[HN Gopher] Haiku has hired an existing contributor to work on H...
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Haiku has hired an existing contributor to work on Haiku full-time
Author : aarroyoc
Score : 213 points
Date : 2021-08-25 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.haiku-os.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.haiku-os.org)
| Decabytes wrote:
| I would love to go about writing a toy operating system, but I
| only know Python, and I feel like I would need to learn a lower
| level programming language (Rust, C++, or C) before I could even
| start.
|
| I wonder if it would be simpler building on top of one of the
| linux or BSD kernels (I've heard NetBSD's is pretty cool)
| cpach wrote:
| Very cool!
|
| Fun fact: Despite the name, "Haiku, Inc." is actually a 501(c)(3)
| non-profit (^_^)
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| I ran BeOS many, many years ago on a PowerComputing Mac-clone and
| remember it fondly. I had high hopes that when LG acquired WebOS
| that perhaps some form of BeOS as a general computing platform
| might resurface.
|
| One question I've always had about Haiku is how faithful it is to
| the underlying implementation and architecture of BeOS, not so
| much its resultant API compatibility? Because it was the guts of
| BeOS which seemed to make it so special, not its component
| interfaces.
| winrid wrote:
| What's the web browsing experience like on Haiku? Really if it
| could run a modern browser and IDE I'd try it out.
|
| It looks like there's an OpenJDK port - that'd open up a lot of
| possibilities[0].
|
| https://openjdk.java.net/projects/haiku-port/
| waddlesplash wrote:
| WebPositive is based on modern WebKit but quite a few features
| have not yet been enabled (because they depend on platform code
| that is not implemented) or function not so well. But there is
| potential for sure.
|
| Nothing prohibits porting Chromium or Firefox, they are just
| huge projects with a massive surface area. (Even WebKit,
| smaller than both of those, is larger than all of Haiku
| itself.) So we have put our time into WebKit instead.
|
| There is Qt Creator already in the package repositories, and I
| think someone got Code::Blocks to at least build if not start.
| I've heard NetBeans used to work, though I'm not sure it still
| does. Eclipse would require much more work.
| snazz wrote:
| The JetBrains IDEs at least start on Haiku (or they did at
| one point): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18893648
|
| Not sure how good that experience is but it's very impressive
| nonetheless.
| dleslie wrote:
| WebPositive uses WebKit, and recently updated it. So it's
| fairly functional.
|
| As for an IDE...
|
| https://github.com/adamfowleruk/Paladin
| waddlesplash wrote:
| Hello HN, I'm the developer that has been hired. Happy to answer
| questions!
|
| Or you can go make a (tax-deductible) donation to Haiku, Inc.
| directly to support my contract: https://www.haiku-
| inc.org/donate/
| dleslie wrote:
| I want to start using Haiku _outside_ of a VM. What sort of
| hardware should I be looking at, considering mostly that I need
| stable WiFi available?
| waddlesplash wrote:
| We reuse FreeBSD's WiFi drivers (I assumed responsibility for
| that port some years ago), so most things that work on
| FreeBSD work on Haiku.
|
| FreeBSD has fallen behind a bit, so you may want to check
| model numbers carefully before buying something. Intel
| hardware of the "9200" series and anything before it
| generally works (though it may not have all features
| enabled.) Atheros hardware is the next best, with anything
| before the "Killer" series especially well supported.
|
| Slightly older ThinkPads tend to do very well. I have an E550
| (from 2015) and a T60 (I dunno, 2009?) that are pretty great.
| My main machine is a custom Ryzen desktop where I carefully
| picked out hardware that I knew either was already supported
| or would soon be (e.g when I bought it, the NVMe driver was
| still in an unstable state and I had more work to do on it,
| but now it's pretty solid.)
| Klonoar wrote:
| But then I take it that means the wifi is relatively slow,
| no? FreeBSD IIRC lacks 802.11ac support still.
| zdw wrote:
| Do any of the BSD's have 802.11ac support? I know OpenBSD
| hasn't worked on it yet.
|
| Not criticizing, just observing how hard it is to work
| through new alphabet soup of standards without hardware
| vendor support.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| You are correct, unfortunately.
|
| FreeBSD has one WiFi driver ("iwm", or on Haiku we call
| it "idualwifi7260") that supports 802.11ac hardware, and
| supposedly the 802.11 stack is ready for ac (there is an
| out-of-tree driver that crashes a lot but does get ac
| speed), but nobody added ac support to the "iwm" driver.
|
| Actually both my laptop and desktop use that driver, so
| who knows, maybe I'll poke at adding 802.11ac support to
| it one of these days.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Are there any problems preventing the adaptation of Linux
| ac drivers, I mean are they technical or licensing etc?
| Klonoar wrote:
| I believe that's one ongoing effort to solve the issue
| (since it'd also ensure things like 802.11ax support).
| It's just low dev resources, I think - but this is from
| my just browsing the situation over the past few weeks,
| mind you. An actual FreeBSD dev should correct me if I'm
| wrong.
|
| I also believe there's a hack floating around to forward
| ac from a Linux VM, which some use.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Huh, curious about the out-of-tree driver - I haven't
| seen that.
|
| I've considered donating funds to FreeBSD with the idea
| of earmarking them specifically for Wifi, but I don't
| know how much that actually helps...
| cpach wrote:
| Kudos!
|
| What are the top three features that you like the most with
| Haiku?
| waddlesplash wrote:
| The single biggest thing for me is the unified system design
| and implementation.
|
| That is, it's not like Linux/BSD desktop environments where
| the kernel, display server, window manager, desktop shell,
| file manager, distribution ... are all developed by separate
| teams in separate code repositories with separate goals,
| schedules, standards, etc. In Haiku, you can change the UI
| toolkit, display server, and init system all in a single
| commit to one repository.
|
| This has a massive array of advantages. It means we never go
| back and forth about where responsibility for a bug lies,
| only where it should be fixed. It means we can decide to go
| with or against trends and standards as it makes sense to
| (our package manager is probably the biggest example of
| this.)
|
| Virtually everything else I like about Haiku stems from this,
| whether it's the timeless UI, the overall system
| architecture, or even the code itself (which is a genuine
| pleasure to just read, not something that one can often say
| about any project.)
| em-bee wrote:
| is there a roadmap?
|
| there is mention of R1 and R2.
|
| what are the goals for R1? any time estimates when R1 will be
| ready?
|
| what's in store for R2?
|
| there is discussion of multi user support for R2. what other
| interesting goals are there?
| dleslie wrote:
| The roadmap is actively updated here:
|
| https://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap
| waddlesplash wrote:
| R1's original goal was "feature-complete replacement for BeOS
| R5". I think we have at this point achieved that, but we also
| have a vague goal of "usable, stable, daily-driver OS" which
| we are not quite there for (mostly on the stability and
| daily-driver front; there are users who use it as a daily
| driver, but in a limited fashion.)
|
| The Haiku kernel and CLI already supports multiple users, you
| can add them and SSH into them already. Permissions checks
| aren't quite there yet, and the GUI is totally non-multiuser-
| aware. It is a R2 requirement, but it could come sooner...
| intricatedetail wrote:
| In many countries a for profit company cannot accept "free"
| contributions, as this is in breach of minimum wage regulations
| and volunteering. E.g. here you can only volunteer for charities.
| xupybd wrote:
| I like the idea of more operating systems to pick from. I'd love
| to try Haiku or BSD one day soon. What motivates people to invest
| in these very niche systems?
|
| I'd love to play around with them for fun but is there more to
| it?
| peterkos wrote:
| Maybe to get a more considered word in about features you need?
| I can't really think of anything specific os-wise, but I'm
| thinking, if you rely on some cool cross-app functionality
| (e.g., macOS drag-icon-from-toolbar-to-move-corresponding-file)
| you can have a good shot at contributing to/owning that feature
| on a small OS project vs. something like Fedora which would
| require a lot more buy-in
| em-bee wrote:
| _I like the idea of more operating systems to pick from_
|
| well this would be one motivation really.
|
| personally, i like the ability to break with conventions and do
| things differently. especially on the user interface level.
|
| like hurd or plan 9, haiku has some unique aspects.
|
| now i just need to find a machine to actually run it.
| klyrs wrote:
| I keep wishing that I could run Haiku on a Raspberry Pi 4,
| just so I could have a little sandboxed machine to play with.
| donatj wrote:
| As someone who used BeOS in the 90's, I think people investing
| their time in Haiku comes down to love, plain and simple.
|
| In the 20 years since, I have not used an OS that has made me
| as _happy_ to use as BeOS. Early OS X around 10.4-10.5 came
| closest.
| RamRodification wrote:
| Doesn't that apply to everyone's OS of choice though?
| Actually maybe it doesn't... But it's not very helpful unless
| you can be at least a little bit specific about why it makes
| you happy.
| donatj wrote:
| > Doesn't that apply to everyone's OS of choice though?
|
| Do people have love deep in their hearts for Windows or
| even macOS 11?
|
| It's hard to explain these days, but back in the late 90s
| it was just so far ahead of everything else except maybe
| NeXT and NeXT was entirely out of reach for 99% of the
| world.
|
| The UI was ridiculously smooth and fast and everything
| worked together like a well oiled machine.
|
| - https://youtu.be/cjriSNgFHsM?t=350
|
| Here they play an mp3 and a video that continue to render
| while you move the windows around, on a 133mhz machine
| without it even putting up a sweat. Clearly that's nothing
| today but that was unheard of at the time.
|
| Beyond that it had amazing features you still don't see on
| operating systems today like the file system being an
| actual queryable database. Common metadata like ID3 tags
| from MP3's were entered into this and queryable.
|
| The standard email client stored emails as individual files
| and just queried the file system. I believe the address
| book did the same for people.
|
| The tabs of the individual windows stack together across
| apps! There were just so many little wonderful fit-and-
| finish things like that you don't get these days.
|
| - https://www.haiku-
| os.org/docs/userguide/en/GUI.html#stack-ti...
|
| I feel like most desktop OS's strive for parity with
| eachother. BeOS was trying to be better.
| ori_b wrote:
| They're pleasant to work in.
|
| -- posted from netsurf on 9front.
| azinman2 wrote:
| > What motivates people to invest in these very niche systems?
|
| Nostalgia, curiosity, and hobby
| diskzero wrote:
| I may contribute to Haiku, now that they are putting full-time
| resources into place.
|
| Why would I do this? It is more than nostalgia or fun, although
| that is part of it. I believe that diversity is vital to
| keeping the technological landscape healthy. Most people are
| happy to go with the status quo, fewer are willing to work to
| make positive changes and even less are willing to fund their
| efforts.
|
| Will something come of Haiku because of this? Directly or
| indirectly, yes. Someone will be working on a vision that may
| differ from that of Apple/Microsoft/linux, etc. This will have
| a ripple effect as either Haiku succeeds, or those who work on
| it take their viewpoints and knowledge to other companies and
| efforts. Either way, this sort of diversity helps out in
| keeping the technological ecosystem from becoming more and more
| of a monoculture.
| iamevn wrote:
| A while ago (2011ish maybe?) I had a hand-me-down laptop whose
| processor speed was measured in MHz (it even had a floppy
| drive!). The previous owners had windows XP on it but that
| didn't really run well. I tried various Linux distros/desktop
| environments/window managers and found that even running a
| barebones AwesomeWM setup was sluggish. I decided to give Haiku
| a shot and was surprised by how smooth it felt. I'm pretty sure
| the only sluggishness I had when opening applications or
| booting up was because the hard drive was very slow. I don't
| know how they did it but somehow it worked wonderfully on this
| really weak laptop. (Unfortunately I couldn't get the floppy
| drive working, idr why but some driver issue blocked me.)
|
| Since then I've kept an eye on it and plan on going back to it
| with some more powerful and better supported hardware to really
| get to play around with stuff like the interesting filesystem
| and get some things I use all the time ported over. Would love
| to switch over from mainly using Linux to having a Linux home
| server, and using Haiku as a daily driver and sshing in for
| Linuxy stuff.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| One of the other Haiku developers had this [1] response to an
| inquiry about why Haiku is so fast:
|
| > The system is not all that well optimized, uses a 15 year
| old compiler which does not uses any modern CPU features, and
| by default, the kernel is built in debug mode which makes it
| much slower than it could be.
|
| > How do other operating systems still manage to feel slower?
| I have no idea.
|
| (Those kernel debug options are no joke, they are a massive
| slowdown. The ones for the TCP stack alone take network
| throughput down to 1/5 of what it is without it; the ones for
| SMP, the virtual memory manager, lock facilities, etc.
| combined make the system visibly less snappy. We disable
| these on beta builds, but they are enabled on nightlies, and
| back in 2011 they were on by default.)
|
| [1]: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/why-is-haiku-so-fast/6317
| codetrotter wrote:
| > I'd love to try Haiku or BSD one day soon. What motivates
| people to invest in these very niche systems?
|
| My interest in FreeBSD began about 12 years ago, when a friend
| of mine told me about the BSD operating systems and he said
| that the one he was using was very secure (OpenBSD) and that it
| had good documentation and that these BSD operating systems
| (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and others) are each developed "as a whole",
| as opposed to Linux which I had recently begun seriously using
| but which is developed as a bunch of separate much more
| loosely-tied projects and then bundled together in the form of
| various distros.
|
| I installed FreeBSD and liked it a lot. I just felt at home,
| somehow. And for a good while I was running FreeBSD also on my
| desktop and my laptop.
|
| Fast-forward to present day. On my laptop I run macOS. On my
| servers I run FreeBSD. My MacBook Pro M1 laptop is my daily
| driver. I have a desktop that I run Linux on but I rarely boot
| it because mostly I have no reason to. Almost everything I do I
| can do with my MacBook Pro M1 and with my servers that run
| FreeBSD.
|
| But even though I like FreeBSD so much, I feel and fear that
| Linux keeps advancing in much bigger strides than FreeBSD,
| because of the many many more people contributing to Linux
| compared to how many people are developing FreeBSD.
|
| I really want to get into eBPF on Linux soon and explore that.
| It seems like it could help me gain both insights into the
| execution of the software that I develop, even more than is
| possible with DTrace maybe. And I want to explore what can be
| done on Linux using kTLS and eBPF together. And I am curious to
| find out more about things like what they talk about at
| https://pchaigno.github.io/ebpf/2020/11/04/hxdp-efficient-so...
|
| And all of those things have me thinking a lot about whether
| the positives of using FreeBSD (jails, OpenZFS in base, a
| system that is developed as a whole, etc) actually justify
| staying with FreeBSD. Or if I should ditch FreeBSD and focus my
| energy on Linux instead of on FreeBSD.
| hellcow wrote:
| I use OpenBSD because it's a very pragmatic choice for servers.
| Nearly everything is "off" by default and I can add only the
| specific things I need, reducing the attack surface.
| Pledge/unveil makes sandboxing my applications very simple. The
| pf firewall is much easier to use with confidence than
| iptables. The manpages are great and the system is small
| relative to most Linux distros, so you can understand how
| everything works and fits together -- great for infra. It's
| well-designed and consistent throughout because the kernel, OS,
| and all core tools are designed by the same people. As of yet,
| no conntrack-style edge cases requiring days digging through
| kernel code. :)
|
| This of course involves many trade-offs (losing access to
| common "modern" tech like containers, slower performance) but
| for my company the trade-offs were justified.
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| > The pf firewall is much easier to use with confidence than
| iptables
|
| Tell me more! I cut my teeth on ipchains/iptables back in the
| early 90's, and feel _very_ familiar with it. That said, I
| know that doesn 't mean it's the best/easiest at all. I've
| tried to grok Pf once or twice, but never ended up getting
| very far. I wanted to ask you if you began with Pf, or if you
| came from something else? More or less, I'm trying to figure
| out if Pf was difficult for me just because it wasn't my
| first.
| cpach wrote:
| FWIW: No Starch Press has a book about PF. I haven't read
| it myself, but it might be worth having a look at.
|
| https://mwl.io/archives/2232
| chaircher wrote:
| haiku has hired an
|
| existing contributor
|
| who will work full time
| dddw wrote:
| At first I thought, weird comment, then I thought: Ah! Weird
| title!
| omarhaneef wrote:
| The trend is quite clear:
|
| Any mention of Haiku
|
| Creates a cascade
| Mertax wrote:
| Ya the original title isn't a haiku, right? This appears to be
| a 6-7-5 pattern Haiku and is more concise
| lostphilosopher wrote:
| Haiku tangent: I'm no Haiku master, but as I understand it a
| proper Haiku should succinctly convey the experience of a
| moment in time. That's really the hallmark of a Haiku. Use of
| "seasonal words" is a traditional, but not breaking
| requirement. And the 5-7-5 thing is somewhat misleading since
| the Japanese (rough) equivalent to a "syllable" is shorter
| than an English syllable such that a 5-7-5 Haiku in English
| tends to be ~30% longer in time taken to say than a Haiku in
| Japanese. (This is what I can recall off the top of my head
| from The Haiku Handbook. Which is much more worth reading
| than my comment if you're interested in Haiku.)
| vondur wrote:
| I like how they announce the new developer only as their
| username. Pretty cool.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| Well, I do have a real name, and if you look in the right place
| you can find it, but >=99.9% of people in the Haiku community
| and those who have heard of it know me only as "waddlesplash",
| so why bother announcing with anything else?
| khazhoux wrote:
| Let me fix this for them:
|
| ---
|
| Haiku has hired
|
| existing contributor
|
| to join us full time
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I'm still nostalgic for OS/2. Apparently it still exists in the
| form of "ArcaOS" but I never hear anything about it.
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| For what it's worth, a couple of years ago I saw an ATM machine
| reboot.... and saw the OS/2 splash screen. Wonder if it's
| popular in that industry, or if it was an older/one-off
| machine?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| OS/2 was extremely popular throughout the entire banking
| industry and ATMs running on OS/2 was almost the norm for a
| few years.
| cpach wrote:
| Fascinating. I wonder who their customers are these days.
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