Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Dawn of Haiku OS

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 115 posts

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#31

Post by beosrocks »

dr_dank's comment on Slashdot ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472 ) pretty much sums up its awesomeness:

BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper.

He yanked the plug on the box.

Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened.

If you've never played with BeOS on an old Pentium II, it's hard to imagine the kind of performance it was able to squeeze out of that hardware. Here's a rough idea:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ#t=17m36s

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#32

Post by timc3 »

zred wrote: post #16
grandpoobah wrote: post #4

At some stage they must have asked themselves, with all the effort they had gone through, couldn't we just make a serious offer to buy the BeOS IP?

Palm bought BeOS for $11M (and those assets were later transfered to PalmSource which became Access). In 2001 (when BeOS was bought), it might have made a bit of sense. Be was pretty modern then - competing against Windows XP and either the Classic Mac OS which it was far better than or OS X which was very new and so incredibly slow it was nearly unusable - I don't miss those days being a Mac user. However, in 2001 i…

So you are saying that they might as well give up?

they have to start somewhere, and choose a good base to start from, from now on its adding those more advanced features and the gravy that users expect.

Perhaps the linux guys should have given up around Slackware 1.0? I mean it wasn't exactly as good as the Sun and SGI boxes I was using back then.

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#33

Post by mtts »

dbaupp wrote: post #23

> Linux, for instance, is based around a core—called a kernel—that was originally designed for use in servers and only later modified for desktop systems As far as I understand the history of Linux, this is just plain not true: Linux was originally a toy project with little focus on either desktop or server systems. Am I missing something?

I think what this is referring to is that Unix is not especially designed to give priority to desktop processes. BeOS was.

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#34

Post by mtts »

appleaintbad wrote: post #2

"What really sets Haiku apart, though, is its efficiency and speed. On my three-year-old desktop computer, Haiku boots up from a cold start in 10 to 15 seconds, and when running it uses only about 170 megabytes of RAM." Sounds good to me, but 10-15 seconds running on what specs? Also, looking at the video, it seems like this OS is stuck in the 1990s. That is fine as long as it runs a standards compliant browser, but…

BeOS booted up in 10 to 15 seconds on a fairly run of the mill Celeron 333 back in the day :-)

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#36

Post by pazimzadeh »

AlexFromBelgium wrote: post #30
pazimzadeh wrote: post #27

The problem with open-source OS's is that they can't take advantage of things like attractive fonts for the user interface. There has got to be a better open-source font than what Haiku is currently using ( http://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/deskbar.html ).

"The problem with open-source OS's is that they can't take advantage of things like attractive fonts..." My thoughts while reading this: haha good one, yeah make fun of the non-open source stuff... oh wait, this guy is serious

I'm not making fun, and I don't dislike open-source software. The typeface is ugly.

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#37

Post by dchest »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #27

The problem with open-source OS's is that they can't take advantage of things like attractive fonts for the user interface. There has got to be a better open-source font than what Haiku is currently using ( http://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/deskbar.html ).

This is no longer true -- there are a few quality typefaces made by professional designers available for open source projects, for example DejaVu, Droid, Arimo/Tinos, PT Sans, Ubuntu. Even Mac OS X uses an open source font for a part of their interface (Menlo, based on DejaVu Sans Mono).

timc is right, what you see is unattractive font rendering (no subpixel rendering, full hinting). For the state of the art of font rendering in open source projects, look at Ubuntu or Infinality.

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#38

Post by wtracy »

eslaught wrote: post #10

"Where BeOS drove ahead of other operating systems of its time (and where Haiku is still ahead of contemporary operating systems) is that each individual application uses many threads. The core of the application itself has one thread, and each window the application creates has a thread." I might not have been around when BeOS was first created, but this is certainly not a new concept today. I don't think I can name…

BeOS was (and arguably still is) the only platform with a UI toolkit and system API that strongly encourages pervasive multithreading. Everywhere else, you have the option of writing asyncronous code, but the libraries are all designed primarily for single-threaded use cases.

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#39

Post by reinhardt »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #27

The problem with open-source OS's is that they can't take advantage of things like attractive fonts for the user interface. There has got to be a better open-source font than what Haiku is currently using ( http://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/deskbar.html ).

If this is the (only/main) problem of the open-source OS's, I'd think they're doing pretty good.

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#40

Post by Sapient »

dchest wrote: post #37
pazimzadeh wrote: post #27

The problem with open-source OS's is that they can't take advantage of things like attractive fonts for the user interface. There has got to be a better open-source font than what Haiku is currently using ( http://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/deskbar.html ).

This is no longer true -- there are a few quality typefaces made by professional designers available for open source projects, for example DejaVu, Droid, Arimo/Tinos, PT Sans, Ubuntu. Even Mac OS X uses an open source font for a part of their interface (Menlo, based on DejaVu Sans Mono). timc is right, what you see is unattractive font rendering (no subpixel rendering, full hinting). For the state of the art of font…

Those fonts definitely have sub-pixel hinting - easy to spot if you zoom in on any of the pics - the font is just not a very good UI font.
Post reply on HN