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Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

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Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#11

It probably can be used to save under-powered hardware from being discarded; one would think that for limited-scope usage (e.g. browsing/basic productivity etc), it should perform well.

> under-powered hardware ... one would think that for limited-scope usage (e.g. browsing ...), it should perform well. Alas, I fear that browsing is probably one of the things that require good performance and a huge amount of software and complexity. Because browsing probably involves "checking Gmail" (huge amount of JS, need a good fast JS engine e.g. with JIT etc.) or "watching a YouTube video" (need to have video…

nah.

I eventually found out that only the shittiest websites force you to have powerful computer and I could browse many of the most interesting ones using lagrange through a web to gemini proxy. Feels like having all the web in reader mode. Same can be done using a browser for the terminal such as w3m or links. Both support images nowadays.

A web browser is unnecessary to check emails anyway. Your example is probably the most easily solved.

Video streaming is another thing.

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#12
It is lovely to use once you learn the keyboard shortcuts

My main gripes for now:

- no full disk encryption which means it can only really be used as a kiosk computer and not contain anything sensitive.

- I haven't been able to play anything reliably from netflix or hbomax. either with otterbrowser or epiphany/Gnome Web. Probably Widevine can't be run on those and even tweaking user agents won't help.

Right now it is relegated as a kiosk computer for the kitchen to follow recipes and play music on an old laptop when I am cooking.

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#13
post #10

Sorry I missed the marketing - I love that it's different, but who's the target user and what's the pitch for them to use Haiku? The author warned about backlash, but having a tight pitch is a key ingredient in continuing the warm vibes and avoiding backlash. IMHO not-Linux isn't so scary anymore, plenty of people have fought with MacOS to get the better hardware, slicker desktop, etc. Does it run Docker? If so, I'd…

I think it appeals people who want a fast booting, snappy OS with base low memory usage.

If you focus on apps using the original tooling/toolkit it looks very integrated. A bit less if you start using gtk/qt apps though.

Since it has some virtualization support it should be able to run docker/podman from a vm, which is basically what happens with docker on MacOS or Windows. I haven't seen a project similar to docker/podman desktop on it but this is not a show stopper imho. I would look at a project like portainer for people wanting a gui for docker that can run wherever docker run.

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#14
post #8

I am confused about this: > Haiku, like BeOS before it, is not a Unix. If you actively like Unix, and what you want to do already works well on Unix – any Unix, and that includes macOS, as well as Linux and FreeBSD – then you probably won't see much appeal here. Don’t they support the same set of terminal command as in other Unix-like systems? From what I saw [1] there aren’t much difference. Well that is what what p…

> Don’t they support the same set of terminal command as in other Unix-like systems? From what I saw [1] there aren’t much difference. Well that is what what people care about unix, right?

You can use bash so yes most builtin shell commands are supported. You won't have all the linux specific commands though.

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#16
post #9

Haiku sounds much more usable than I'd realized: > The new version supports HiDPI displays [...] and has significantly improved Wi-Fi support, including via some USB Wi-Fi adapters[.] > [...] > It has translation layers for both X11 and Wayland, as well as for Gtk apps, alongside the WINE support it gained this time last year. This means a number of new apps, including the GNOME Web browser Epiphany, a full graphical…

Way easier to try it out. Just fire up a vm in virtualbox or whatever your preference is. They even wrote documentation on it https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/virtualizing

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#17
post #10

Sorry I missed the marketing - I love that it's different, but who's the target user and what's the pitch for them to use Haiku? The author warned about backlash, but having a tight pitch is a key ingredient in continuing the warm vibes and avoiding backlash. IMHO not-Linux isn't so scary anymore, plenty of people have fought with MacOS to get the better hardware, slicker desktop, etc. Does it run Docker? If so, I'd…

I think for personal computing a single user, multi tasking OS is the sweet spot. It's too bad that stagnated with BeOS and Amiga.

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#18
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> under-powered hardware ... one would think that for limited-scope usage (e.g. browsing ...), it should perform well. Alas, I fear that browsing is probably one of the things that require good performance and a huge amount of software and complexity. Because browsing probably involves "checking Gmail" (huge amount of JS, need a good fast JS engine e.g. with JIT etc.) or "watching a YouTube video" (need to have video…

Just check gmail using lynx ;)

Unfortunately, logging in to Google now requires JavaScript.

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#19

It is lovely to use once you learn the keyboard shortcuts My main gripes for now: - no full disk encryption which means it can only really be used as a kiosk computer and not contain anything sensitive. - I haven't been able to play anything reliably from netflix or hbomax. either with otterbrowser or epiphany/Gnome Web. Probably Widevine can't be run on those and even tweaking user agents won't help. Right now it is…

Isn't the netflix problem mainly due to DRM-stuff? Not sure how they could fix that.

Agreed on the disk encryption. Other than that Haiku is indeed getting dangerously close to being feasible as a daily driver.

For work Docker support would be nice-to-have but one can always set up a Linux VM instead. Docker performance on Windows and Mac is crap anyway.

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#20
post #8

I am confused about this: > Haiku, like BeOS before it, is not a Unix. If you actively like Unix, and what you want to do already works well on Unix – any Unix, and that includes macOS, as well as Linux and FreeBSD – then you probably won't see much appeal here. Don’t they support the same set of terminal command as in other Unix-like systems? From what I saw [1] there aren’t much difference. Well that is what what p…

Unix is not just a set of terminal commands, it's the whole system architecture, and the fact that all those derive from the original old AT&T Unix. If I run the Bash shell on Windows, it won't turn it into Unix either..
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