[pxc]

Haiku sounds much more usable than I'd realized:

> The new version supports HiDPI displays [...] and has significantly improved Wi-Fi support, including via some USB Wi-Fi adapters[.]

> [...]

> It has translation layers for both X11 and Wayland, as well as for Gtk apps, alongside the WINE support it gained this time last year. This means a number of new apps, including the GNOME Web browser Epiphany, a full graphical version of Emacs, updated POSIX layer, WINE, and more.

> [...]

> In testing, we didn't experience a single crash[.] [...] Just for reference, this article was written on Haiku itself, on the bare metal of an old ThinkPad W500, using a Markdown editor called Ghostwriter.

All I really need for most of my computer use is a web browser, Emacs, and a decent command line, and I imagine similar is true for many HN readers. Sounds like Haiku is ready for hobbyists in this crowd to use for a fair chunk of our most common computing tasks.

I love the Linux desktop, but I'm really curious about non-Unix F/OSS desktops. I will have to see if there's a place for Haiku in my life on some old hardware!

[kristopolous]

Way easier to try it out. Just fire up a vm in virtualbox or whatever your preference is. They even wrote documentation on it https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/virtualizing

[lproven]

[Author of the review here]

It absolutely is, yes. That is how I captured the screenshot for that article.

But the thing is that that doesn't let you get any real feel for how it works with the hardware.

One big aspect, of course, is the performance. That's why I used one of the oldest slowest laptops in my testing fleet for the writeup.

On a 15YO C2D with spinning rust, Haiku b4 starts about as quickly as Ubuntu from NVMe SSD on my day-to-day Core i7. It is impressive.

Secondly the wifi support is impressive too. FreeBSD only supports some old wifi standards and the connection is not all that fast. Haiku talks -n and -ac standards and it's quick, as quick as this old machine's wifi card can do. It saw both my 2.5GHz and 5GHz WLANs, too, separately.

Regular readers of my reviews of alternative and niche OSes will see that I usually try in VirtualBox first, and then if that is successful, I move on to bare metal. Depending on the sophistication of the OS, I may use an "easy" machine, such as a laptop with only integrated graphics, or a "tough" machine, such as one with two GPUs and switching support.

Quite a few OSes never make it out of a VM in testing. Frankly, if something can't support the well-standardised virtual hardware of a VM, it is likely to fair badly on bare metal.

[pxc]

That's definitely how I'll spin it up to test it, but for me, bare metal use feels more convenient as well as more 'real', once u get past the initial setup.

I'm hoping that it might be fun for me to explore and even struggle with a little bit in the same way that Linux was exciting for me as a kid. :)