51–60 of 71 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, you know, text smoothing. Antialiasing. Silly stuff like that ;)
Haiku has sub-pixel rendering and every drawing operation is antialiased.
> every drawing operation is antialiased.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, get some lens flare and transparent windows in there!
Awww, hackers who hate what they call “eye candy”. It warms my heart!
Several things 1. I'm an OS junkie. I love installing, fiddling and learning new OSes. I installed BeOS and used it for about 2 years (no joke) back in the day. LOVED IT. I even had it replace my Slackware instance for about 6 months as my primary system. 2. I love seeing OSes still actively developed even if they aren't popular. I think it keeps driving ingenuity and pushes other people. But, I don't get why we have…
The interface certainly looks 1997, but it feels reasonably smooth. It is lightweight and fast, just that one has to click a lot. So, it feels 1997, when GUIs were a ittle more responsive. (I do really wish the WM would do some more things for me, like SloppyFocus) ...and don't ask about the file manager.
As far as boot speed goes, on my laptop it's a couple of seconds. I'd use it more if not for the below-mentioned issues. (Booting from a disk; the live CD is as slow as you might expect.)
The software support is not bad at all. There's a nice browser (webkit-based), bash, and I didn't have trouble getting a couple of mainstream interpreters running. I believe they're using a slightly older gcc, but I had no trouble getting a couple of my personal projects to build (rsync'd from somewhere or copied from my /home, since Haiku can mount ext3), or a few other programs that I wanted. If something is POSIXy, it'll probably run. Ruby and Python worked for me, as well as a small language I'd put together.
The only thing that keeps me from running it as the main OS for my laptop is drivers. The wireless support is still in development, and the version I have doesn't know when I've plugged in my headphones; my laptop is mostly used to play music, ssh to a larger computer, and browse the web. So, without headphones, I would definitely disturb coworkers, and need an ethernet cable to use besides.
Still I recommend trying it out. It's still under development, but it's solid and fast already. (Just need the danged sound/wifi drivers to work...)
The fact that BeOS is single-user is news to me. I have to wonder what the security model looks like without a 'root' concept - this article's dismissal of the problem seems pretty shallow. Obviously the "Change the World" title is just linkbait. Thanks for renaming.
What's the problem? There's one user, it's their data on the drive, and they can do what they want with it. In any case, root isn't the solution. It's a bug in Unix that Plan 9 fixed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, I agree with that statement in principle. Though I don't see Haiku capturing a market the size of even WebOS or something like that, it just doesn't seem that there is enough space for it. The only reason I mentioned translation layer was to get people using it...but it they plan to write some awesome apps for it, all the better. It really is a catch-22. Look at Ubuntu and Wayland. Getting to Wayland means havi…
Not sure Haiku will ever be more than a hobby. My appreciation for it is that it has been a long , long , long labor of love for its developers. I can't help but to admire the dedication of everyone who made it happen. I don't think that widespread adoption was anything they had in mind.
(Edit: changed "it" to "widespread adoption".)
The reason that I'm excited about Haiku: a fledgling open-source OS that isn't based on the Linux kernel. It has been awesome to see Linux find its place on the desktop and mobile, yet, the homogeny is rather stifling and it's disappointing to see there's no alternative to maintaining UNIX's legacy (X11, filesystem layout, my personal dislikes). Haiku seems to have the potential to fill that void.
I wonder what a mobile OS based on Haiku could be like?
I can't see what Haiku offers that modern OS X doesn't. Drag and Drop between applications? Got it. Combining soundcards to use in aggregate? Got it[1]. Object Oriented APIs? Had it since NeXTSTEP (and they're called 'Kits' as well). The only thing that seemed mildly interesting to me was the routing of audio between apps, but this is mostly achieved these days using ReWire or Soundflower (admittedly not an ideal sol…
I use Mac OS X every single day and I would freely admit it is a giant bloated memory sucking pig. My finder was using 100 megs of memory yesterday. Why? Who knows but for me I'd like to have a lean OS with good features rather than one that I need to reinstall every year because it suddenly becomes a sluggish, memory sucking pig like my Mac OS X machines have over the last 5 years. Haiku isn't a memory pig- I'd like…
Not to single out Apple; most UIs are like that nowadays, including my personal phone (N900, flashy/slow animations and everything, but tolerable). Responsiveness and speed in GUIs seem to be relegated to semi-obscure X11 window managers. It would be nice if "usable" got a higher priority than "flashy", without neglecting flashy, but it seems to be one or the other for now.
Some people clearly want that, though, so it's hard to blame anyone for selling it to them.
I can't see what Haiku offers that modern OS X doesn't. Drag and Drop between applications? Got it. Combining soundcards to use in aggregate? Got it[1]. Object Oriented APIs? Had it since NeXTSTEP (and they're called 'Kits' as well). The only thing that seemed mildly interesting to me was the routing of audio between apps, but this is mostly achieved these days using ReWire or Soundflower (admittedly not an ideal sol…
Tracker is much more rapid to navigate around than any other GUI I've used. I find haiku workspaces far more fluid to use.
Some disadvantages opver OSX is that OSX is really unix, whereas Haiku just presents as it. Most people won't care about this, but if you were porting unix utils yourself you'd probably be aware of it.
BeOS/Haiku use C++ as the primary development language. This will be offputting to some. I'd expect the APIs are easy enough to wrap and that the haiku community will produce first-class python wrappers or similar. They've had them in the past.
> suggesting that it's going to have any effect on 'the
> world' is pretty silly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a "modern OS" BeOS lacked a lot. Shoddy hardware support at best, a terrible network stack, did it have a printing subsystem? I know they wanted to rebuild the networking stack I don't remember print being good. Internationalization was non-existant. It was an RTOS with a UI on it, sexy and clean, I'm not a hater but a long long long way from NextStep or OSX.
Replace shoddy with limited and I could agree with that. BeOS died very young. Pretty much all those points could be made at the inception of any OS. OS X had a nice jump on that because it was NextStep and had been developed for well over a decade.
Several things 1. I'm an OS junkie. I love installing, fiddling and learning new OSes. I installed BeOS and used it for about 2 years (no joke) back in the day. LOVED IT. I even had it replace my Slackware instance for about 6 months as my primary system. 2. I love seeing OSes still actively developed even if they aren't popular. I think it keeps driving ingenuity and pushes other people. But, I don't get why we have…
BeOS GUI was minimal, slick, and one of the rare GUIs that you can actually use for system maintenance. That's a tipping point for me: Linux desktops GUIs are there because a desktop computer apparently has to have a desktop GUI. In BeOS, it was there so that you could operate your system. Using a shell on Linux is the equivalent of the "Start" button; using a shell on BeOS always felt like a hack: you didn't need it for system control.