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Haiku R1/beta6 has been released

haiku-os.org

61–70 of 110 posts

Re: Haiku R1/beta6 has been released

#61
I would love to give Haiku a try. Indeed, I've looked at it's code before (it's quite good, or was, last time I looked at it). What prevents me is accessibility. To be fair to Haiku, implementing an actually good accessibility stack is genuinely a nightmare that AI isn't going to help much with, were you to ask it to help you with it. Primarily because many accessibility stacks (UIA, MSAA, IAccessible2, AT-SPI, ...) are massive collections of incredibly nasty hacks. I have yet to find an accessibility stack that is actually well-designed, thought out and future-proof. And screen readers are pretty much collections of good code alongside a bunch of app-specific workaround as well which just complicates things.

All of that said, I might fire it up if only to play with it from the console if I can get something like SSH working.

Re: Haiku R1/beta6 has been released

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, Linux is improving too quickly for Haiku. I have been looking forward to running Haiku as a daily driver for years. And it is almost there. It may even be good enough now for many people. Modern browsers really help. But I was amazed recently when I put Haiku on an old laptop that was already running Linux. I remember Haiku being so lean and fast and multi-tasking so smoothly. But honestly Linux felt…

There are Haiku/BeOS-style window manager/GTK themes if that suits your needs better.

could you point them out? i actually did a search but could not find much. there are GTK themes, but nothing i could find that converts a gnome desktop. stuff is either incomplete or outdated. i actually managed to get half BeOS theme together for KDE, and i still use that on my desktop. but it's inconsistent, and in particular the tab style window management is missing, which is really the best part of the interface.

Re: Haiku R1/beta6 has been released

#63

Haiku could theoretically fill a niche for music production workflows. Ultra tight MIDI timing and sequencing, low-latency audio and a beautiful desktop. I hope this dream comes true eventually.

I think it'll need a compelling DAW to make that a reality.

IMHO, it's not just DAWs keeping people on main OSes, but plugins. On the Linux side, Reaper, arguably one of the most popular options on Windows/macOS, has been available since 2018, BitWig is a good Ableton-like experience, and Ardour is also decent. But on the side of plugins - in my case drum VSTis and amp sims - the selection is still quite limited.

Re: Haiku R1/beta6 has been released

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What really sets Haiku (and the preceding BeOS) apart is that it's built for the express purpose of being a desktop operating system. As good as desktop Linux has gotten it still suffers from servers being the chief use case for Linux-based OSes, seen in quirks such as how poorly it handles running out of memory (not as big of a deal in the server world, particularly in the container era; just tweak your setup and re…

The problem is, Linux is improving too quickly for Haiku. I have been looking forward to running Haiku as a daily driver for years. And it is almost there. It may even be good enough now for many people. Modern browsers really help. But I was amazed recently when I put Haiku on an old laptop that was already running Linux. I remember Haiku being so lean and fast and multi-tasking so smoothly. But honestly Linux felt…

> The problem is, Linux is improving too quickly for Haiku. Ain’t it the truth. It’s really great now the snowball is fully in flow down the mountain with Linux. But at the same time it’s sad that there’s little time for anything else. We are a bit of a victim of our own success. We beat the drum in the 90s that Linux needs to win and now that it won what does it really mean. Free and open source to do anything but at the same time, why in the world use anything else. We have come a bit of a Chromium in that regard (or it became us?)

Re: Haiku R1/beta6 has been released

#65
post #61

I would love to give Haiku a try. Indeed, I've looked at it's code before (it's quite good, or was, last time I looked at it). What prevents me is accessibility. To be fair to Haiku, implementing an actually good accessibility stack is genuinely a nightmare that AI isn't going to help much with, were you to ask it to help you with it. Primarily because many accessibility stacks (UIA, MSAA, IAccessible2, AT-SPI, ...)…

In a world where Haiku is widely adopted, I figure its accessibility model would be much like that of Windows XP, in that it works by not restricting you from doing things, rather than specifically allowing certain things. XP and Haiku let the user do pretty much whatever, and for this reason, many disabled people still rely on systems like XP.

Re: Haiku R1/beta6 has been released

#66

Just a heads-up for those trying it out, I've found a couple of regressions in Beta 6 that rendered my Haiku system unbootable, until I remembered about hammering the space key during the boot sequence to get to the safe mode menu. In my case, my ThinkPad X1 (Yoga 3rd Gen) used to boot despite what appeared to be kernel panics, but typing "continue" at the kernel prompt would skip past them and everything would then…

Maybe share my old article with Haiku developers: https://clickhouse.com/blog/agentic-coding

Could be a small chance, but it has already made many engineers reconsider their AI stance.

Re: Haiku R1/beta6 has been released

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows crashing all the time? I haven’t experienced crashes since WinXP… Or when trying beta drivers and overclocking. As a day to day windows and OSX user, I’ve had more stability issues with OSX than Windows.

Windows has gotten more stable, that's for sure, but I have seen BSOD's on every single edition of Windows, and that's only on my personal life. In my time in corporate IT I can tell you that Windows is generally much more problematic than MacOS for a variety of reasons, though modern MacOS certainly has its share of issues. But again, that's in a corporate IT environment, not regular consumer usage. Not sure how you…

I didn’t mean to say it never happened. It’s just that when it happened it was a memory stick, MB, or other non Windows specific issue

Re: Haiku R1/beta6 has been released

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it's arguably clean, and definitely an improvement over Windows 98 era GUI, probably also XP era. But the world has moved on. Even KDE looks better today.

I honestly don't get this, what have we gotten since that's a considerable UI improvement? Bigger paddings? Flat UI? IIRC you can even configure custom colors, have dark mode, etc. It might look dated with the gray color scheme but that's really the only thing I can guess would look dated to someone.

We are these days blessed with the gift of elegantly useless skinny scrollbars

Re: Haiku R1/beta6 has been released

#69
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haiku should rethink that AI rule. Put very high code quality gates in place, sure, but Haiku in particular is a very low-velocity project and AI could help them so much. There is no reason you can't produce high-quality code with AI conformant to your style guidelines and structural preferences, it just takes a lot more effort than the slop.

I'm curious why velocity is sooooo important. Every single AI discussion that I've read always always always mentions velocity or development speed as though that somehow is the ultimate goal. Why does it matter if your velocity isn't as fast as everyone else? Maybe taking things slowly might actually be a good thing. I'm not at all trying to be overly critical or pissy; I'm genuinely curious as to why this is always…

Velocity of LoC isn't important. Velocity of user visible improvements can matter if a project feeds off of usage and popularity. Or at least that velocity matters until the OS is capable enough to satisfy the user base.

Re: Haiku R1/beta6 has been released

#70

Haiku could theoretically fill a niche for music production workflows. Ultra tight MIDI timing and sequencing, low-latency audio and a beautiful desktop. I hope this dream comes true eventually.

Tunetracker[0] radio automation software (not sure what else it did/does) started on BeOS, then moved to Haiku. After 25 years(!)[1] it's on Mac now.

[0] https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/

[1] https://rbr.com/tunetracker-ditches-beos-haiku-for-mac-backb...

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