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

81–90 of 115 posts

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#81

Post by mesec »

tqh wrote: post #75
rbanffy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have machines scattered throughout the office for meetings (mostly Jira or other web applications). One of those has Haiku running and people seem to like it just fine. I do find, however, the ergonomics of the window manager to be atrocious. The little tabs, while faithful and part of the visual identity of BeOS, are, perhaps, the worst idea since the invention of overlapping windows. I'd suggest focusing on the…

The stack and tile functions might make you reconsider: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y-6YmGd30A

Amazing stuff, thanks for the link!

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#82

Post by GuiA »

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…

>it seems like this OS is stuck in the 1990s

Sounds like you're saying this solely based on what the GUI looks like. Yes, it's extremely dated and doesn't have all the fancy glitz of modern desktop environments, but the underlying system itself is quite modern.

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#83

Post by DHowett »

rbanffy wrote: post #64
pazimzadeh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So, it's not like they can't take advantage as much as most of its developers don't care about type.

Except that in this case they do, and have had numerous discussions about default fonts and wanting to not step on patent issues over things like ClearType (for RGB subpixel rendering).

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#84

Post by wmf »

batista wrote: post #71
wtracy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, BeOS is somewhat akin Node.js for operating systems?

No, every other GUI is akin to Node.js (single-threaded event-driven), while BeOS is more like Java servlets.

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#85

Post by ibisum »

brackishlake wrote: post #54

"Haiku is probably the best positioned to challenge the mainstream operating systems like Microsoft Windows and Mac OS." This is an absurd statement. Stop wasting time solving problems that don't exist for 98% of the market. "More choice" is not a better than if the choices suck. "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 hal…

There is room in the world for more operating system choice, most certainly. The modern hardware landscape being what it is, the OS is the App, pretty much, so work that out .. Haiku has its place.

Maybe after Web2.0 lights are faded, we will enter "OS War 4.0" and see where it takes us. I'm ready! (Still got my aging BeBox, to boot!)

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#86

Post by pjmlp »

gecko wrote: post #73
cageface wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's not so much the problem of an ABI but the fact that changing base classes in C++ forces client code to be recompiled because offsets of members and vtable entries change: http://haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue2-25.html Apparently Apple gets around this the usual way by padding out their API classes with extra unused members. I wonder what the solution is in Windows 8 & Symbian.

WinRT gets around it because it doesn't really export C++ the way you're thinking. What it exports are basically COM objects with a bunch of extra CLR-style metadata. COM avoids the C++ issue because it only allows you to consume interfaces, and, for all Windows compilers when COM was invented (and obviously since), vtables are always in a set location. So the trick is: 1. Never change existing interfaces 2. Always a…

Yeah, I left that a bit in the air.

One can see COM as a kind of operating system OO ABI.

OS/2 SOM was better, but never got much following.

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#87

Post by pjmlp »

cageface wrote: post #59
pjmlp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never heard this story before. Mac OS X drivers are written in C++. Symbian is fully written in C++. The new WinRT API for Windows 8 is C++ based along as the user space driver framework. There is no reason why Apple could not have defined a standard C++ ABI in BeOS, if that was the reason. The decision to take NeXT instead of BeOS, surely did not have anything to do with technical merits of the underlying systems.

I think it's not so much the problem of an ABI but the fact that changing base classes in C++ forces client code to be recompiled because offsets of members and vtable entries change: http://haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue2-25.html Apparently Apple gets around this the usual way by padding out their API classes with extra unused members. I wonder what the solution is in Windows 8 & Symbian.

The problem is not C++ specific.

Any OO language with native code generation suffers the same problem.

It is one of the consequences of the fragile base class problem in OO.

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#88

Post by chc »

DHowett wrote: post #15
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…

iOS doesn't actually spawn a new thread for every window in an application. All of the UIKit calls are still very thread-unsafe and expect to be used only from the main thread. This doesn't really cause much of a problem, since apps are page-based: you don't need to update more than one or two windows at one time, anyway.

Yeah, for anyone who doesn't believe this, do a search for _WebThreadLockFromAnyThread sometime. All those Stack Overflow questions are from people who thought it was safe to have threads anywhere near UIKit.

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#89

Post by batista »

nkoren wrote: post #80
batista wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd be more forgiving of Lion if it could play even one movie on my Macbook pro without occasionally going into frame-dropping VM-swapping. Try my MacBook Pro then, I play movies all the time on it with no problem of frame-dropping or swapping. And it's a 2007 model.

Well, that's weird. Mine's a 2009 model and I sorely regret installing Lion on it. The thing absolutely crawls.

I'm running Lion too. If you have repeatable problems, there should be some specific source for it. Tried "Activity Monitor" when it occurs?

Common problems can be: Spotlight doing indexing at the time, Flash fucking around, too little available hard drive space (less than 5GB), some rogue app, etc.

MBP 2007, 2GB RAM. I have now open: Chrome with 7 tabs, Sublime Text, Terminal (2 tabs, one SSH), Mail, iA Writer, Adium, iTunes, TunnelBlick VPN, Photoshop, Transmit, Dropbox, Alfred, Little Snitch and VLC and the movie plays just fine. I use either VLC or MPlayerX though, very rarely QuickTime w Perian.

Now, some people open 50 tabs and think that the browser should automagically handle them all, with 20 instances of Flash running in videos and apps, etc. Not so. VMs are also very resource hungry.

That said, the laptop is noticeably slower than my 4GB / i7 iMac, but not to the point it swaps --unless I start my 1GB linux VM (VMWare).

Re: The Dawn of Haiku OS

#90

Post by naner »

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…

The hinting looks fine and freetype2 is currently capable of emulating everything OSX or Windows does. The fonts look like (I'm no expert here) they are from the Liberation family that Red Hat created, and I'd agree that they are somewhat utilitarian and ugly.
Post reply on HN