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Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

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Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#31

Post by Narishma »

cardanome wrote: post #19
prmoustache wrote: post #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…

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.

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

Why is that dangerous?

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#33

Post by UncleSlacky »

noisy_boy wrote: post #3

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.

Yes, it runs well on my Asus eeePC 701, even though the resolution is below the official minimum requirement. Even the wifi works.

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#34

Post by UncleSlacky »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #4
noisy_boy wrote: post #3

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…

It sometimes helps to use the mobile versions of websites instead. There are also dedicated email clients and tools like youtube-dl for downloading videos.

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#35

Post by cardanome »

Narishma wrote: post #31
cardanome wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It's not. I used in place of "very close". It's a stylistic thing, though maybe misplaced here.

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#36

Post by otikik »

tokai wrote: post #22
otikik wrote: post #15

"17 years" "image thumbnails in the file manager" It took them one less year than Gnome to implement that one! https://www.omglinux.com/gnome-thumbnails-file-picker/

please don't flamebait

Not trying to start a flame here. Just found it funny that the same feature in two different projects took about the same amount of time to get implemented.

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#37

Post by prmoustache »

waddlesplash wrote: post #30
prmoustache wrote: post #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…

> It is lovely to use once you learn the keyboard shortcuts If you mean Alt vs. Ctrl, you can swap to Ctrl-based keyboard shortcuts by clicking the button in the "Keymap" application. But, the Quick Tour tells you this, there's a reason we encourage users to take it :) https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/welcome/en/quicktour.html#shor...

I mean in general. Resistance to change is a natural thing.

Same applies from going from Windows to Mac, Gnome to KDE Plasma and vice-versa.

Re: Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

#39

Post by lproven »

kristopolous wrote: post #16
pxc wrote: 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

[Author of the review here]

It absolutely is, yes. That is how I captured the screenshot for that article.

But the thing is that that doesn't let you get any real feel for how it works with the hardware.

One big aspect, of course, is the performance. That's why I used one of the oldest slowest laptops in my testing fleet for the writeup.

On a 15YO C2D with spinning rust, Haiku b4 starts about as quickly as Ubuntu from NVMe SSD on my day-to-day Core i7. It is impressive.

Secondly the wifi support is impressive too. FreeBSD only supports some old wifi standards and the connection is not all that fast. Haiku talks -n and -ac standards and it's quick, as quick as this old machine's wifi card can do. It saw both my 2.5GHz and 5GHz WLANs, too, separately.

Regular readers of my reviews of alternative and niche OSes will see that I usually try in VirtualBox first, and then if that is successful, I move on to bare metal. Depending on the sophistication of the OS, I may use an "easy" machine, such as a laptop with only integrated graphics, or a "tough" machine, such as one with two GPUs and switching support.

Quite a few OSes never make it out of a VM in testing. Frankly, if something can't support the well-standardised virtual hardware of a VM, it is likely to fair badly on bare metal.

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