[DaoVeles]

I have said it before, Haiku feels like it is simultaneously 20 years in the future and 20 years in the past. The interface is so incredibly snappy but there is a lot of basics missing such as WiFi support.

Seeing a modern browser supported does fill a big gap however. Who knows maybe one day through a series of silly unpredictable events it will be the OS of choice and running Ladybird browser in a similar fashion.

[drooopy]

I absolutely adore the way that HaikuOS looks and feels. It's like a direct evolution of the classic Mac OS UI. So incredibly snappy and responsive and with minimal visual clutter. I keep an old thinkpad around with Haiku just for when I need to do word processing with no distractions.

[BlackLotus89]

WiFi support missing? Afaik it uses *BSD network "drivers" and I remember having a wifi dialog/support

Edit: https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/workshop-wlan.htm... here wifi seems to be working (which another commenter pointed out as well)

[rcarmo]

It doesn't support a lot of modern Wi-Fi chipsets. There was an entire wave of Broadcom-powered stuff that they weren't able to develop for.

[katzinsky]

That sounds more like licensing issues than "being 20 years in the past."

[uncanneyvalley]

There was some licensing drama[0] around BSD’s Broadcom bcm43xx driver. No idea if another driver was ever implemented as I’m not a BSD user.

[0] https://lore.kernel.org/all/[e-mail]...

[broodbucket]

The result is the same for users, regardless of where the blame lies.

[consteval]

Right but we need a dose of realism. They don't develop the drivers, and they don't make the hardware. If the manufacturer doesn't care, then that's that.

It's a network problem. Manufacturers aren't gonna care unless it's a big OS with lots of users. Your OS won't get a lot of users unless it has drivers. So the result is stagnation, and only the Big 3 OS continuing. Well... really the Big 2. Mac OS is a unique situation.

[graemep]

> The interface is so incredibly snappy

So that feels like its 20 years in the past

> there is a lot of basics missing such as WiFi support.

So that sounds like 20 years in the past too

Where does the future bit come in?

[desdenova]

Exactly what I thought as well. UIs get increasingly slower as time passes, not snappier. We had snappy UIs in the 80s and 90s.

[llm_trw]

We had bloated UIs in the 80s and 90s, it's just that what's come after is so much worse.

Try using the old analog control systems where responses are basically instant. It feels like the controls are reading your mind.

[jwells89]

Mac OS 9 felt pretty darned fast on my 400Mhz iMac G3 back in 2000. Same for Windows 2000 on my parents’ PIII 750Mhz Dimension 4100. The only time anything felt slow is when a significant amount of data needed to be loaded from their hard drives.

Not all machines were like this though, we also had a Compaq Presario with some kind of Celeron running 98SE and that thing did feel slow more often than not, especially after several months of usage with the cruft buildup that comes with that.

[tivert]

I think the rule (at least while Moore's law was in force), was UIs start out boated but become fast as the hardware catches up. For instance, your example:

> Mac OS 9 felt pretty darned fast on my 400Mhz iMac G3 back in 2000.

You were using a UI that (at its core) was built for 1984 machine, with sixteen additional years of hardware performance improvements.

Every once in a while I boot up a Mac from 1989, and Mac OS is definitely not snappy on it.

I think if you want speed, you need to find something built for a system far more constrained than the one you're actually using. The choices the developers made to make the system merely usable under those constraints will make it fast once they're removed.

[jwells89]

That makes a lot of sense, and I agree. Perhaps a good baseline to develop against today to produce a similar result on modern hardware would be something like a Core 2 Duo or Core i5-750 and Geforce 9600 GT.

[peatmoss]

I think the point of comparison in the 80s and 90s were those analog systems. Expectations about lag were set by analog.

We could have really snappy stuff today, but have gotten enamored with our latency inducing abstractions and haven't really gone back to fix it.

80s and 90s bloated UIs sure seem snappy and miniature by today's standards.

[pino82]

Not only slower, right? I mean, for UIs, there is the same race to the bottom going on as in other parts of the industry.

It needs to be a big show, and everybody must be able to directly understand it without any learning curve or even rtfm.

Everything else (ergonomics, features, ...) are too often secondary values.

I wouldn't say that UIs were great in the 90s. They weren't. It was also harder to implement them. The programming languages were more tedious, low-level, etc.

But as so often, it's disappointing what we do with our additional power today. Snappiness wouldn't even be my first concern, though.

[IshKebab]

I don't remember Windows 95 & MS Word 6 being especially snappy. I think this is nostalgia.

[omoikane]

See for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933 - Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened? (2023-06-23)

Follow up to the above by the original author:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 - Fast machines, slow machines (2023-06-28)

[IshKebab]

They're opening Notepad and Paint, very simple apps even for the time. Try MS Word.

Also Windows NT was released in 1993 when typical PCs were more like 100MHz, so this is getting a 6x speedup from the designed experience.

[omoikane]

The second article has videos of more comparisons with different software on a greater variety of hardware:

https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html

The point is that the good old days aren't just pure nostalgia, some parts were genuinely good compared to modern bloated software.

[prmoustache]

The interface themselves were snappy when there was no or little I/Os. Spinning drives were killing their snappiness.

Now we don't have such excuse, at least for non networked apps.

[rbanffy]

Same for MacOS 6 and 7 on period hardware. It’s anything but snappy. MacOS 7 on PPC was snappy compared to Windows 95 on Intel, and that’s it. Amiga was snappy, compared to Windows, but I have a working Amiga 600 and it’s not a great platform even for email.

[snvzz]

Comparing A600's 68000@7.14MHz with the strongest macs running system 7 isn't fair.

If you're gonna do that, then remember how much faster a well-expanded Amiga was. Even faster than any real 68k Mac when emulating Mac.

[KerrAvon]

7.5 is really fast on a 68040 as long as you’re not bound by I/O

[viraptor]

The apps were snappy, but the hardware wasn't. Every menu/window opened immediately and without unnecessary animation... unless it needed some unexpected processing - then you were potentially waiting for the spinning rust to handle the swap file.

[rbanffy]

The UI was minimalistic, but with better hardware we also wanted nicer fonts, transitions, wobbly windows (I actually miss those) and countless other nice things that take time.

Also, it’s pointless to open a menu in less time than it takes the screen to refresh.

[bmacho]

> Also, it’s pointless to open a menu in less time than it takes the screen to refresh.

No, that would be the goal.

[Lex-2008]

wobbly windows - did you know that they're still available in modern KDE Plasma Desktop Environment? No need to actually miss them! :)

https://userbase.kde.org/Tips/Enable_fun_desktop_effects_on_...

[ahoka]

There's an option to disable animations in Windows, but I find it disorienting.

[prmoustache]

Most desktop have such options, kde and gnome too.for instance.

I am pretty sure this is good old resistance to change. You would disabled them on all your systems, then force yourself to use them that way for a month and I am pretty sure that "disorientation" would quickly disappear.

[szundi]

Windows Vista gave this feeling retroactively

[ahoka]

That's just comparing CRT screens with 60Hz LCD panels. Get anything 120Hz+ and you will see that modern systems are very snappy.

[wao0uuno]

I strongly disagree with this statement. Every new version of Windows feels slower than the last one. Linux DEs are either very outdated and very snappy or somewhat modern and only barely snappier than Windows. I have zero experience with MacOS.

[morning-coffee]

CRT screens were also 60Hz. Look at the latency along all steps of the pipeline to get a keypress visible on the screen... https://danluu.com/input-lag/

[goosedragons]

Many were above 60Hz and it depends on resolution. An iMac G3 for instance could do 75Hz at 1024x768 or 640x480 at 117Hz. Someone recently got a CRT at 700Hz too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zm3lLlaEC8&t=0s

[hollandheese]

Only the crappy ones were restricted to that.

My 22” Diamondtron went 2048x1536 @ 85Hz or 1600x1200 @ 100Hz (which is what I usually ran it at)

[hodapp]

No, an extra ~17 msec of delay is not even close to the cause of this. The speed difference between older and newer UIs is still apparent even at 60 Hz.

[anthk]

My CRT did 1024x768@85 HZ.

[szszrk]

Future comes in at point were we actually circle back. "Black is always in fashion" kind of thing.

Ditch modern ad endpoints (a.k.a. operating systems) and go back to those distros we used 20 years ago. Accept that those don't support DRM, carefully choose our hardware (as its barely supported), and stick to it until it dies.

The thing i miss most from that time is Window Maker. I'd love to have again those tiny tiles with small graphs and buttons, but for more modern use cases.

[wizzwizz4]

Window Maker still exists. There's an ongoing Wayland port / reimagining: https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker.

[szszrk]

That's actually amazing. Can't wait for dockable apps support. That could be a killer app for operators - half desktop, half monitoring dashboard, haha :) I can already see those dockable tiles with Prometheus metrics.

[rbanffy]

The thing I liked most in the NeXT was the sparing use of color. It was part necessity, but also usability. What does the color of the window bar being blue communicate?

I am an enthusiast for Gnome’s less is more approach.

[ahoka]

Original NeXT was monochrome, so of course it used no significant colors in the UI.

[teddyh]

The original NeXTcube was 4-bit grayscale, but there was a graphics card available which supported 24-bit colour. The later NeXTstations supported 12-bit colours without any additional hardware.

[lelanthran]

> The thing i miss most from that time is Window Maker.

I use WindowMaker as a daily driver. Still.

[smallstepforman]

I have 3 x64 boxes with 3 different wifi chipsets that work with no issues. The only chipset that doesnt work for me is the bm4360 chips used in Apple hardware. A 7$ usb wifi dongle solves that problem.

[qwerty456127]

How would you use WiFi on Haiku if it were there? I thought people mostly use Haiku inside VMs like VirtualBox so network connection goes through an emulated fiber.

I dream of Haiku being ported to Raspberry Pi and I even was sadly surprised it isn't - to me the primary value of Raspberry Pi seems it being an uniform standard hardware platform, this sounds like a great enabler for alternative OSes as lack of need to support all sorts of different hardware makes the thing a lot easier.

[llm_trw]

The raspberry pie is a very odd computer which is hard to develop for. There are much better targets that are both simpler to develop for, cheaper, and easily available.

[rcarmo]

And we never really got any of them working, so I would contest that. Many years ago, I asked about Pi 2 support on the Haiku forums and there was a lot of ill will towards Broadcom closed binaries. I pointed at the Plan9 port and a couple more examples and nothing happened.

I tried the same thing several times with the Pi 3 and the Pi 4, and someone more vocally pointed towards RISC-V. Some four years later, there is a somewhat working RISC-V port, but in the meantime there is still no working ARM port of any real use.

On the whole, I was not overly impressed with the Haiku OS community where it regards exploring widely popular platforms that, despite having some challenges, would provide them with a larger audience. It's their call, but as an original BeOS user (and who can actually spot the Be Book from my couch as I'm typing this) and someone who's spent the past two years delving into the Rockchip ecosystem, I'm quite saddened by the way things went. It's not as if they lacked other ARM options, they just a) didn't have the resources and b) were perhaps a tad too opinionated.

[waddlesplash]

The RISC-V port was done almost entirely by one developer who took an interest in it. It wasn't as though the project got together and decided to prioritize RISC-V over ARM; it was just that someone did a port, and then it got (mostly) upstreamed. Nobody has taken an equivalent interest in ARM, in large part because, well, the developers are all running x86 machines as you might expect, so that's what Haiku gets developed on. If someone comes along (or one of the existing developers takes interest) in working on the ARM port more, we will hardly reject the patches!

[chrsw]

Opinions aside, they just don't have the resources for ports. That's the shame: that this project isn't more popular. Linux doesn't have this problem anywhere close to the way Haiku does.

[coolcoder613]

Quite a lot of people use Haiku bare metal, and wifi support absolutely is present.

[hodapp]

Are you one of them? I am curious what the experience is like trying to use it as anything like a daily system.

[coolcoder613]

I am, although I do not use it as a daily driver, I have bare metal installs on two different computers. In my experience, it is very snappy, and always fast, except for some browsers, and wifi support for my specific wifi cards is there, and works fine, although not perfectly. In regard to using it as a daily system, browser-wise, especially since Firefox has been ported, it works well enough. Webmail can be used fairly easily, but most of the email clients available only support regular pop/imap authentication, and not oauth. But then, whether you can daily drive it depends on your specific use cases and hardware.

[10729287]

I would have loved to use it as my daily laptop one year ago but it lacked a password at login. Is it still the case ?

[coolcoder613]

Yes, it is still single-user. Have you considered a BIOS or bootloader password?

[smallstepforman]

Haiku in 3 x64 boxes, native with wifi

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ0Ijc5n6Y4

[pjmlp]

There is an alternative universe where Be is acquired, BeOS turns into MacOS, C++ wins the desktop wars, and POSIX on the desktop never makes it.

However in this universe Steve Jobs never rejoins Apple, and most likely it closes doors a couple of years after Be's acquisition.

[Apocryphon]

What would be interesting is if AppleBe still ends up merging with NeXT a few years later, and Jobs doesn’t immediately scrap the hybrid BeOS platform immediately…

[pjmlp]

Given the famous keynote where he announced killing OpenDoc and other efforts, I am not so sure about that, regarding scrapping the hybrid BeOS platform.

[ksp-atlas]

I ran Haiku on a laptop and the Wi-Fi worked just fine

[tetris11]

Is there good laptop support? By that I specifically mean, good power control management and display brightness control.

[yellowapple]

I had decent success with it on an 11th-gen Framework 13. Power management was finicky, but it was also finicky under OpenBSD, which makes me think it was a hardware or firmware issue. I haven't tried it since upgrading to the latest firmware, so maybe the combination of that plus whatever bugfixes have happened in the last couple years might've improved things.

[lukan]

I would seriously doubt that, when even Linux, which has broad support now conpared to 15 years ago, struggles with that.

I guess certain laptop models, those that the devs use, might be allright.

[rcarmo]

Nope. I run it under QEMU since even the nightlies don't support Ryzen power states.

[popcalc]

>WiFi support

Works on my old Thinkpads.

[undersuit]

Maybe it's because setting up a Wifi connection is 20 years old.

[Beijinger]

If you like Snappy, try Bodhi Linux with the Mosksha desktop.

https://www.bodhilinux.com/

[Beijinger]

Why is this downvoted so badly?

[memsom]

My guess - BeOS and Haiku are not Linux based systems (not BSB, nor any other OS.) People that use Haiku probably do so out of choice and I guess they already know Linux exists. If they wanted to use Linux, they probably would. IMO, stating "just use Linux" therefore seems super obnoxious.

[KTibow]

Perhaps one reason is that it seems off topic and you treated "snappy" as a proper noun