[puppetmaster]

Gentlepeople... the time to try Haiku is now! get an image, and boot it. Out of 10 machines with different ages, all but one get to desktop in a few seconds. For the one that gets to a blank screen equally fast, make sure to press <space> on boot and choose vesa.

Browsers? Usable for the focused mind, lots of wip... For me, I have text editors, compilers, a terminal, and aws cli... I can wish for more, but I am happy with this.

[tinco]

Is it safe to boot on an expensive laptop like a MacBook? I remember when Linux had missing drivers there were risks that you'd overheat your machine because the laptop manufacturer was controlling a system fan in some nonstandard way.

[waddlesplash]

Macbooks >= ~2013 or so will run into this kernel panic shortly after boot: https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/13189

2012 and earlier Macbooks pretty much work, I'm told (though you will hit the remaining NEC/Renesas bug I mentioned in the blog post, so use a USB2 drive until we manage to debug that.)

But yes, generally our hardware support is not quite as good as Linux's, so you will have a mixed bag in Macbooks. High-end PC laptops (e.g. Dell XPS 13) are fine.

EDIT: According to the comment below, it seems I was misremembering, and these problems occur on 2015-and-up Macbooks, not 2013-and-up.

[smallstepforman]

I run Haiku natively on MacBook Pro 2014 (11.3), on SSD with EFI boot. Have working audio (headphones only), wired ethernet (no WiFi), very usable Hi-DPI display (2880x1800) with basic framebuffer driver. Retina MBP up to 2015 should all work like mine. Good enough for developing apps.

[LIV2]

MacBooks still control the fans in some nonstandard way so you need to install some software to control the fans for you, not sure if it exists for haiku though

[jesikat]

I've booted Haiku on a 27" 5K Retina iMac, 6th gen i7 without too much hassle. The AMD graphics didn't work, so needed VESA mode.

[themodelplumber]

I just tried it for a few weeks, ending last week. It wasn't bad at all, though individual apps had various bugs such that the experience often came down to same-app-on-Haiku vs. same-app-on-Linux. Also, while I liked being able to join different apps into one tabbed window, the other workspace features in Linux DE's seemed even more useful.

So: I was surprised at how easy it was to end the experiment early and try out another Linux distro, even though I'll probably try out other Haiku releases in the future. The boot time and single-user configuration was definitely a nice break.

[waddlesplash]

> the other workspace features in Linux DE's seemed even more useful.

Such as? Haiku has the "workspaces" concept too (https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/workspaces.html), though perhaps not as full-featured as Linux's.

[themodelplumber]

Yes, I think it's the full-featured aspect that made a lot of difference in this case. Though I didn't have any _workspace_ problems in Haiku, it was more like the panel concept in e.g. XFCE is simply more refined.

A really basic difference example though was that the default window move/resize RMB shortcut modifier is simply Alt in my Linux install, as opposed to Ctrl+Alt on Haiku. On a cramped keyboard this combination was fiddly. I also swap caps and CTRL on this keyboard in Linux and I hadn't checked yet if this could be accomplished. There were lots of things to look into.

I appreciate your response, and will probably try out Haiku again in the future. I liked that it was easy to install and test. Also as someone who uses QMMP a lot, I was very pleasantly surprised at the neat Be-style skin that came in its Haiku install. :-)

[waddlesplash]

> I also swap caps and CTRL on this keyboard in Linux and I hadn't checked yet if this could be accomplished. There were lots of things to look into.

This you can already do; see Keymap preferences: https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/preferences/keyma... -- you should be able to just drag & drop the keys around to swap them. Or you can edit the keymap file directly to completely customize it.

> the default window move/resize RMB shortcut modifier is simply Alt in my Linux install, as opposed to Ctrl+Alt on Haiku. On a cramped keyboard this combination was fiddly.

We have a ticket somewhere to revamp the hardcoded shortcuts into the "Shortcuts" preferences pane; but nobody's done this yet. Eventually...