[slantyyz]

Serious question - does anyone use Haiku for anything more than playing?

I was a huge BeOS fan back in the day, and bought the Intel version when I had a Pentium ][ computer. I was so excited for OpenBeOS (now Haiku) after BeOS got acquired, but it's been something 17 years, and it looks they're still just a release candidate for 1.0.

Back then, BeOS did some amazing stuff compared to Windows, but technology has come a long way since then, and I'd rather be using MacOS, Windows or a Linux Desktop like Ubuntu than Haiku.

[kitsunesoba]

Right now they’re focused mostly on parity with BeOS R5 in terms of features/capabilities. Once that goal has been reached, the focus will shift to making Haiku a proper modern OS and addition of new features in the spirit of BeOS. I suspect that it’ll become much more interesting to a wider variety of people after a release or two with the latter focus.

The one thing that makes Haiku intriguing and promising in my eyes is the fact that its developers want it to be a first class desktop/laptop OS above all else with no server/mobile/other kitchen-sink-isms muddying the water. There’s nothing like that out there today, save for maybe macOS (which is more desktop focused but still suffers from the various multipurpose compromises brought from its *NIX heritage).

[michaelmrose]

"no server/mobile/other kitchen-sink-isms muddying the water"

I'm not convinced that at present this is a meaningful benefit especially compared to the increased resources available for say linux. The one good example that I can think of cpu schedulers seems to be solved by running a kernel with alternative patches.

[kitsunesoba]

The benefit would be the ability to cherry pick only the most desktop-beneficial features rooted in non-desktop domains while also leaving behind the rest. One example would be the window server and compositor — on Linux/BSD, these services, being desktop oriented on a multipurpose system, must be wholly decoupled from the rest of the system introducing a ton of opportunities for latency, stutter, and other issues to find their way into the user experience. It’s not impossible to minimize these issues, but it’s much more difficult.

Haiku doesn’t have to worry about this problem at all. It can simply implement the most effective and good-experience-conducive end to end design possible for its window management and compositing since it’ll never ever be a headless server.

[mikepurvis]

But doesn't that mandatory separation of concerns lead to good system architecture?

Microsoft lived without it for years and then finally did the job when they needed a Core OS to be shared between laptops, servers, phones, and Xbox— in the process they discovered and cleaned up all kinds of super weird interdependencies between components which should definitely not needed to be talking to each other.

[waddlesplash]

Haiku developer here.

I used to run Linux on the desktop pretty extensively, but eventually got fed up with how often something broke and I had to fix it (ALSA doesn't play audio anymore, or suddenly MP4 files stutter -- or most recently, on the last remaining Kubuntu install, I can't even log in to my user account after the upgrade, it just hangs.) So, perhaps the system is "better architected" by some standard, but having those weird inter-dependencies tends to mean everything runs smoother. Depends on what your definition of "good" is, I guess.

[badsectoracula]

Well, last time i tried Haiku i tried to write a simple program and at some point when i pressed save in the editor the entire OS crashed, so there is that :-P.

ALSA not playing either means that there are driver issues - and i highly doubt Haiku solves the problem of drivers having bugs - or there is some configuration issue.

But this (configuration) issue and the desktop focus do not seem to require getting rid of the entire kernel and - most importantly - the systems it supports. If X11 doesn't do (which i doubt, X11 ran on way more restricted hardware than what is available even on $5 "computers" today, but lets roll with it) you could simply write a new window system from scratch and provide a layer for everything you may think a desktop system needs so that any application written on that layer will keep working if the backend library/tech changes.

And from my understanding of Haiku, this is basically what happens already (<Stuff>Kit depends on some popular open source library for <Stuff> that is already available on Linux but exposed to applications through the <Stuff>Kit API), except with a kernel that doesn't support most things that people need today.

Personally i like the idea of Haiku as a desktop focused system, i just do not see what exactly having a custom kernel with its own need for drivers and hardware compatibility provide that a layer on top of kernel that exposes a similar API doesn't (beyond of course the hack value and the fun of making a kernel - something i am 100% totally behind as i personally write a lot of stuff just for the fun of it).

[michaelmrose]

Kubuntu is perhaps not the finest example as it has not been what I would call stable or optimal. I honestly think your analysis is in error. It has forever been the wort kde distro you could pick. You could get a more stable experience by picking a distro by throwing darts at printout of distrowatch.

A number of things have been historically sub optimal on the linux desktop but while the way linux is designed as a bunch of loosely coupled projects DOES seem to be the cause of it being able to be a lot of different things to a lot of different people example different window managers, compositors, file systems its not equally clear that the defects present exist for the same reason.

It seems likely that haiku expanded to thousands of different types of computers could easily be worse or better than linux in practice insofar as buggy behavior while still definitely being objectively worse insofar as not being modular.

[slantyyz]

>> its developers want it to be a first class desktop/laptop OS above all else with no server/mobile/other kitchen-sink-isms muddying the water

In today's terms, that sounds a lot like an iPad (with an attached keyboard) or a Chromebook.

[kitsunesoba]

Kinda I suppose, except without many of the limits inherent to those platforms. Both probably still aren’t as good as they could be for their purposes due to baggage inherited from their *NIX predecessors.

[dleslie]

I have it on a few older laptops that I keep around for traveling - I don't care if they're stolen, and I only need them for SSH and a browser.

Haiku runs circles around Ubuntu MATE on these devices; it may seem equivalent on benchmarks, but the UI just _feels_ much zippier and apps load quickly.

[inferiorhuman]

> Serious question - does anyone use Haiku for anything more than playing?

Doubtful. After seeing a few Haiku posts over the past few days I downloaded it and gave it a try. There's a lot of promise, but it's pretty darn glitchy (e.g. DHCP client works occasionally, mail client sees mailboxes but doesn't fetch messages).

I'm in the opposite camp though. I'd love to find a viable alternative to macOS.

[waddlesplash]

Those two things plus the web browser are indeed the glitchiest parts of the system :)

I've finally found a consistent way to reproduce the DHCP glitches, so I might be able to spend some time debugging that. The mail client is another issue; for now you're probably better off avoiding it. (There are third-party mail apps in the depot, so maybe try one of those?)

Glad to hear you can see the potential, though! :)

[iforgotpassword]

I see it too, but am honestly quite sceptical it'll get there in time. Development is just plain slow, which isn't surprising with the comparatively low number of devs. It feels half the man power is "wasted" on just keeping up with new hardware. By the time haiku is done, i fear desktop pcs and laptops will be extinct. I liked beos so I was really thrilled when openbeos popped up. I download the latest haiku build every other year or so, but it just feels they are all the same.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Apparently a few of the devs use it full time. I've tried it out a few times, it's really very responsive, but it lacks a lot of useful software and hardware support. If you have the right hardware for it and a relatively limited set of application needs, it might work.

[waddlesplash]

Some of us developers use it almost full-time (I don't quite yet, but I've finally gotten WiFi working on this PC so hopefully I will do so shortly), and there are users in the community that do also.

TuneTracker (http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/index.html) ships commercial radio broadcasting systems that run on Haiku.

[navjack27]

I'm waiting for Haiku to actually have a modern web browser and built in support for kaby lake refresh wifi. I want to use this on bare metal so bad.

[navjack27]

You can pretty much put all other applications support on hold. If you get modern web browsing that opens up so many web apps. WebPositive is a joke. Otter isn't quite stable.

[waddlesplash]

> built in support for kaby lake refresh wifi

What chipset is that? I just merged new drivers for the Intel PRO wireless chipsets and Intel "Dual Band" chipsets; so if it's one of those it might work out of the box now.

> a modern web browser

Well, WebPositive can play YouTube and mostly works on major sites ... but yes, this is a difficult problem.

[zlynx]

This article is about Rust and Haiku, so maybe Haiku should look into building a Servo GUI layer.

Rust and Servo are already good for massive multithreading, so that should fit into the Haiku expectations pretty well.

[waddlesplash]

Servo seems to depend pretty heavily on hardware acceleration, which we don't have, so it probably wouldn't work too well. We don't have time to implement that; but someone else is certainly free to put the time in...

[st3fan]

Pentium II Apple ][