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by themodelplumber 2655 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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.

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. :-)

> 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...