[HN Gopher] Haiku Activity Report - January 2021
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Haiku Activity Report - January 2021
Author : mondoshawan
Score : 100 points
Date : 2021-02-07 15:51 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.haiku-os.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.haiku-os.org)
| spijdar wrote:
| I'm intrigued by the SPARC support. Not sure if it's for
| sun4c/m/u, but I've got both 32 and 64 bit SPARC laptops that
| Haiku would be perfect for.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| Wow 20 years! Here's the history: https://www.haiku-
| os.org/about/history
| keb_ wrote:
| I know a lot of folks think it looks dated, but I absolutely LOVE
| the aesthetics and icon art of HaikuOS.
| mhd wrote:
| Speaking of Icons, I love that they spent considerable time to
| optimze those[1], including their own vector format so that
| they can store it in the metadata of the file, so that
| displaying large folders with unique files would be speedy.
|
| [1]: https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-sixth-day-with-haiku-
| under-...
| yakubin wrote:
| HaikuOS looks like an OS dedicated for desktop use. I've just
| gotten myself a Mac mini last week. Big Sur is the ugliest OS
| I've ever seen. If that's where the future is heading, then I'm
| not sure I want to continue using computers. I could use some
| dated UIs, such as the Haiku one.
| grishka wrote:
| > it looks dated
|
| It's a real desktop OS, with a UI meant for a keyboard and a
| mouse. A rarity these days.
| fb03 wrote:
| I wish I could use a Linux distro as snappy as BeOS was! Is
| Haiku the same in that regard?
| moron4hire wrote:
| I tried running it in a VM earlier last year and found the UI
| to be unusably laggy. It seems there were some issues with
| virtual mouse drivers or something and this was the
| "expected" experience in a VM.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| No, that's definitely not the expected experience for VM
| usage. Plenty of people run Haiku in a VM without such
| problems. QEMU/KVM is the best system to use, with VMware
| second, and VirtualBox et al. coming in last.
| unicornporn wrote:
| How usable is this as a general purpose OS? I seldom see people
| running it outside VMs. How hard is it to find compatible
| hardware such as wireless cards. Does sleep/suspend work
| reliably?
|
| Lastly, I just _LOVE_ the aesthetics. Even XFCE could not resist
| the allure of "improved" themes and also ended up welcoming
| CSDs.
| morganvachon wrote:
| There is no hardware 3D acceleration at all, but most GPUs
| supported by FreeBSD and Linux work fine for everyday use.
| Sleep and suspend are still a work in progress. WiFi and
| Ethernet support is heavily dependent on FreeBSD drivers, as
| such not every card is supported but there are a good number of
| supported devices. In general, a well-supported Linux/BSD
| machine will likely work well under Haiku (Thinkpads in
| particular).
|
| For me personally, the biggest thing holding it back from
| becoming a daily use computer is the lack of a really good web
| browser. WebPositive has made great strides as the native
| browser, but it still has a long way to go. There are ports of
| other mainstream browsers but most are incomplete or unstable.
|
| I sorely miss the era around 2000-2001 where I used BeOS
| successfully as a daily machine, able to browse the Web, access
| email, do document management and creation (word processing and
| spreadsheets), photo editing, music production, and video
| editing all with native-to-BeOS software. It transformed my
| Windows 98 machine from a slow, clunky, stuttering mess into a
| computer that felt like it was from the future. Nothing since
| has come close to that level of technological Nirvana.
| dleslie wrote:
| Forget the Web Browser, the biggest barrier is the lack of
| wireless drivers. I've tried it on a half dozen laptops and
| couldn't get a single one to work.
|
| At the time I last tried there was no support for USB Wifi,
| so using a trusty TP-Link wasn't an option.
| unicornporn wrote:
| Thanks for the short review!
| Jkvngt wrote:
| It has emacs and a modern browser and a compiler, what else do
| you need?
| hakfoo wrote:
| I know it basically worked out of the box on a Thinkpad x230
| Tablet, running off a flash drive.
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| I'm so happy to see it's still up and running. I was a HUGE fan
| of BeOS and to this day I wish it had won the Apple contract,
| though Next was obviously an amazing choice. I hope Haiku
| continues to succeed!
| kiwijamo wrote:
| BeOS was ahead of its time, that's for sure. One thing it did
| exceptionally well was multitasking. Even if you had a
| intensive task running in the background, you would never
| notice any lag whatsoever in the GUI. Windows/Linux/etc on the
| same hardware would lag horribly when doing the exact same
| tasks. I understand many aspects of the OS and GUI toolkit was
| multi-threaded (as BeOS was designed to run on, and take
| advantage of, systems with multiple cores). To this day there
| is no OS that handles multitasking as gracefully as BeOS did. I
| still remain disappointed that it did not see much success as
| it had so much potential.
| pjmlp wrote:
| You mean as threads used to gracefully crash each other?
|
| BeOS was an interesting OS, 20 years ago, its time is due,
| API frozen and just like Oberon and Amiga, only usefull for
| nostalgic purposes.
| Jkvngt wrote:
| Frozen APIs are a blessing, not a curse. The only way
| forward is to constrain developers to a well-known standard
| set of tools and interfaces. We've seen what happens when
| they just get turned loose.
| desktopninja wrote:
| Yup! Honestly feels like the industry as a whole has lost
| the plot.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I have a Pentium here to sell, if you feel so inclined.
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(page generated 2021-02-07 23:01 UTC)