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tier one: linux, windows, freebsd tier two: openbsd, netbsd tier three: haiku tier four: all others
One of the few OSes where my wifi and sound just worked out of the box :)
Its totally usable DESKTOP fOS.
I always wondered what is the motivation behind Haiku. Is it a recreation of BeOS for the sake of recreating it, or is it practically usable for daily use?
The x86-32 version (and hypothetically the never-complete PowerPC version), as I see it, exists (or would exist) for binary compatibility with legacy BeOS systems. The AMD64 version on the other hand is a hobby OS demonstrating a path not taken where personal computer operating systems remained separate from server operating systems.
Also, like others, these days I can do basically everything I need to do on a computer other than gaming as long as I have a browser that supports the modern web and a SSH client so Haiku is absolutely fully usable on the right hardware.
BeOS was my dream from childhood. Haiku is amazing, especially because the original BeOS only existed for five years, while Haiku has been going for 24 already. What stamina!
Sorry for being negative here: What is the motivation for recreating Be? What would you hope to obtain that you cannot just by using, say, a customized Linux Mint? If it's just historical/nostalgia/challenge, I get it. But people seem to believe there is something else too, and I'd like to know what that is.
Even now, using it feels like the system is bereft of bloat and cruft. It's a system _for the user_ that doesn't assume that the user is technically incapable.
BeOS was my dream from childhood. Haiku is amazing, especially because the original BeOS only existed for five years, while Haiku has been going for 24 already. What stamina!
Sorry for being negative here: What is the motivation for recreating Be? What would you hope to obtain that you cannot just by using, say, a customized Linux Mint? If it's just historical/nostalgia/challenge, I get it. But people seem to believe there is something else too, and I'd like to know what that is.
IDK what scheduler voodoo they were doing, but it was awesome.
Only things I've seen that achieved something similar were QNX/Photon, and (though with the benefit of way stronger hardware and a ton of "cheating" by suspending applications) some (mostly early) versions of iOS.
I'm not sure I have any use for Haiku today, but I definitely wish for a world in which computer GUIs didn't feel so damn slow and janky and pre-occupied with whatever it's got going on internally rather than what I need it to be doing right now.
Also, I wish some kind of tagging system for filesystems had taken off well enough that I could rely on it, even cross-platform and when copying files between filesystems. Entire programs could just be file tags. Other programs could just be a thin GUI over tagged files. It sucks that didn't end up becoming a standard and reasonably cross-platform-compatible thing.
To get it working I have to type "continue" at the two kernel panics on startup due to spurious / overzealous Thunderbolt PCI warnings. I also needed help from an Action Retro video to figure out how to setup the UEFI BIOS files on the correct partitions on the bootable Samsung USB stick I use. But it works enough that I can boot into it straight off USB when I want a break from Windows & Linux. They finally added support for the WiFi in my particular ThinkPad. There's basically no bluetooth support, so if you want a wireless mouse and keyboard, something like the Logi Pebble 2 bundle with wireless USB dongle works well.
Haiku has a Go 1.18 port now that mostly works, so that helps. A lot of Qt software has been ported across, though obviously the ideal would be truly native BeOS software.
The main thing I find Haiku lacks is a decent email client. That really prevents productive work for me. There's Claws Mail, but it has enough bugs that I didn't even find it usable, nevermind reliable. There's also some memory or networking issues they haven't tracked down. When I'm using terminal sessions, network responses often have dropped bytes in the output.
Actually the thing I'm really lacking is Claude Code. I ended up building my own minimal TUI API harness / client on Haiku to try and get work done. Haiku's web browsers (like WebPositive) sometimes have problems with the Claude website. I've been wanting to use Claude to help write more Haiku / BeOS software and fix various OS issues - a couple of weeks ago I used the Claude API and $30 API credit to make a USB UAC 2 audio driver for Haiku that works with Focusrite Scarlett devices (both playback and recording). But Haiku's AI policy means I can't contribute those fixes back. Though I understand their desire to keep the source pure and free from any potential copyright liability concerns, especially as they release it under an MIT license.
If I ever become a billionaire, I'm going to throw a boatload of money into an seL4-based desktop operating system.
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It appears to be usable for daily use for some people, in that enough of a web browser works that you could mostly get by. It would be hard to say it is really practical, nor that it has a convincing path to being practical in the way that say ReactOS does.
People still find plan9 usable for daily use. The major barrier these days is indeed a web browser. I suspect even there you can get 95% of the way to that goal with a "browser" that is actually a linux VM.
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Sorry for being negative here: What is the motivation for recreating Be? What would you hope to obtain that you cannot just by using, say, a customized Linux Mint? If it's just historical/nostalgia/challenge, I get it. But people seem to believe there is something else too, and I'd like to know what that is.
BeOS was way, way snappier to use on the same hardware than Linux (or Windows) no matter how much you trimmed down your (GUI) Linux. IDK what scheduler voodoo they were doing, but it was awesome. Only things I've seen that achieved something similar were QNX/Photon, and (though with the benefit of way stronger hardware and a ton of "cheating" by suspending applications) some (mostly early) versions of iOS. I'm not su…
Hmm.
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i can't speak for the project's maintainers and their motivation, but it is workable as a daily use OS if your hardware is supported and you are willing to use the still beta firefox port.
But compared to Linux, why would I want to use Haiku these days?