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Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024

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Re: Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024

#31
post #6

Haiku looked amazing and beautiful in 2009 when I first learned about it. Today it looks dated like Windows 95.

Disagree strongly. I find its appearance 10X more visually appealing than any modern UI (win/mac/kde/etc). They’re all incredibly wasteful of space and chunky. Also, designers ruined OSX by making it flat and joyless.

They not just waste space but at the same time break some of the UI. Recently it took me half a minute to drag a window into view on Mac OS because aside from a few pixels every single part of the window "title bar" was actually some button or widget. I wish mainstream operating systems implemented DWM's shortcuts for window dragging/resizing, those are amazing: holding the key and left mouse button makes the window draggable anywhere, and right mouse button instantly resizes the window so the bottom right corner is at the mouse cursor position.

And I hate auto-hiding, narrow scrollbars so much. Scrollbars have exactly two purposes: show the scroll progress and allow faster scrolling than with the wheel/gesture. Both are effectively prevented by it going invisible.

There was a time when I found the Windows 98 UI a bit "old", but honestly in the long run it aged better than almost everything that came after.

Re: Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024

#32
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having contributed to the project, I still agree. In my mind it’s perfect for retirees who don’t need zoom or mobile syncing. The browser is quite good imo as is the email client. I really like that it’s (by default) a single user environment-ideal for an old laptop.

I have to imagine the Venn diagram of retirees and people who are interested in trying more obscure operating systems, has only a sliver of overlap. Though I may end up in that camp one day. I did quite a bit of that between graduating from college and getting my first job.

Retirees built every long lasting technology we use everyday, and even invented some too. ;-)

Re: Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024

#33

Loved BeOS, and love HaikuOS. But a "daily driver" it is most certainly not. Don't be fooled.

I attempted to use Haiku as my daily driver about a year ago. Only four things really put the kibosh on that:

1. Lack of native / built-in support for full-disk encryption

2. Lack of a day-to-day usable web browser

3. Lack of the apps I regularly use on Linux and Windows (or good enough equivalents)

4. Lack of stability on the hardware I was using (Framework 11th Gen)

It looks like at least one of those is no longer an issue, thanks to Falkon. It also looks like there's been a lot of progress on getting Wine working and stable. If overall stability is sufficiently improved, then giving it another try might very well be in the cards, even without FDE.

Re: Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024

#34

Haiku looked amazing and beautiful in 2009 when I first learned about it. Today it looks dated like Windows 95.

I could not disagree more about Windows 95 looking "dated". It's one the clearest, simplest, and easiest to parse UIs I've ever seen. Buttons look like buttons. Scroll bars are thick and clear. Draggable objects are obvious. It's a huge shame that we've gone only backwards since then, IMHO.

One convention we lost was that text fields have sunken white background and other areas of the UI are generally grey. UI now uses bright white in most places, eventually causing the world to invent dark mode.

It's really gone backward.

Re: Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could not disagree more about Windows 95 looking "dated". It's one the clearest, simplest, and easiest to parse UIs I've ever seen. Buttons look like buttons. Scroll bars are thick and clear. Draggable objects are obvious. It's a huge shame that we've gone only backwards since then, IMHO.

I'll probably catch heat for this, but I think Windows 95 was the pinnacle of UI/UX design, and much of what we've done since have been regressions.

I agree. You knew visually what everything did. A button was a button and was noticeably off or on and things like that. I would put classic on for my XP UI I love it so much.

Re: Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024

#37
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boots really fast. And the UI on some linux DEs feels laggy at times. This shouldn’t have the decades of cruft making the GUI lag.

What Linux GUI are you referring to? The only one I could think of were the first versions of Gnome 3, but that is pretty smooth nowadays.

Gnome. Still.

Of course modern web dev is not helpful.

Re: Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024

#38

Loved BeOS, and love HaikuOS. But a "daily driver" it is most certainly not. Don't be fooled.

I have to try Haiku, but the last time I used BeOS everything effectively ran as root. Not that Unix-style user permissions are the epitome of OS security, but at least an RCE vulnerability in the browser doesn't allow for persistent root or whatever.

haiku devs are working on some form of multiuser support

Re: Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024

#39
post #7

Haiku looked amazing and beautiful in 2009 when I first learned about it. Today it looks dated like Windows 95.

I wish modern operating systems looked like Windows 95, I think this was the one time Microsoft got their user experience right, except for the things that were forced on them by backward compatibility concerns, e.g. "in-band" filename extensions that were awkwardly hidden by later versions of Windows.

Haven’t tried either, but there’s https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 and https://serenityos.org/

Re: Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024

#40
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it works on ones computer I dont see why it couldnt be daily driven depending on your needs. It has a webkit based browser, and a native emacs port, thats pretty much all i use day to day :P

No 3D acceleration.

What are you doing on a daily basis that needs 3D graphics?
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