Haiku

#1

Post by tosh » Wed, May 13, 2026, 4:22 PM UTC

Haiku
haiku-os.org

Re: Haiku

#2

Post by lukaslalinsky » Wed, May 13, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

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?

Re: Haiku

#3

Post by ranger_danger » Wed, May 13, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #2

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?

IMO For some it is practically usable with an ever-growing repository of new and familiar packages. HaikuPorts has over 4500 packages.

For the longest time there was not a modern browser that could run, but now there are multiple chromium-based and firefox-based options.

Re: Haiku

#4

Post by jdboyd » Wed, May 13, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #2

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?

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.

Re: Haiku

#5

Post by throwaway27448 » Wed, May 13, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

jdboyd wrote: post #4

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #2

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?

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.

Re: Haiku

#6

Post by kouosi » Wed, May 13, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #2

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?

Most people working on kernel/osdev do for the sake of recreating it :)

Re: Haiku

#7

Post by reconnecting » Wed, May 13, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

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!

Re: Haiku

#8

Post by efficax » Wed, May 13, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #2

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?

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.

Re: Haiku

#9

Post by lbaune » Wed, May 13, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

This has been around for years. I don't understand what the news is?

Re: Haiku

#10

Post by ttul » Wed, May 13, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

It's a shame that Be failed. I think they were a victim of Microsoft's aggressive anti-competitive activities in the late-1990s, combined with Apple deciding to bring back Steve Jobs via the acquisition of NeXT (making Apple a serious competitor in the same segment that Be was targeting -- multimedia and realtime applications). Ultimately, they prevailed in winning about $24M from Microsoft, but that was after the company had shut down. I presume the winnings went to Palm. Super cool to see Haiku continuing to develop. No doubt agentic coding is making it far easy for enthusiasts to improve and maintain projects like Haiku and I look forward to seeing where this project goes. You never know...