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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

#101
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s to a certain advantage though. There’s a nostalgic pining for simpler cleaner OS aesthetics. See the vaporwave and Frutiger Aero trends, and the interest in SerenityOS.

Aero was not simpler or cleaner. Ditto with KDE3 with Keramik. Usable and with clear widgets? Yes, but not simpler. Simpler, clean and usable were Mac OS 7-8, Windows 95-2k, or BeOS. Also, lots of vaporwave confuses the 80's and 90's, often made from people which either they weren't there or they were too young. To me the years from1996 and 2004 share lots of traits, (being Mac OSX almost the pinaccle of late 90's te…

To me, the appeal of Frutiger Aero is more in the proto-solarpunk marketing (skyscrapers surrounded by verdant fields under sunny blue skies, dolphins leaping) than the actual UI. Though hard to hate on the Wii Shop Channel.

Bluecurve from Red Hat is a nice bridge between the '90s and late '00s era, as far as design languages go.

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

#102
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Haiku developer here.) There is one hardware accelerated driver, for Radeon Southern Islands; but it's third-party, out-of-tree, and not particularly simple to set up and get running. So, not really.

Thanks for the response. Is there much hope for this to change at some point? I would love to eventually use Haiku on actual hardware, and the lack of video acceleration is the main thing that discourages me from giving it a go.

Well, there's nothing preventing it from happening if that's what you mean. It's just a difficult thing to do, and requires effort (and expertise.)

I might take a crack at porting the KMS/DRM drivers from Linux eventually, but it's not near the top of my TODO list.

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

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, it depends on your threat model, but https://xkcd.com/1200/ applies; for a single user machine what's the difference between the user and root?

I have to type a password to perform actions as root, for one.

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

#105
I loved BeOS. In the 90's it was my main OS including at work. When Be announced that BeOS will be gone, and Be too... I went to Linux. And never looked back. Started with a RedHat Linux 5, tried Debian, but could not get Debian to work with the dial-up modem, so went RedHat 5, then 6 and all those that followed until Fedora went out.

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

#106
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that the industry is littered with the skeletons of "kitchen PC for Grandma" that lets a senior connect to the grandkids, set a timer for those apple pies, and do some light surfing, and that it will never work on the slurry-filled Internet that Grandma's kids actually built in their day jobs - but with each passing enshittification of the home user PC experience, the siren song of a simple single user OS that…

As a retired grandparent I was delighted to see that software I worked on in the 1980s was recently used to crack a Quantum-resistant cryptosystem candidate ( SIKE -Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation) in minutes. https://mathematical-research-institute.sydney.edu.au/news/q... ( Magma is a 1990s- second gen version of Cayley from the 1980s- ) Can you explain more about setting a timer for apple pies?

Well, there are many seniors doing great work and staying up to date on all kinds of new tech and so on. But one glance at the media directed at mass market seniors and you can also see that people believe there is a huge market for simplified devices and technology. Consumer Cellular, jitterbug phone, life alert necklaces, the list goes on.

All thru the 90s and 2000s there were attempts to make a PC into a home hub. I think even facebook tried around 2018 iirc. It would be something that you put on the kitchen counter and that serves as a recipe database, conferencing machine, and a useful kitchen helper: such as, setting a timer to go off to tell you that its time to get the apple pie out of the oven.

The UI for such a thing needs to be simple and bulletproof. Windows and Linux dont meet that bar. I think iOS comes close. In another timeline, it could have been BeOS.

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

#107
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one area where I think 98 and 2000 regress from 95 is that they introduce "web content" in applications that are not web browsers - specifically, random objects respond to single-clicks instead of double-clicks, and blue underlined (and sometimes not even underlined) hyperlinks start to appear. There was no reason to do that.

Active X desktop crap could be disabled with some Registry tweaks.

It wasn't just on the desktop, though. It was in the Explorer, in Office apps, and various other places.

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it depends on your threat model, but https://xkcd.com/1200/ applies; for a single user machine what's the difference between the user and root?

I have to type a password to perform actions as root, for one.

You probably have to type a password to perform actions as your normal user, unless you've disabled the login screen for your system. But if you do enter that root password, what exactly can you do that you couldn't do as your own user that actually matters? Sure, root can ex. inject drivers to the kernel, but that's just an intermediate step. The real damage is typically in running a keylogger, getting access to your online accounts, sending DDoS traffic for a botnet, etc. - all actions that can be done with just your non-root user.

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

#109

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

Early 2000s it was my daily driver. But man.. I used the filesystem like it was indented.. All my files had attributes. Unfortunately none of the metadata was supported on other platforms. Lots of wasted energy :) I loved BeOS

Did you ever use Scott Hacker's CD ripping script?

It got the track info from cddb, added the attributes to both the mp3 files and the BFS extended attributes.

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