical period. I didn't like him but that's relevant to the success of the company. JLG did not have whatever it was Jobs gave the company.
https://www.youtube.com/@designedinca
(Specifically they talk about Be beginning: https://youtu.be/5IFxwnXASyQ)
If not, desktop computing would be taken over by C++ as main systems programming language, and UNIX like computing relegated to servers.
In the places where there's something entirely different going on, such as networking in earlier BeOS, it's trash and you'd obviously want to throw it away and do what Unix did - Be were doing so. So a hypothetical turn of the century fruit-flavour BeOS is probably much closer to "Unix with a different UI" than you're thinking. NeXT changed nothing there.
The original Nike store in NYC purchased one to do their signage media playback. It didn’t go well.
I was installing GNOME pieces compiling from source, on top of Sun Solaris. So it was a weird configuration. But FWIW I relied on the tabs a lot.
I seem to recall that you could hold down Alt key and drag the tab horizontally. So a tab could stick up anywhere along the top of the window frame. The SPARCStations had three-button mice, and this might have been mapped to middle or right mouse button.
The tabbed interface features the ability to gather windows into tab groups. So when you are moving a window by dragging its tab, if you drag the tab next to another window's tab, the dragged window will snap to that other window's frame, the dragged window will be the selected tab and its contents displayed in the frame. Then dragging any of the tabs drags the whole set of tabs that are snapped to that frame. Click on a tab to make it the active tab displayed in the frame.
It's effectively like tabs now, but sort of inside out: tabs are managed by the windows manager and not the app. Tab groups of multiple, different apps. The app does not have to be "tab-aware" to be in a tab group, although I suppose there are events that can signal the manager to make a window the selected tab. It's just raising a window, making it frontmost. Modal dialogs can get tangled up, but it's no worse than the mess commonly accepted today.
[1]: https://www.haiku-os.org/
With AI I feel like a lot of these bygone-era OS's could see a whole new ecosystem of modern apps within a very short period of time.
1. https://github.com/machiya-kobo/shiori/tree/main#haiku
At this point, they could likely decompile MacOS classic and rework it to give it modern memory protection, virtual memory, preemptive multitasking, and networking.
I assume booting an OS with a mere few megabytes of RAM footprint would only take milliseconds?