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Haiku

haiku-os.org

71–80 of 92 posts

Re: Haiku

#71

The problem with Haiku is that it is unable to leave the perpetual beta situation. On Linux I can use perl, ruby, python, php, julia - you name it. Good luck thinking you can do this on Haiku, as-is. Edit: I should say that I like Haiku, but I used it many years ago, and the situation with regards to programming still has barely improved here for the most part. They are building literally a dream OS nobody will serio…

Beta it may be, but there's a good amount of software and programming language support. The 64-bit version is amazingly stable, even on the nightly version.

Re: Haiku

#72
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For one, it's not being actively targeted with new daily exploits.

Re: Haiku

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would you hope to obtain that you cannot just by using, say, a customized Linux Mint? When things are coded right, Haiku / BeOS is blazing fast (every single thing runs in a separate thread), and resource usage is tiny. I think the OS only uses about half a gig of RAM? When the apps are coded right, there's a feeling that this is how our modern computers could have been, free from bloated software and using th…

I have said that Haiku feels like it is simultaneously in the year 2040 and 2000. I glimpse from the past of a future we didn't get.

Like Foundation is in 50000 and 1942.

Re: Haiku

#74
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be was pretty close from being acquired by Apple instead of NeXT. It was also founded by an ex-Apple employee (Jean-Louis Gassée). MacOSX would be really different today if it were based on BeOS instead of NeXT...

I strongly suspect Apple wouldn't be here had they picked Be. What NeXT brought was exceptional developer tools, not to mention Steve Jobs. No Steve Jobs likely would have meant no iPod, iPhone, etc.

The butterfly effect gets insane with that one, but it's kind of an interesting alternate future to think about.

Re: Haiku

#75
post #52
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were never going to compete with Microsoft even if MS hadn’t screwed them (which MS definitely did). At the time, MS was invincible in the enterprise market. Be’s only path to success was with Apple. Jean-Louis Gassée was negotiating the buy-out with Apple but he wanted more than Apple was willing to pay and Jobs was the key acquihire at Next, before people started talking about “acquihire” as a concept. Unfortu…

Be made inroads in radio and sound production; though I don't think they knew it.[0] There was a market starved for a stable, high quality and responsive operating system that would run on the x86 hardware that was abundant everywhere. Windows wasn't it, yet; recall this is years before XP, and Windows 98 was an unstable mess while NT was slow. 0: https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/27-tune_tracker/

Tune Tracker is sill(?) around, they moved to Haiku a long time ago.

Re: Haiku

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

fully agree, that would be awesome.

linux does at least have extended filesystem attributes. the dolphin filemanager from KDE makes use of them to support tags and comments. it's not ideal (tags are a comma separated string) but it is usable. adding tags is a bit painful though. i resorted to add and them through the commandline.

Re: Haiku

#77

I tried for years to get this operating system to run on my hardware. Last year I succeeded. Only...there was no software. The system ran beautifully. But I had no web browser that was supported. All the software seemed to be ports from Linux and didn't seem to take advantage of Haiku's advantages. I had a good speedy operating system that booted almost immediately to the desktop. But nothing to do when I got there.…

> But I had no web browser that was supported.

This might be a new development, but there's like 3 different forks of Firefox that are packaged. See: `pkgman search firefox`, or something like that. I used Floorp, and it worked well, especially considering it was running with 4 gigabytes of RAM on a VM on a system that already had a bunch of applications open.

Re: Haiku

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

More generally, I think there’s a good deal of ways of improving user experience with a single purpose dedicated desktop OS like BeOS that is out of reach on general purpose OSes like Linux.

Actually, I think with Linux there may be a bit of a double penalty on desktop use with how much more attention the server use case gets compared to everything else.

Re: Haiku

#79
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's one of the last single-user focused operating systems. Its design from kernel to UI is intended to make the system accessible to the user sitting at the desk. It was _extraordinarily_ fast and stable on even modest hardware of the era, and its software toolkit was a delight to use. 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 use…

> Its design from kernel to UI is intended to make the system accessible to the user sitting at the desk.

What does this translate to, in some amount of technical detail?

Re: Haiku

#80
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were never going to compete with Microsoft even if MS hadn’t screwed them (which MS definitely did). At the time, MS was invincible in the enterprise market. Be’s only path to success was with Apple. Jean-Louis Gassée was negotiating the buy-out with Apple but he wanted more than Apple was willing to pay and Jobs was the key acquihire at Next, before people started talking about “acquihire” as a concept. Unfortu…

I recall that they had one OEM who wanted to install BeOS as a preinstalled option Hitachi), but then Microsoft threatened to raise Windows license prices in retaliation. A little search gives a reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20131109045719/http://www.intern...

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