Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well Haiku still hasn't quite reached that magic Version One Point Zero line in the sand, in part because its developers are setting the bar much higher than that of any other FOSS OS. Haiku beta 5 arrived in September, but a significant box for this experimental OS was ticked in December, with an unofficial but working and usable …
I've been playing with it for a while, stuck the experimental Firefox/Iceweasel on there last week.
But I don't know that I really see a serious future for it. There's a reason it's not Mac OS today, and Nextstep is - and Apple seriously considered it in the '90s. Sure, part of that was the annoying Frenchman, but it's just not as capable as a *nix.
One REALLY weird thing about it is how much faster it is to install than it is to boot, at least in the VM that I've been using to play with it.
A desktop/laptop OS which is fast, understands POSIX, has a classic GUI and isn't a bloated mess or some kind of data-slurping endpoint for a late-stage capitalism business model is surely something to be recommended.
Hopefully it will attract more developers now the version 1.0 finish line is in sight.
BeOS lost funding after Apple went with NeXT and an ill-advised IPO at the end of the dotcom boom deprived the company of necessary funding. Haiku has arguably suffered from the rise of Android, with Google doing the heavy lifting of hardware support, enabling a huge market for application developers. At that time Haiku was barely usable for any but the bravest.
But the kernel and API are still things of beauty, especially in comparison with the bloated binaries on other systems.
I was interested in BeOS and had attended some demos. I heard one of the developers say that it had excessive dependencies on the Metrowerks tools that doomed it without a major investment. I used Metrowerks CodeWarrior at the time and it was a terribly unstable product.
Its strengths seem to be its strong identity, speed on low-end/old hardware and overall strong simplicity and cohesion.
What could it be used for ?
OS hobbyists : quite clear but it needs a Pi version to truely shine !
Power user : not enough specialized native apps compared to linux I fear.
Web kiosk : perhaps as a gateway to go on the web on older/low-end hardware. Might be more streamlined than xfce/linux.
Could it compete with chromeos on this segment ? security might not be tight enough
Embedded : not sure as vendors would customize linux guis or use android for touch-enabled devices.
Smartphones/tablets : no apps and no touch makes it a difficult path.
what do you think ?
Embedded devs really don't care what the OS is, only that the hardware is well supported.
I can very much see it being used in place of Linux or Win10 IoT, especially as nearly all embedded is single-user and so gets tripped up occasionally by the inherently multi-user design of both Linux and Windows.
If a dev board offered Haiku as a first-party supported OS, it'd get used there.
I love Haiku (actually that's a lie, I still don't like the name). But I absolutely love using the OS.
I do a lot of testing of things like corporate access to Azure resources - Haiku is immensely useful there and yes, all the Azure admin portal sites work in Haiku!
It's maybe never going to be mainstream, but those who know... know ;)
As a former Be employee (albeit a lowly sysadmin) and enthusiast, I was excited by the emergence of Haiku as a spiritual successor to BeOS. Unfortunately, development of Haiku has progressed at what might generously be termed a desultory pace, possibly due to a lack of involvement by the original development team. As a result, in 23 years of development, Haiku has yet to make it out of beta, leaving it as a lingering coda to the swan song of BeOS.
Not everybody needs an OS with commercial software. Some (retired) old Gits just like tinkering with old machines.
An OS doesn't need to be a Windows or Linux competitor to be interesting.
If you don't like or need it, don't use it.
It's free.
Similarly, if the latest Raspberry Pi isn't to your liking or doesn't meet your requirements, I'm not really interested.
There was a time when the comment section here was full of useful technical tips and very funny posts.
"There was a time when the comment section here was full of useful technical tips and very funny posts."
Which, clearly obvious fact, correlates closely with the translation of the Reg's Centre of Gravity from somewhere around 0 degrees lat. to something more West Coast. My God, even the spell checker on this page flags up my (correct) spelling of 'centre'. Pah!
I played with BeOS back in the day and really liked it, but there was no ecosystem. Since then I've messed with Haiku "just because I can" through its slow but steady development. It finally sounds like Haiku may be ready for a serious revisit.
Now... Where did I store that old Core-Duo Unibody MacBook...?
Yeah, there's a huge amount of documentation on the Haiku site (though I'm not sure about the aesthetics of their chosen coding style).
I like the idea, but as something to play with... and... I do a lot of quick and dirty console programs. Which seem to be verboten. I may have misunderstood. But I didn't come across a 'hello world' example yet.
Well, ackshually --- there is an ARM port, with four Raspberry Pis on the targets list: https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/develop/kernel/arch/arm/overview.html
But the state is nowhere near useful. I believe someone's demonstrated the GUI loading on an ARM64 device, but then it crashes. Shame; I have a Pinebook Pro that would run Haiku very nicely. As always, volunteers are needed.
I remember a little about this in way back days. I figured it was dead. I really like the idea a lot. The world is in need of more competition. The problem I see is talking all the high end software companies to go back to 32 bit. You will need some kind of 32-64 bit bridge, and now it starts to drag resources. I do like the idea a lot though.
> I figured it was dead. I really like the idea a lot. The world is in need of more competition.
Me too, and I agree.
> The problem I see is talking all the high end software companies to go back to 32 bit.
It has both x86-32 and x86-64 editions, and I think the future is clear and means dropping BeOS binary compatibility. There are already _way_ more native Haiku apps than BeOS ever had. The handful that were big names are largely obsolete. I think the attachment to 32-bit is partly sentimental.
I have seen people say that the reason they've not called it "v1.0" and have done with it is that there's dissent on where to go after it's declared complete. In other words: after its "finished" and "done", then what?
I am not sure if this is true or not.
But then they have maintenance cost for both versions. If they dropped one of them, you could still get the code and work with it, but the core developers wouldn't have to try to keep them both in sync. For something as small as this, that could be the difference between having a next version and it stagnating.
I think having a 64-bit version is probably going to work better than having a 32-bit only version for old software. If the old software is important enough, a compatibility layer is probably better than making everything else change so they run natively. I imagine that most of the software written for BeOS is not so useful nowadays, and the ones that would still work, like word processors, can be replaced by LibreOffice which the article says is supported.
Keeping both versions does not add much overhead and has never been considered a problem. Some people want 32-bits for their old BeOS software, such as Gobe Productive (though this has some annoying bugs), and it took a while to get 64-bit feature complete. It was mooted than after an official release, development of 32-bit would be frozen.
How well does it run Windows programs?
Now that everything I want to install on Linux is a flatpack, I am finding that the Windows versions runs better under wine than the flatpack versions.
Linux is now regularly locking up due to inadequate swapfile management, and has to have the power switch used.
Recently an app size was: Linux flatpack: 714Mb, Win 130Mb, Android 70Mb.
Perhaps windows apps on Haiku is the future?
@AC 10 Jan / 01:34:
I don't know why your Linux is locking up, but it's probably not due to swap management failure. Reason: for decades I've run both Linux and OpenBSD on netbooks with 2GB RAM, and NO swap, without problems.
On the other claw: if you're running a bunch of Windows programs (via WINE, etc.), you may be having memory-leak problems. There's nothing magical about Linux-native programming which prevents memory leaks, but there are tons more programs for MS Windows than for Linux, which leads to tons more memory-leaking programs for MS Windows than for Linux.
Even if you're right that memory leaks are the underlying cause here, the parent's point still stands: once a swapstorm starts it's unreasonably difficult to get a Linux machine (or a Windows one for that matter) back under control. It can be quicker to power-cycle the machine than wait for the chain of events between a mouse-click on the close gadget and the application finally terminating.
Even Ctrl-Alt-F1, login and kill the offending process can take several minutes.
(And disabling swap won't necessary prevent swapstorms, either - applications or libraries can still be paged out and re-loaded on demand, which for interactivity can be worse than mutable data being paged out. What's missing is some way of "pinning" UI / desktop environment code as "required for interactivity". I don't know how much better Haiku is in that regard - it may be better simply through having a much smaller footprint and way less complexity.)
I know this was a largely throwaway line that was somewhat tangential to the article, but… I am a pedantic nerd, and someone is wrong on the internet ;)
> There is a terminal emulator, but like on a Mac, you can ignore it
As a developer whose daily driver is an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro… hard disagree on this. I’m regularly working in a terminal prompt. I *can* manage without the terminal, but by ‘eck it’d slow me down.
Arguably I’d be much better off using Linux as my day-to-day work machine - aside from the rather impressive hardware and stellar battery life, there’s nothing special about macOS that makes it particularly suited to what I need. However corporate policy rarely aligns with developer preference. I can have a really flexible and powerful MacBook or a heavily locked-down Dell-something-or-other running Windows.
Getting back to the wider article however it’s good to see progress on Haiku, however glacial it may be. I remember being utterly blown away by the original BeOS - running an entire multimedia OS from a single floppy disk was unheard of for the time.
I must also disagree with that line, because you can ignore the terminal on pretty much anything with a GUI. Windows and Linux users manage to do without the terminal as well. I don't, because I want to use the terminal, because there are some things that are a lot faster through one and some things that haven't bothered to write a GUI so I don't have a choice. People who want to ignore a terminal can, and most of them do because they don't know how to use it anyway.
Some of us avoid them because when we started our careers they were the only option. So for us it's not that we "don't know how to use it anyway", we're just realistic about how much better a GUI is for most jobs.
Last place I was at was full of youngsters who fucking loved using a terminal. I guess to them it was new and exiciting.
I like having the option, not being required to use it. There are some people, a small number but I have met some, who pretend that GUIs are bad and that all that matters is having a CLI. I don't believe them because of the number of tasks where a GUI is clearly better, sometimes significantly better. There is a reason why all my computers boot into a GUI first, but there is also a reason why there's often a terminal window or five up, because there are times where a CLI is more efficient or useful. Having both options is what I want, not picking a single winner.
One of the reasons for that in my case is that I'm a programmer and I often solve my problems by writing small programs. A CLI is one of the simplest ways of going from having some code that fixes a problem to executing that code. I don't need to write much in order to get some inputs and print progress reports. I have at times made some basic GUI libraries so I could do those simple things in a GUI, but often less flexibly than a CLI would. It also means that my various CLIs are not the same. A zsh or bash session, a Python REPL, and an R window may look similar, but they're quite different in what they do well and what their limitations are.
But why should they? Like Linux, they assume, and correctly, that people who want it are fully capable of installing exactly what they want rather than using the manufacturer's image. Unlike Linux, it doesn't sound like it's at a stage where it's reasonable to give it to a nontechnical user. So with both of those, it sounds like you just want them to help with the Haiku development efforts to make sure any bugs getting it to work on their hardware are fixed, which is great, but there are a lot of operating systems they could do that with so why should they prefer Haiku.
With possibly two modern browsers (firefox and falkon) and many kde apps, things could get interesting very fast.
Perhaps a well-thought webapp integration paradigm in the tracker could be helpful.
I wonder if web-based video conference (zoom, teams etc..) work or not.
I heard there is no GPU acceleration yet, I also wonder if new nvidia open drivers (not nouveau) that moves most of the code from the driver to GPU firmware could make witting haiku driver somewhat easier.
A fully functioning and well supported browser could extend this project's legs. I'll try it on the VAIO P - didn't install last time I tried, a couple of years ago. If it boots fast and runs Firefox fast, it'll be a keeper as an option with Windows XP, Windows 7 Pro, and antiX.
https://www.grc.com/never10.htm
https://www.grc.com/incontrol.htm
I have had it running on my old 4770k ex gaming rig as a side monitor to my main gaming rig for viewing web pages etc. since B5 came out.
I also have a copy running on an old i3 8th gen intel CPU laptop with a SSD and it’s startlingly fast to boot up and get to the desktop. Like really, really fast.
I finally also have an 8 inch Atom based industrial touch screen AIO pc with an 8GB Compact Flash card and 1GB of RAM from a lab where it used to be an autoclave control panel which is actually finally usable. And it’s also really funny to see just how little system resources it uses in the background.
Haiku is now properly in use daily by me at least and I can’t wait for at least intel drivers for video playback or 3D
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