[HN Gopher] Haiku R1/beta4
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Haiku R1/beta4
        
       Author : waddlesplash
       Score  : 419 points
       Date   : 2022-12-23 18:54 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.haiku-os.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.haiku-os.org)
        
       | yellowapple wrote:
       | It's awesome that Haiku has come a long enough way that it runs
       | on my Framework out-of-the-box. Still ain't quite there as a
       | daily driver, but it's very close.
        
         | waddlesplash wrote:
         | Have you tried the newly-ported GNOME Web browser, mentioned in
         | the release notes? It seems that it solves the "web browser
         | problem" many users have complained about.
        
           | HeckFeck wrote:
           | It is excellent to see a modern browser on Haiku, but one
           | thing remains:
           | 
           | If we get a web browser with advert blocking, it will be
           | ready for the modern web.
        
             | waddlesplash wrote:
             | GNOME Web has built-in adblocking.
        
           | yellowapple wrote:
           | I haven't yet, but my daily-driver-blocking issues during my
           | last attempt were more around stability. Much of it I think
           | is the hardware (OpenBSD and Haiku both would spontaneously
           | reboot on occasion; given that it was more frequent on
           | battery, I suspect it's some quirk with the Framework's power
           | management - or maybe there's something in the iwx driver
           | that freaks out the whole machine), and some were likely
           | attributable to being on nightly; I'll have to re-test with
           | beta4 (and maybe the latest UEFI updates on my machine) to
           | see if that straightens some things out.
           | 
           | The lack of a built-in solution for full-disk encryption is
           | also a blocker for me. It's something I keep meaning to try
           | and tackle (say, by porting over OpenBSD's FDE
           | implementation), but I ain't quite comfortable enough yet
           | with Haiku's codebase to even know where to start.
        
             | waddlesplash wrote:
             | There's a non-built-in solution in axeld's DriveEncryption,
             | but it doesn't support encrypting boot disks.
             | 
             | Probably we should try and incorporate DriveEncryption into
             | Haiku itself and see about adding support for boot disks...
             | that will require some discussion and agreement on how to
             | change the bootloaders.
        
       | hbbio wrote:
       | > Since the last release, there is 1 new Haiku developer with
       | commit access: davidkaroly, who has already made significant
       | contributions to Haiku's in-progress support for ARM. Welcome!
       | 
       | This is one the most interesting bits in an already awesome
       | release notes! Haiku would rock with Raspberries and I can't wait
       | to use it as the default OS for family 400s.
        
         | RalfWausE wrote:
         | If you want to see something really rocking on a raspi, i would
         | suggest to take a look at RiscOS ;-)
        
           | lproven wrote:
           | :-D
           | 
           | It's true, but Haiku is multithreaded now, and has SMP
           | support and wifi... ;-)
        
       | shrubble wrote:
       | Installed this beta4 on a ThinkPad T410, 4GB RAM, 1280x800
       | display, SSD drive. Seems pretty fast, the Emacs UI is nice,
       | everything is VERY responsive.
       | 
       | It detected only 1024x768 when it started up, which made things
       | look blurry; fixed by going into the Screen app and changing it.
       | Haven't figured out the Wifi yet, but the Ethernet was detected
       | and worked immediately. With both Web and WebPositive browsers up
       | and with a page or two loaded, 1.2GB RAM was in use, total, for
       | everything.
        
       | djsavvy wrote:
       | @dang Could the URL be changed to the release notes?
       | https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta4/release-notes/
       | 
       | It's a much more filled-out page, and probably what most people
       | are clicking through to anyways.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Changed from https://www.haiku-
         | os.org/news/2022-12-23_haiku_r1_beta4/. Thanks!
        
       | gigatexal wrote:
       | Oh what would have been what could have been had Apple bought Be
       | instead of Next. We'd likely not have any iPhones or a 2.5T Apple
       | but we could have had some really cool software. BeOS and now
       | Haiku will always have a special place in my nerd-head.
       | 
       | consider sponsoring the team here:
       | https://github.com/sponsors/haiku
        
         | KMag wrote:
         | In school, I quad-booted Debian, Win2k, QNX, and BeOS on my
         | desktop.
         | 
         | BeOS was very light weight. Its ethernet driver for 3c509 was
         | buggy and crashed often, but being a userspace driver, I just
         | got a popup asking permission to restart the driver.
         | Conversely, a couple years later I had an OSX laptop, and a
         | corrupted backup CD that would kernel panic OSX, Win2k, and
         | Linux. (Honestly, ISO 9660 and FAT32 drivers should be migrated
         | out of mainstream OS kernels, since kernel latency is very far
         | from being the bottleneck when using thunmb drives or CDs.)
         | 
         | On the other hand, BeOS had some questionable uses of metadata.
         | After improperly using tar to backup my home directory before a
         | reinstall, I lost all of my NetPositive browser bookmarks. I
         | didn't realize each bookmark was a zero-sized file with the URL
         | actually stored in metadata. My improper backup procedure
         | dropped the metadata fork.
         | 
         | Also, there was a kernel bug related to semaphores. I had some
         | semaphore code that worked fine under Linux but would kernel
         | panic BeOS.
         | 
         | Had Apple purchased Be, we'd likely have a much lighter weight
         | OSX, though perhaps with poorer support for multiple users.
         | 
         | I'm still hoping that someday QNX RTP gets open-sourced. A hard
         | real-time light weight microkernel OS was fun to play around
         | with. In particular, a cache benchmark I ran for a systems
         | class showed quite a bit smaller cache footprint for QNX vs.
         | Debian. (Though, Debian almost certainly had more daemons
         | running, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison of kernel
         | cache footprints.)
        
         | jeffbee wrote:
         | I find this take somewhat baffling. At the moment that Apple
         | bought NeXT, NeXTSTEP had a mature software toolchain, a
         | working IPv4 networking stack, and enterprise customers, three
         | things that BeOS lacked. BeOS had a primitive software
         | toolchain ecosystem based on pre-standard C++. BeOS IP
         | networking barely worked and despite everything claimed in
         | their advertising it was fully serialized, single-threaded
         | networking. BeOS had zero customers.
         | 
         | The only thing that Be did have was one nifty demo, and a
         | somewhat innovative file system. Apple must have correctly
         | deduced that it would be easy to improve the filesystem,
         | because they later did so, with the same author.
         | 
         | Comparing BeOS and NextSTEP in 1997 is like comparing a ham
         | sandwich to a piglet and a bag of flour. One of these things
         | was a finished product.
        
           | perardi wrote:
           | Also, NeXtSTEP could reliably print stuff. Which, given that
           | publishing was the niche that arguably kept the Mac alive
           | during those years: kinda important!
        
           | PAPPPmAc wrote:
           | (Just because I love this argument): Have you used Mid-90s
           | OpenStep and BeOS on period hardware? People rose-tinted-
           | glasses the hell out of OpenStep (...and the first few OS X
           | releases), it's ridiculously sluggish and brittle (in that
           | same kind of "I did something to config and rendered it
           | unbootable" way as early 2000s Linux). BeOS is shockingly
           | performant and flexible on the same hardware.
           | 
           | As much as the original BeOS network stack was mediocre (and
           | it was, it wasn't fixed until the BONE design in that final
           | Dano leak in 2001) the much-touted NeXT networking stack was
           | literally the open source 4.3BSD networking code running
           | hosted, with their awful NetInfo system on top, which Apple
           | spent the next several years excising. Excising like the
           | Adobe license fees cost more than a PC, few major vendors
           | (not even Adobe!) willing to port their software to, Display
           | PostScript GUI they had to throw out and replace.
           | 
           | I'll grant that they got a really good set of development
           | tools they're still essentially using, and Be's were rough
           | (and kind of alien, that kind of pervasive threading is
           | _still_ hard with decades of work on the tooling).
           | 
           | Apple bought NeXT because the stack looked architecturally
           | like a less-bungled version of their own failed Pink/Taligent
           | effort, and Steve Jobs had a better relationship with people
           | still at Apple than Jean-Louis Gassee.
        
             | shrubble wrote:
             | I ran NEXTSTEP 3.2 and I think, 3.3, on both 486 DX2/66 and
             | original NeXT hardware. At one job I ran on a 25Mhz Mono
             | slab as my daily and only machine. I did Web surfing,
             | email, used VarioData for the home-built sales/contact
             | system, etc.
             | 
             | There were some pieces that were slow, but overall it was a
             | fantastic experience. The "Shelf" was great; I would store
             | commonly-used docs there, reference materials etc.
        
             | lukeh wrote:
             | NetInfo did have some good ideas, and I suppose it could
             | have been improved, but the market wanted a standards-based
             | solution. I think macOS was the first commercial operating
             | system to ship with a RFC2307 LDAP client. Jaguar (10.2)
             | had a NetInfo to LDAP bridge and subsequent versions
             | removed NetInfo entirely, although I think NOOP stubs may
             | still remain in libSystem.
        
             | jeffbee wrote:
             | Look I'm not going to bat for NeXTSTEP as a user nirvana,
             | but _at the time Apple bought it_ it was hugely advanced
             | compared to BeOS, which still had not reached R3. A few
             | things that NeXT could do that Be could not do at the time:
             | run on an Intel PC, burn CD-Rs, and print.
             | 
             | BeOS R4-the first revision that did useful things users
             | actually wanted-came out two years after Apple agreed to
             | acquire NeXT. The current BeOS at the moment was "DR8" as
             | in "developer release".
        
               | KerrAvon wrote:
               | The fundamental thing Apple got out of the NeXT
               | acquisition was an adult OS management team. The software
               | acquired was totally irrelevant (at the time). What was
               | important was new people in charge, who unlike the
               | previous Apple management, could actually make decisions.
               | The decisions were often bad, but they were decisions!
               | 
               | If Amelio and Hancock had been competent, they would have
               | actually set up a management structure internally and
               | started focusing on shipping Copland-based software
               | instead of shopping externally. Strip it down and get it
               | out the door and build on that. It could absolutely have
               | been done.
               | 
               | Of course, you wouldn't have the iMac or iPod or iPhone.
               | And Apple might not have survived. The world would be
               | very different.
               | 
               | (That all said, OpenStep was truly dire in 1997. Yes, it
               | could print, although they ended up having to write an
               | entirely new graphics stack from scratch anyway. It
               | actually took six years from 1997 to turn moribund
               | OpenStep into a viable consumer OS (I could not recommend
               | anything before Jaguar to end users -- the Finder, among
               | other things, was unusable up to that point).
        
               | PAPPPmAc wrote:
               | The tale of major incumbents' completely bungled
               | OS/Platform projects of the 80s and 90s really is one of
               | the great epics of the field.
               | 
               | A short - and playing it a little fast and loose for
               | narrative like a Malcolm Gladwell piece - telling of the
               | circumstances:
               | 
               | Apple failed utterly with Taligent, and Copland, and
               | mismanaged A/UX into the ground, so it's the mid 90s and
               | they're shipping a hyper-extended version of a one-off
               | from 1984 that had to be hacked for even cooperative
               | multitasking, looking around for a platform to jump on
               | to. With IBM's help in two of those cases. They even,
               | reportedly, batted around giving up and becoming a shell
               | on top of NT or Solaris by porting Quickdraw during their
               | flail in the early 90s. Then they bought NeXT, took one
               | more (and it was at least the third after A/UX and the
               | MAE product which was really more of an emulator, but so
               | was Classic) pass at "Let's slap a Mac-like shell and
               | compat layer on top of a UNIX and call it a day" and got
               | successful selling mostly handheld appliances running
               | basically that stack.
               | 
               | IBM failed utterly with their share of Taligent and the
               | A/UX/AIX merger planning, and mismanaged OS/2 into the
               | ground, until IBM, once of "IBM and the Seven Dwarves"
               | dominance, became a midsize player in the PC market they
               | created (more through incumbent effects than technical
               | prowess), until they gave up and sold the businesses to a
               | Chinese clone maker and retreated to high-end niche
               | markets. (Their spun out printer division, the legacy of
               | their once dominant typewriter business, would also later
               | also be bought out by a Chinese cartridge cloner, so it's
               | almost a theme for them.)
               | 
               | DEC dithered on ...literally everything because they
               | didn't understand the world after minicomputers, so all
               | their talent left as they crumbled (which is also a large
               | part of how AMD64 happened, there is an awful lot of
               | Alpha lineage in the K8 design). Eventually their corpse
               | was consumed by a PC cloner, who were themselves consumed
               | by HP.
               | 
               | The UNIX vendors were too busy infighting to get much
               | done, and all the UNIX-brand-UNIX vendors license cost
               | overhead was too high to put up credible consumer
               | offerings anyway, until eventually a hobby project from
               | some kid in Finland ate their entire software business
               | while Intel (possibly accidentally, Itanium is the
               | culmination of a series of failures - 432,860,960 - for
               | them too) ratfucked their long term hardware projects to
               | death.
               | 
               | ...And so Microsoft, then famous for 8-bit BAISCs, slowly
               | abandoning their own successful but mutant UNIX offering
               | (Xenix), managing to sell Seattle Computer Products' DOS
               | to IBM after Digital Research/Gary Kidall (CP/M) didn't
               | want to deal with IBM, and the surprising success of
               | their awful DOS shell, ran away with nearly the entire
               | mainstream OS market for decades by gathering everyone
               | competent from the VMS and OS/2 lineages (they put Dave
               | Cutler and Moshe Dunie in charge) and having them write
               | NT. Running mostly on Intel's inescapable accidental
               | success extension-of-an-extension-of-an-extension legacy
               | architecture.
               | 
               | It's a weird field we're in.
        
               | greatquux wrote:
               | Spot on man. I think we've all learned that the best tech
               | stack will not win without also having a good sales,
               | marketing, and management team to support it. And if you
               | are completely incompetent at those things it doesn't
               | matter how good your tech is, you will turn into a
               | hilarious failure we'll all be laughing at later. (Though
               | we'll have a lot of fun making YouTube videos where we
               | run all your shit through emulation.) I know people
               | always shat on Microsoft's engineering, though the truth
               | is I think they tried to do the best they could with what
               | they had and they also understood how important backwards
               | compatibility was, and they had to work within that
               | limitation. But I think that maybe they were just a bit
               | jealous that their management was so far ahead of
               | everyone else (really only Apple after Jobs came back
               | could rival them)!
        
               | PAPPPmAc wrote:
               | I'm not sure that attributing the successes to "sales or
               | marketing" had as much to do with it as timing and
               | position. Management _failures_ certainly dominated the
               | era, there were vast numbers of unforced errors due
               | largely to managerial empire building, feature
               | creep/novelty seeking, and ambition exceeding the scale
               | of tractable development practices. The note up-thread
               | about "What was important was new people in charge, who
               | unlike the previous Apple management, could actually make
               | decisions. The decisions were often bad, but they were
               | decisions!" is, IMO, a great read on the situation. I've
               | posted in earlier HN threads about my belief in the "Next
               | bought Apple with Apple's money" idea, and the
               | replacement (or reversion since a lot of them were Apple
               | folks to start with) of Apple's management with Next
               | folks in short order. They were making largely the same
               | kinds of decisions that almost bankrupted Next, but under
               | more favorable circumstances.
               | 
               | Even as someone who has run Linux most of the time for
               | like 15 years, the underlying tech in NT is in many ways
               | by far the best design of the OSes that survived to
               | modern maturity. I just hate almost everything they've
               | done with the upper layers of the stack since 7.
        
               | waddlesplash wrote:
               | R3 could actually run on Intel PCs; it was the first
               | release to have that option available. The other two you
               | are probably right about, I'm not actually an expert in
               | BeOS history pre-R5 :)
        
           | steve1977 wrote:
           | NeXT even had stuff like WebObjects, which was really ahead
           | of its time back then. And AFAIK it still powers some
           | services at Apple.
        
             | jeffbee wrote:
             | iTunes and App Store seem to both still be backed by
             | webobjects services. Stuff like [1] still respond at WO-
             | like URLs and still include headers like `x-webobjects-
             | whatever` so I surmise these are still production WO apps.
             | 
             | 1: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/
             | ws/w...
        
         | diskzero wrote:
         | Many Be employees, including myself, ended up at Apple; some
         | after a brief time at Eazel and others later on. They had, and
         | continue to, make great contributions. As a former Be employee
         | and lover of BeOS, I can say that Apple acquiring Be would have
         | been a disaster for Apple. I have no ill will to Gil Amelio,
         | Ellen Hancock, Steve Glass and the other leadership, but they
         | didn't have what it took (other than the NeXT purchase) to pull
         | Apple out of crisis.
        
         | angrygoat wrote:
         | Circa 1999 one of the popular machines in my uni's computer
         | club was the BeBox - it had a solid web browser, it was fast,
         | it had the cool CPU usage indicator on the front, and it was
         | *nix enough to compile most stuff or to work on assignments in
         | ANSI C. And it was just so snappy, it could do more than one
         | thing without getting janky.
         | 
         | A real shame that they faded out. I kind of miss those days
         | with all the different and varied workstations - Be, SGI, DEC,
         | HP, IBM, Sun, ...
        
           | rzzzt wrote:
           | I'd like to see the GeekPort reintroduced on non-Pi class
           | machines. A bit of digital GPIO, some analog lines, maybe
           | SPI...
        
             | guenthert wrote:
             | Twenty years ago I might have liked that too, but these
             | days I _much_ prefer dedicated machines (MCUs like Arduino,
             | P8X32A, R.Pico etc. or  "single-board" (or rather "open-
             | frame") computers like R.Pi, BBB etc.) for the acoustic
             | noise alone (not to speak of power bill and electrical
             | safety). USB or Ethernet (preferred for galvanic
             | separation) on the PC does just fine to connect to those.
        
             | hakfoo wrote:
             | I wonder why there isn't a $20 PCI-E card (or perhaps USB
             | dongle) that offers a 40-pin RasPi-style port.
        
               | jeffbee wrote:
               | I don't know about the prices but mixed-signal GPIO rigs
               | for PCIe and USB are very common. Look at the "LabJack"
               | for example. The LabJack U3-HV has almost exact feature
               | parity with the geekport.
        
               | hakfoo wrote:
               | A quick google puts it at $130, well beyond the price of
               | "just buy a Raspberry Pi or similar device, which also
               | comes with all the SoC smarts too."
        
               | jeffbee wrote:
               | Fair enough. It compares more favorably to an odd port
               | inconveniently located on the back of a $5000 (2022
               | dollars) tower PC.
        
               | ofrzeta wrote:
               | If you had a PCI card you would need some kind of
               | external adapter or breakout box for the GPIO pins. Seems
               | much more practical to have the board in the "breakout
               | box" and connect it via USB.
        
         | cameroncooper wrote:
         | It would be interesting to see what would have happened had
         | Apple bought Be instead of Apple, but I think it's pretty clear
         | Apple made the "right" move. NeXT had really good software, and
         | of course, Steve Jobs (and let's not forget about the rest of
         | the NeXT team with people like Avie). Hard to imagine Jean-
         | Louis Gassee (or anyone else really) being able to turn the
         | company around like Steve did.
        
           | hankman86 wrote:
           | Exactly. In acquiring NeXT, Apple bought leadership and
           | culture. And we can argue forever if Apple's engineers could
           | have shipped the first OSX release earlier or in a better
           | state, had they instead acquired Be. But I doubt it. Because
           | - again - they bought themselves a high-performance culture,
           | which they might not have gotten from Be. Porting BeOS to
           | Apple hardware / existing software would have likely required
           | an equally Herculean effort.
           | 
           | Oh and they got Steve Jobs of course who made quick work of
           | pushing out the old Apple leadership. And good that he did.
        
             | cmrdporcupine wrote:
             | BeOS already ran on existing Apple PowerPC hardware of the
             | time:
             | 
             | http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/s
             | u...
        
         | pjmlp wrote:
         | Assuming Apple's success by going with Be instead of NeXT, we
         | would have yet another mainstream OS where C++ plays a major
         | role, thus settling the whole discussiong regarding C vs C++
         | for OS design.
        
           | zozbot234 wrote:
           | Linus Torvalds has settled that whole discussion, by
           | rejecting C++ and subsequently adopting Rust. Even Windows is
           | basically written in C in its lowest layers anyway, they
           | apparently don't find C++ itself very useful.
        
             | pjmlp wrote:
             | Linus Torvalds has settled that whole discussion for the
             | Linux kernel.
             | 
             | Thankfully his opinion about C++ is meaningless outside
             | Linux world.
             | 
             | Windows started to adopt C++ on the kernel since Vista, you
             | can make use of Windows Implementation Library, a C++
             | template library for kernel, drivers and userspace code.
             | Just gotta to love that VC++ /kernel flag.
             | 
             | macOS with its NeXTSTEP heritage, changed from having
             | Objective-C drivers on kernel space to C++ drivers in
             | kernel space.
             | 
             | Then if you bother to broaden your horizons beyond FOSS
             | UNIX clones, there are enough OSes already shipping C++ on
             | the kernel.
        
       | themodelplumber wrote:
       | > The thumbnails themselves are stored in extended attributes of
       | the files themselves, which means applications can create their
       | own thumbnails for custom filetypes, if they want (for example, a
       | screenshot might be the thumbnail of an emulator's save-state.)
       | 
       | This is pretty neat. Is it something that script-type
       | applications can do, as opposed to more formally-programmed
       | applications?
       | 
       | Or for that matter is there that kind of system scripting
       | language for the OS, like an ARexx for Haiku? I've used Haiku but
       | not at this level.
        
       | bluepoint wrote:
       | > One of the newly available GTK applications is GNOME Web aka.
       | Epiphany, which is based on a very recent version of WebKitGTK.
       | This provides an unfortunately non-native but largely functional
       | web browser for Haiku for the first time in many years, with
       | "just works" status for major websites like YouTube and others.
       | 
       | I was really waiting for this! I want to install Haiku in an old
       | computer for an old lady friend to use (and for me to see how she
       | will use it). They only problem always was that youtube never
       | really worked. That is the chance!
        
       | gatosenojados wrote:
       | Try it in the browser, new version should be available soon:
       | https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=haiku
        
       | xvilka wrote:
       | > Supporting these drivers required the addition of an "OpenBSD
       | compatibility layer", which builds on top of the existing FreeBSD
       | compatibility layer.
       | 
       | This doesn't look very good, in my opinion. While having working
       | WiFi is important, stacking compatibility layers is not a good
       | architectural decision.
        
         | waddlesplash wrote:
         | OpenBSD is itself a fork of FreeBSD from many years ago, and
         | while there has been a significant amount of API divergence,
         | the differences are not as large as you might first expect. The
         | "OpenBSD compatibility layer" is just a bunch of headers which
         | add more or differing functions from FreeBSD, it does not have
         | any .c files. It works just fine.
        
           | chungy wrote:
           | OpenBSD was actually a fork of NetBSD ca. 1996; NetBSD and
           | FreeBSD in turn are basically sibling-forks from 386BSD.
        
             | waddlesplash wrote:
             | Ah right, seems I got the BSD lineages mixed up. Well, the
             | basic point still stands, anyway.
        
       | makach wrote:
       | HaikuOS still going strong
       | 
       | If we like it on our pcs
       | 
       | Install and use it
        
       | LeFantome wrote:
       | Both Haiku and SerenityOS seem to have enough momentum to
       | potentially become viable contenders for the Open Source Desktop
       | someday.
       | 
       | Both of them highlight how much nicer a vertically integrated
       | user experience can be as well as how much lighter weight a
       | modern desktop can be as well. They also demonstrate that it does
       | not take dozens of corporate paid engineers to do it ( not that I
       | would turn them away ).
       | 
       | Haiku has a long lead over Serenity in terms of hardware support
       | and now app compatibility ( with the new X11 and Wayland stuff ).
       | That said, having to drag along binary compatibility with BeOS
       | must really be slowing Haiku down at this point.
       | 
       | I am looking forward to using one or both of them in the future.
        
         | bionsystem wrote:
         | I like RedOx too although it's going to be quite some work
         | before it runs on a reasonably wide variety of hardware. Haiku
         | was fun to play around a few years back, I remember being able
         | to write a toy gui app in an afternoon with no particular dev
         | experience (although some programming knowledge). Indeed
         | everything seemed well integrated and coherent.
        
         | httgp wrote:
         | Is elementaryOS still going strong?
        
       | alganet wrote:
       | I'm eager to test this. HiDPI, modern browser, wine, emacs...
       | that's A LOT of useful stuff.
       | 
       | I use lightweight linux VMs to keep different workspaces and
       | hobbyspaces separate from my main OS. Depending on how the test
       | goes, I feel that Haiku might replace some of those linuxes.
        
         | MonkeyClub wrote:
         | Yep, this stood out for me as well:
         | 
         | > but now (thanks to Emacs developers!) has a fully-upstreamed,
         | polished-to-a-shine native GUI.
         | 
         | This alone is definitely worth giving it a go!
        
       | user3939382 wrote:
       | These compatibility layers are huge and are going to skyrocket
       | Haiku's strength as a daily driver. I'm really rooting for
       | everyone working on it. Keep up the good work guys.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | jamesdwilson wrote:
       | any way to run this bare metal on an m1 mac? can i dual boot it?
        
         | waddlesplash wrote:
         | The ARM64 port doesn't yet boot all the way to desktop in QEMU,
         | so it certainly won't run bare metal on an M1, unfortunately.
         | 
         | You can certainly dual-boot it on x86 machines, though.
        
           | snvzz wrote:
           | Is RISC-V port in any better condition?
        
             | waddlesplash wrote:
             | Yes. As I noted in another comment, the RISC-V port is
             | basically "fully functional" and only lacks software
             | (HaikuPorts is set up to build on it, but we haven't yet
             | created binary package repositories for RISC-V.) I know at
             | least one Haiku developer has a HiFive Unmatched and it
             | runs Haiku pretty well.
        
       | ofrzeta wrote:
       | With so much compatibility now how much work would it be to port
       | Firefox? What are the showstoppers?
        
       | szastamasta wrote:
       | While I totally despise Electron it might be a great moment for
       | new OSes and UI toolkits to emerge. In near future it might be
       | enough to port Electron and a web browser and your niche OS might
       | become actually usable on daily basis.
       | 
       | It's slow and a total memory waste, but web became a new UI
       | toolkit that actually solved OS compatibility issues. Who would
       | have thought...
        
         | prmoustache wrote:
         | Aren't most electron apps available as regular web pages
         | anyway?
         | 
         | I mean I tried a number of electron apps and always end up
         | using the web version that is always the most up to date and
         | are as wll integrated to the desktop thanks to desktops support
         | for web notifications.
         | 
         | And in many cases, the web version end up more stable/reliable
         | than the electron one. MS Teams is a great example of that.
        
       | hectorm wrote:
       | If anyone wants to quickly spin up a Haiku VM I leave here my
       | Docker image [1].
       | 
       | It's just a proof of concept but some people are using it for CI
       | as well [2].
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/hectorm/docker-qemu-haiku
       | 
       | [2]
       | https://github.com/HaikuArchives/ArtPaint/blob/7f5c49278545e...
        
       | waddlesplash wrote:
       | Release notes: https://www.haiku-os.org/get-
       | haiku/r1beta4/release-notes/
       | 
       | Downloads: https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta4/
        
         | pb82 wrote:
         | Very happy to see boot failure fixes in the release notes.
         | Can't wait to give it another try with beta4!
        
       | superboum wrote:
       | 3 days ago, I installed Haiku on bare metal: an old PC from
       | ~2004. I was not aware that a new version was planned at that
       | time, but the upgrade was completely smooth.
       | 
       | My idea when I installed Haiku was to make my own version of the
       | "old computer challenge"[1], with an emphasis on using GUI apps.
       | 
       | Similarly to @probono (a FOSS dev), I also found Haiku
       | "shockingly good"[2] at being a lightweight, responsive, easy-to-
       | use desktop OS.
       | 
       | After some patching, I was even able to compile Tectonic[3], a
       | modern LaTeX engine written in Rust, and Quaternion a Matrix
       | client supporting E2EE[4]. All that running on a single core
       | Athlon 64 and 1.5GB of RAM.
       | 
       | I posted some screenshots in a Mastodon threads if you are
       | curious[5] (but my posts are in french sorry :/). And of course
       | this comment is posted from Haiku!
       | 
       | [1]: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-07-old-computer-
       | challe...
       | 
       | [2]: https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-first-day-with-haiku-
       | shocki...
       | 
       | [3]: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/
       | 
       | [4]: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion
       | 
       | [5]: https://mastodon.tedomum.net/@tgoldoin/109554115997967651
        
         | phkahler wrote:
         | I had a single core Athlon 64 that I upgraded to a dual core
         | back in the day. That was my primary PC until I got a Ryzen
         | 2400G several years ago. All are really great CPUs for many
         | years after they're made. Next up might be a Zen 5 APU. I'm on
         | a slow upgrade cycle...
        
         | nortonham wrote:
         | oh i loved reading the old computer challenge at the time.
         | Solene did some great write ups about it
        
         | dleslie wrote:
         | How's the support for Samba/NFS?
        
           | waddlesplash wrote:
           | There's a built-in NFSv4 client, but I think it may have
           | fallen a bit behind NFSv4's evolution; I recall hearing you
           | had to turn some feature off in order to get it to connect to
           | a standard exported volume from Linux.
           | 
           | SMB is supported by fusesmb, which is available as a package.
        
             | dleslie wrote:
             | Cool. Network file system support is critical for how I
             | would use it. I've loved the experience for the most part,
             | otherwise.
             | 
             | Well, and Emacs support, but that's in now.
        
         | UncleSlacky wrote:
         | It also runs really well on old netbooks - it's revitalised my
         | Asus EEE 701 4G (even though the screen resolution is below the
         | official minimum requirement), it fits comfortably on the
         | internal 4Gb SSD, and even the wifi works!
        
         | xattt wrote:
         | Around 2001, I ran the contemporary BeOS demo on a Pentium MMX
         | 200 MHz machine with 32 MB of RAM. Even with those limitations,
         | the thing screamed. I believe it was live CD you downloaded and
         | burned.
         | 
         | I am absolutely not surprised it works well on Athlon 64.
        
           | KMag wrote:
           | Ahh, the memories! (266 MHz PII, 64 MB RAM ... maybe upgraded
           | to 384 MB RAM by the time I was quad-booting Debian, Win2k,
           | BeOS and QNX)
           | 
           | Maybe I ran BeOS slightly before a demo CD was available, or
           | maybe I just didn't risk burning a coaster. (Remember those
           | days where you had to worry about your OS not being able to
           | feed the CD burner as fast as it was writing?) When I demoed
           | BeOS around 2000, it was on a floppy (I repurposed a free AoL
           | floppy from a few years earlier... by that time AoL was
           | mailing free CDs instead of free floppies). The demo floppy
           | allowed one to format a BeFS partition on the drive, and I
           | think even put the kernel on the drive, but kept the
           | bootloader on the floppy to encourage purchase.
           | 
           | I woke up one morning to see the floppy drive light on, and
           | apparently a BeOS kernel or usespace driver bug caused it to
           | spin the floppy continuously all night without moving the
           | read/write head. I popped out the floppy and pulled back the
           | dust guard to discover a thin stripe where the magnetic media
           | had been polished off of the floppy. The drive didn't read
           | any floppy correctly after that; presumably the read/write
           | head was covered in magnetic media dust.
           | 
           | I don't remember how, but I eventually found instructions for
           | copying the bootloader off of the downloaded floppy image and
           | getting GRUB to find it, so I didn't need to put my
           | replacement floppy drive at risk.
        
           | TruckerScreamed wrote:
           | Pentium 75 mhz was enough for the BeOS demo. It was almost
           | like using QNX. I believe I tried BeOS on some 486'es too,
           | but if I did not at least it screamed, and burned, as you
           | said, even on a Pentium 75mhz. The only limitation of the
           | 'demo' was that usable space was like locked into 512MB
           | extendable user-space, if I'm not wrong. Please do correct
           | me/this.
        
             | einr wrote:
             | BeOS never (officially) supported 486 class processors, I
             | can't recall if it actually uses Pentium instructions and
             | won't run, or if it's just super slow on 486. I think it is
             | actually compiled for Pentium.
        
           | drooopy wrote:
           | I remember having the exact same experience on slightly less
           | powerful hardware with that BeOS demo. I remember throwing
           | everything at it and it just kept on going like it was no big
           | deal and me constantly going "wow, wow, wow" haha! It was
           | such a bummer going back to Windows after experiencing that.
        
         | bmacho wrote:
         | I believe Linux should be even faster, right? Probably it only
         | lacks a lightweight and responsive DE, and a distro with sane
         | defaults, e.g. no gazillions of random processes running at the
         | start. But e.g. the compilation, or anything compute heavy
         | should be faster under linux?
        
           | lproven wrote:
           | I wouldn't have thought so, no.
           | 
           | Linux is a huge OS by the standards of BeOS and Haiku, with
           | an early-1970s design and layers and layers of legacy cruft
           | between the kernel and the user.
           | 
           | Dr Tanenbaum called it obsolete even 30 years ago:
           | https://www.edn.com/linux-is-obsolete-thread-is-started-
           | janu...
           | 
           | ... and he had a point then.
        
           | squarefoot wrote:
           | It is possible that musl based distros such as Alpine, could
           | somehow compete for having a lot smaller code footprint to
           | execute, but "normal" glibc ones would hardly match Haiku's
           | speed. That doesn't necessarily make Linux inferior; it's
           | just the price to pay for decades of development from
           | thousands of developers and being portable to a huge number
           | of platforms. The upside is we (Linux users) have a lot more
           | software and supported hardware than Haiku, as of today.
        
           | themodelplumber wrote:
           | I switch between Haiku and Q4OS on the same netbook, and they
           | are both very responsive. The Linux distro does indeed have
           | some performance advantages. However I haven't tried beta4
           | yet.
        
         | deaddodo wrote:
         | > 3 days ago, I installed Haiku on bare metal: an old PC from
         | ~2004. I was not aware that a new version was planned at that
         | time, but the upgrade was completely smooth.
         | 
         | If there is one thing to say about Haiku, their slow and steady
         | approach has resulted in a remarkably solid Kernel and base
         | system. It is extremely light and has a well-built and
         | consistent environment. I've always hoped more engineers would
         | hop on the bandwagon to accelerate development, but what the
         | team _has_ achieved is notable in comparison to other
         | alternative /"hobby" OSes.
        
       | rcarmo wrote:
       | This is pretty impressive. GTK, WINE, Wayland... As a
       | "lightweight" OS, it has a lot of potential for tinkering. I
       | can't wait until they get a working ARM version for a Raspberry
       | PI or an RK3688 SBC.
        
         | forgotpwd16 wrote:
         | The approaches to X and Wayland compatibility are interesting.
         | 
         | >Instead of running a full X server as XQuartz or other X11
         | compatibility packages do on other operating systems, it
         | directly handles Xlib API calls and translates them into Haiku
         | API calls, instead.
         | 
         | >It is a little more complicated than the one for X11, running
         | an "in-process Wayland server" for each application instead of
         | translating C API calls directly.
         | 
         | Unfortunately the Wayland part has no blog post similar to the
         | X one.
        
         | waddlesplash wrote:
         | The ARM port has made a lot of progress since the last release;
         | it gets almost all the way to starting the desktop. Similar
         | progress was made on ARM64. But that's not very exciting news,
         | so it only got an oblique mention in the release notes.
         | 
         | The RISC-V port on the other hand is nearly fully usable even
         | on bare metal. I know some people run it on HiFive Unmatched,
         | at least...
        
       | forgotpwd16 wrote:
       | >One of the newly available GTK applications is GNOME Web aka.
       | Epiphany, which is based on a very recent version of WebKitGTK.
       | This provides an unfortunately non-native but largely functional
       | web browser for Haiku for the first time in many years, with
       | "just works" status for major websites like YouTube and others.
       | 
       | For many people that makes Haiku suitable to run daily.
        
         | dleslie wrote:
         | WebPositive was also updated to latest WebKit. Honestly, it
         | worked OK before and if it's using the same WebKit as GNOME Web
         | then it should be just as good, but also using native UI.
        
         | chungy wrote:
         | I kind of get not using the Be GUI API makes it feel "non-
         | native", but it's still a native port of GTK and Epiphany. It's
         | not like they've built a Linux ABI emulation layer to run it.
        
           | waddlesplash wrote:
           | There's not a Linux ABI emulation layer but it is running on
           | top of a Wayland emulation layer, instead of using the Be GUI
           | API directly (as the Qt, SDL, and Java Swing ports do.) That
           | does make a difference, especially around stuff like keyboard
           | handling.
        
             | forgotpwd16 wrote:
             | >on top of a Wayland emulation layer
             | 
             | As per release notes, for time being it uses X11 layer
             | instead for features and performance.
        
               | waddlesplash wrote:
               | Uh ... no? The release notes state it started out using
               | the X11 layer, but then switched to using the Wayland
               | layer.
               | 
               | I should know: I wrote the X11 layer, contributed to the
               | Wayland layer, and wrote most of these release notes. :)
        
               | forgotpwd16 wrote:
               | Yeah, skimmed through them and mixed up the wording. It
               | says "port now is built atop [the Wayland compatibility
               | layer] for both features and performance reasons",
               | remembered it the other way.
        
               | phkahler wrote:
               | So can it run Solvespace? CAD with GTK gui.
        
               | rayiner wrote:
               | Really impressive work man. Really great to see Haiku
               | alive and kicking. I remember stanning for BeOS on
               | Slashdot. Those were the days.
        
       | nullc wrote:
       | I really love how responsive the Haiku gui feels.
       | 
       | I only use if for testing free software packages in a "weird"
       | build environment, but every time I do I feel sad for how much
       | we've regressed in terms of the latency of modern desktop
       | software.
       | 
       | Beyond latency the UIs are also just a lot more useful, the
       | subtle faux-3d delineates the boundaries of control surfaces and
       | make it much more clear where you need to click and what will
       | happen when you do.
        
       | spyremeown wrote:
       | Who is the designer behind Haiku's icons and general "feel"? It
       | looks really nice.
        
         | c0balt wrote:
         | I can't speak to the specific person(s) however the Haiku inc.
         | (The non-profit for Haiku Org stuff) has an FAQ entry about
         | them: https://www.haiku-inc.org/trademarks/haiku_icons/
         | 
         | Edit: Fixed typo
        
         | waddlesplash wrote:
         | That would be "stippi" aka. Stephan Assmus on both counts, I
         | believe. At least the icon style was chosen after a competition
         | all the way back in 2006, where stippi's style got the most
         | votes [1]. The look & feel of controls was done by him in 2009
         | [2], not sure if there was ever an announcement about that (I
         | see an old forum thread that may be related, though.)
         | 
         | These days, stippi does not have much time for Haiku, but there
         | are a number of developers & community members who have picked
         | up where he left off, continuing work on the UI and drawing new
         | icons when required.
         | 
         | (Old hands from the BeOS days may remember stippi as the co-
         | developer of the shareware "WonderBrush", which now runs on
         | Haiku and has been open-sourced [3].)
         | 
         | [1]: https://www.haiku-
         | os.org/news/2006-11-03_icon_contest_and_be...
         | 
         | [2]:
         | https://github.com/haiku/haiku/commit/2f86ba45579bdc9648b232...
         | 
         | [3]: https://github.com/stippi/WonderBrush-v2/
        
         | brobinson wrote:
         | Where do you even see them? I clicked around the website for a
         | minute and can't find a freaking screenshot of anything
         | anywhere. How frustrating.
        
           | waddlesplash wrote:
           | The front-page should probably have more screenshots, yeah.
           | 
           | There's a screenshot tour here: https://www.haiku-
           | os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/
           | 
           | And the release notes, linked from the release announcement,
           | have screenshots: https://www.haiku-os.org/get-
           | haiku/r1beta4/release-notes/
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | The user guide has some: https://www.haiku-
           | os.org/docs/userguide/en/gui.html
        
       | dang wrote:
       | This is maybe about the limit for a list like this, and I omitted
       | a few less interesting ones. If anyone knows of a good thread
       | that I missed, we can merge it in!
       | 
       |  _Show HN: Xlibe - A serverless Xlib (X11) compatibility layer
       | for Haiku_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31167562 -
       | April 2022 (46 comments)
       | 
       |  _Giving Haiku Beta 3 a try_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29757451 - Jan 2022 (48
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _My progress in porting Wine_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29753069 - Dec 2021 (62
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku Now Has Experimental 3D Acceleration_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29390689 - Nov 2021 (71
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku has hired an existing contributor to work on Haiku full-
       | time_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28305191 - Aug 2021
       | (105 comments)
       | 
       |  _20 Years of Haiku_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28241255 - Aug 2021 (119
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku Beta 3_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27955755 -
       | July 2021 (96 comments)
       | 
       |  _HaikuOS running on RISC-V hardware (HiFive Unmatched)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27867941 - July 2021 (80
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _The Dawn of Haiku OS (2012)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27616822 - June 2021 (15
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku Monthly Activity Report - May 2021_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395511 - June 2021 (20
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27129305 - May 2021 (86
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku Activity Report - January 2021_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26055781 - Feb 2021 (24
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku: Call for Wallpapers_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24756787 - Oct 2020 (24
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku: Contest for System Sounds_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24593719 - Sept 2020 (15
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _A decidedly non-Linux distro walkthrough: Haiku R1 /beta2_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676975 - June 2020 (46
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku R1 /beta2 has been released_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23469209 - June 2020 (254
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku Alpha 1: Rebirth of legend_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22401383 - Feb 2020 (14
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _500 Byte Images: The Haiku Vector Icon Format (2016)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22373422 - Feb 2020 (91
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _The Haiku Operating System_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20812877 - Aug 2019 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _My sixth day with Haiku: Under the hood of resources, icons,
       | and packages_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20443136 -
       | July 2019 (38 comments)
       | 
       |  _Most long-standing XHCI (USB 3.0+) issues resolved_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19352839 - March 2019 (58
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku Beta is finally here_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18769814 - Dec 2018 (53
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _What makes BeOS and Haiku unique_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18583722 - Dec 2018 (219
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku R1 /beta1 has been released_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099127 - Sept 2018 (79
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _The State of Rust on Haiku_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17472907 - July 2018 (84
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _LibreOffice is now available for Haiku_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17440862 - July 2018 (157
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku Project_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15973918
       | - Dec 2017 (64 comments)
       | 
       |  _Scripting the Haiku GUI with hey_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15697697 - Nov 2017 (47
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Trying to work in Haiku, the BeOS successor_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14697308 - July 2017 (24
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Porting Swift to Haiku_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14617453 - June 2017 (49
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku booting in UEFI mode_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13200633 - Dec 2016 (94
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku Project_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12566056
       | - Sept 2016 (143 comments)
       | 
       |  _500 Byte Images: The Haiku Vector Icon Format_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12420763 - Sept 2016 (81
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku OS Action - From BeOS compatible to Desktop [video]_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9713843 - June 2015 (4
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku OS - Fundraising 2015_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9046701 - Feb 2015 (27
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Whatever Happened to BeOS?_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8175135 - Aug 2014 (17
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Interview with Haiku developer Pawel Dziepak_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754772 - May 2014 (47
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku meets 9th processor_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6987731 - Dec 2013 (44
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku Operating System_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5564766 - April 2013 (110
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku OS (BeOS clone)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123941 - June 2012 (46
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _HaikuOS x86_64 port part of Google Summer of Code_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3906710 - April 2012 (15
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _The Dawn of Haiku OS_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3904972 - April 2012 (110
       | comments)
       | 
       | * Haiku Project Announces Availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 2* -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334827 - May 2010 (11
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku: A Perfect Desktop Operating System?_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1009751 - Dec 2009 (5
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=826986 - Sept
       | 2009 (29 comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku Project Announces Availability of Haiku R1 /Alpha 1_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820844 - Sept 2009 (20
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Haiku OS first alpha scheduled for September 6th_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=767766 - Aug 2009 (11
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _BeOS Lives: Haiku Impresses_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475756 - Feb 2009 (19
       | comments)
        
       | hankman86 wrote:
       | Beyond the nostalgia: are there any other reasons to keep
       | contributing to Haiku? Like critical infrastructure that is
       | reliant on BeOS/Haiku. Or anything you can plausibly do best on
       | Haiku?
        
         | unixhero wrote:
         | It's just a fun OS
        
         | waddlesplash wrote:
         | It's an alternative to the fragmented state of the "Linux
         | desktop": instead of having dozens of separate projects (GNOME,
         | PipeWire, systemd, Wayland, ...) be combined by yet another
         | project (a distribution), which is (in my view) a major cause
         | of the fragile nature, slow pace of development (it's hard to
         | request features if you have to spend minutes to hours figuring
         | out where they need to be requested from!), and other problems
         | it faces, Haiku is a one-project-governs-all: a single
         | development team for the core operating system and userspace
         | ("desktop environment"), with an interconnected distribution
         | ecosystem.
         | 
         | We can merge a change to Haiku's kernel and drivers, and test
         | builds will be available with it on the "nightly" channel
         | within hours. We can issue a patch for the system C library
         | headers, trigger rebuilds of packages from the ports tree
         | against it as soon as CI builds finish. We can send users
         | experimental builds of work-in-progress features for testing,
         | with very little technical know-how required to install such a
         | patch or revert to the previous version if it breaks something.
         | 
         | There are so many huge advantages Haiku has due to how the
         | project is structured that the "Linux desktop", whatever
         | upsides it does possess, basically cannot ever have by its very
         | nature.
        
           | guenthert wrote:
           | > instead of having dozens of separate projects (GNOME,
           | PipeWire, systemd, Wayland, ...) be combined by yet another
           | project (a distribution), which is (in my view) a major cause
           | of the fragile nature, slow pace of development (it's hard to
           | request features if you have to spend minutes to hours
           | figuring out where they need to be requested from!), and
           | other problems it faces, Haiku is a one-project-governs-all:
           | a single development team for the core operating system and
           | userspace ("desktop environment"), with an interconnected
           | distribution ecosystem.
           | 
           | So there will never be 3rd party software? Not even a GNU
           | Emacs? Surely you're using GNU GCC, aren't you?
        
             | nix23 wrote:
             | Have your read the release-notes? Hint emacs. It's about
             | the coresystems (network, graphic, sound, storage), the bsd
             | systems do that (partially) so is windows and macos.
        
               | guenthert wrote:
               | What I tried to convey is that this is an arbitrary line
               | to draw. What difference does it make to an user whether
               | graphic and network bugs can be reported to the same
               | organisation, but bugs in the IDE (I'm thinking of
               | IntelliJ here, not Emacs) go somewhere else vs. all bugs
               | go to their respective software package's bug tracker?
               | 
               | There was a time when DEC or IBM could act as a single
               | point of contact for all your software needs, but we live
               | in a much more diverse world now and the all-inclusive
               | software offering / SPOC is just not a realistic or
               | (IMHO) desirable target anymore.
        
               | nix23 wrote:
               | The arbitrary line is normally base to 3rd party, the
               | line is blurry, but you read too much in in, just compare
               | it with macOS would you?
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | The difference is not to which organization to report,
               | rather having a cohesive arquitecture design of the OS
               | stack instead of a bunch of lego bricks with incompatible
               | pins.
        
         | forgotpwd16 wrote:
         | Mostly for fun. Something kinda helped by that Haiku retains
         | some interesting concepts (e.g. built to have small footprint,
         | written in C++, object-oriented and concept-oriented API,
         | database-like filesystem, replicants, standard scripting
         | mechanism, ...) and being enough different from other Unix-like
         | systems.
        
       | donatj wrote:
       | As a BeOS users in the late 90's / early 2000's - the fact that
       | Haiku is still going twenty years since its first inception is
       | just incredible to me.
       | 
       | I am continually amazed at how much progress the project
       | continues to garner. It really proves there was something magical
       | to BeOS.
        
         | waddlesplash wrote:
         | It's not just that there was something magical to BeOS, there's
         | still something magical to Haiku, especially in the era of the
         | "Linux desktop" with its free-for-all fractured ecosystem
         | approach to desktop environments. We aren't working on Haiku
         | just because it reminds us of the past, but because we think it
         | could be the future, too.
        
           | hankman86 wrote:
           | This deserves to be expanded on: I very much see the need for
           | innovation in OS research. But I just don't see anything in
           | BeOS/Haiku that would address any of the big challenges for
           | operating systems. Which in my mind include the following:
           | 
           | Can we get away from the "leaky bucket" security paradigm
           | where despite all of the best efforts and gradual
           | improvements, prevalent operating systems "keep on giving" in
           | terms of exploits that are discovered all the time. Is there
           | something akin to what Rust is for programming languages?
           | 
           | Or what about an operating system for AIs? Is the current
           | stack of Linux, GPU drivers, and some ML SDK on top an
           | adequate answer for emerging AI applications?
           | 
           | Or if you still believe in Blockchain applications, what
           | about a native OS for that?
           | 
           | And the list goes on.
           | 
           | All I see in Haiku/BeOS is a pretty, albeit dated user
           | interface. Someone educate me what else they bring to the
           | table.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | pacifika wrote:
             | You're listing tech that didn't exist when Haiku started so
             | how could it address those things?
             | 
             | Haiku is an OS for endusers.
        
             | christophilus wrote:
             | It screams on super underpowered hardware. That's a nice
             | benefit over just about any modern OS.
        
               | ako wrote:
               | Could also help with some of our biggest issues: use less
               | energy, reduce energy costs, go green, use your existing
               | hardware longer, less need for producing new things.
        
             | DragonMaus wrote:
             | > And the list goes on.
             | 
             | I would be keen to see more of this list, as two of the
             | three items you mentioned are not at all interesting or
             | useful to me (and, I would presume, to a majority of other
             | users).
             | 
             | Even the other item (#1) is somewhat academic, as modern
             | security practices are generally "good enough" for most
             | people in most use cases. (That is, there is certainly room
             | for improvement, but where we are now isn't nearly as bad
             | as it could be.)
        
             | als0 wrote:
             | > Is there something akin to what Rust is for programming
             | languages?
             | 
             | Check out the Genode OS framework
        
             | Ygg2 wrote:
             | Sometimes making a better UX Operating system is enough.
        
           | Gualdrapo wrote:
           | Forgive me but as I can appreciate the effort put into Haiku
           | and working on a single user targeted OS, I still can't get
           | why the people behind it like to throw darts to Linux from
           | time to time. That "era of the Linux desktop" phrase is
           | something even we Linux desktop users themselves will laugh
           | at, as there is not such thing.
           | 
           | Praising the positives of your work at the expense of the
           | criticism of other's work won't do you any favours.
        
             | LeFantome wrote:
             | I do not think they are throwing darts. My read is that
             | they are making the following two points:
             | 
             | - the "Open Source Desktop" is pretty much a Linux
             | monoculture and they are an alternative to that
             | 
             | - the Haiku philosophy is to offer a unified and consistent
             | user experience vs a collection of a thousand independent
             | projects approach ( the Linux experience )
             | 
             | - Haiku offers everything needed for a desktop experience
             | under the banner of a single project ( another way of
             | saying the previous point )
        
             | waddlesplash wrote:
             | I think you are reading a little too much into it. Linux
             | people throw darts at Haiku ("why would you ever use this
             | and not Linux?" etc.) so it seems only fair we throw a few
             | back. Many of us have desktop Linux installs, and some of
             | us even have patches (or even have contributed significant
             | amounts of work) in various Linux ecosystem projects.
        
               | Gualdrapo wrote:
               | > "why would you ever use this and not Linux?"
               | 
               | That seems to be a legitimate question, not a dart nor a
               | criticism by any means.
        
               | waddlesplash wrote:
               | Sometimes it is, and you can see elsewhere I've given
               | real answers to that question.
               | 
               | But sometimes my criticisms of Linux are because, well,
               | they are a real and genuine motivation for why I gave up
               | on desktop Linux and devoted even more time to Haiku.
               | It's not as if my criticisms are anything new, there's
               | pages upon pages where Linux users and developers say
               | similar things. I "throw such darts" here to make it
               | clear how Haiku stands in contrast.
        
           | sho_hn wrote:
           | Isn't adding X11 and Wayland and Wine getting you the same
           | free-for-all toolkit and app mix in the end?
        
             | waddlesplash wrote:
             | Free-for-all in terms of toolkit and application mix, yes,
             | but that's actually the "lesser" problem of the Linux
             | desktop. Ideally we would have all-native applications, but
             | not even macOS can really manage that.
             | 
             | The X11 and Wayland compatibility layers are very different
             | than XQuartz macOS or the Wayland-based WSL GUI are, they
             | are much more tightly integrated into Haiku. While you are
             | still going to notice some seams here and there, overall
             | the experience is much more like a "full port" than most
             | other OSes have on this point.
             | 
             | More to the point, all ported applications are still
             | running on top of Haiku's kernel, Haiku's window manager /
             | display server, Haiku's media services, Haiku's init
             | system, Haiku's package manager, etc. On Linux, all those
             | things come from separate projects, and some of them can
             | even be swapped out within a Linux distribution, never mind
             | between distributions. Not so on Haiku.
        
               | sho_hn wrote:
               | Many of the apps are designed to the conventions of the
               | various desktop environments on Linux (or Windows, in
               | case of Wine), and feel most at home in one of them.
               | Without additional effort to e.g. implement D-Bus and XDG
               | portals, having a Qt or GTK app run will mean those apps
               | open File Open/Save dialogs that are not the native Haiku
               | ones. In the end it will be a fractured feel as well.
               | 
               | I hear what you're saying and I do understand the point
               | you're trying to make. However, I think it's interesting
               | to point out just how app-centric systems have become,
               | with many apps even shipping essentially their own unique
               | HIG and look and feel.
               | 
               | If you look at Haiku's competitors, 10 years ago they
               | were all much more editorialized with a strong sense of
               | what a proper, native app for them should look like. And
               | despite all having more such native apps than Haiku has
               | now, the trends have - at least for the time being -
               | pulled away from that. If Haiku gets more popular it'll
               | similarly become subject to simply running the most
               | popular software.
        
               | Ygg2 wrote:
               | That's the issue with specific GUI toolkit.
               | 
               | Haiku has its own set of tools.
               | 
               | As long as it's integrated it might avoid Lisp Curse of
               | Linux. It's too easy to fork and too hard to reintegrate.
        
               | rayiner wrote:
               | That's a good observation. In many ways your approach is
               | like Carbon on MacOS, or the bajillion UI toolkits that
               | exist on top of the same display driver, clipboard, etc.,
               | infrastructure in Windows.
        
         | kristopolous wrote:
         | I've spoken to some of the developers. There's a community of
         | admiration and integrity that is really solid. You get the
         | strong feeling that they enjoy each other and that's what
         | drives them. It was obvious to me why it was still going after
         | talking to a few people.
        
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