7 ms·

From the website:- "Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use,

by Lio 10y ago

From the website:- "Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful."

hyperhopper 10y ago
That still doesn't say much. Why would I be interested in this over linux? The FAQ doesn't even say whats good about it, just that it targets personal computing, which windows and OSX would also say. Ubuntu too, probably.
- qubex 10y ago
  You would not be ’interested’ in “running [Haiku] over Linux”: the latter has evolved, the former is a re-implementation of an innovative 1990s OS that has since been left behind by about fifteen years of lack of progress. It was fascinating and awesome at the time, however, and for many of us this project brings back those erstwhile thrills. It's a kind of futuristic retrocomputing thing that (I guess) leads others to still wax lyrical about other obsolete platforms such as (say) Amiga.
  - jaclaz 10y ago
    Risking to go off topic, I remember a few years before, playing with these systems: http://www.vrexperience.net/Newsroom.aspx?id=120 http://www.vrexperience.net/Newsroom.aspx?id=120 Amiga 3000 based, and they were like supercomputers ... ... and we liked it!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Steeeve 10y ago
  Haiku is a good system for computing things but details are slim
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jaclaz 10y ago
  You are probably too young to have tested in the good ol'times the original BeOS. It was IMHO a "revolution" that - for whatever reasons - never happened. Don't ask me the actual "technical" details, but it was small, very, very fast, even on the limited hardware of the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS I have no idea if Haiku is (will be) as faster as it was BeOS at the time (when compared on the same hardware to Windows 9x or NT 4.00) when compared to a "current" Windows or Linux or MacOS, but at the time it blew away any other OS, particularly when it came to browsing the web or for music, video, etc.
  - ashark 10y ago
    For those of us who had the pleasure of using it, the fact that BeOS isn't the dominant desktop OS is proof that we're not living in the best of all possible worlds.
    - qubex 10y ago
      I adored BeOS but I am not sure whether the single-user “wide open” lack-of-security model it embodied was a path worth taking. Surely one can question whether it makes sense to have purportedly multi-user UNIX-derived OSes on single-user mobile devices, but...
      - jaclaz 10y ago
        Or NT based for that matters. Talking of PC's still today, some 20 years later, more or less the only thing that may prevent unauthorized access from an intruder with physical access to a machine is the BIOS password, anything else is just something that may slow down him/her a little bit.
        qubex 10y ago
        Well, yeah — but NT was maimed mainly by flawed implementation and assumptions made in the threat model (crucially, assumptions about the remote and local attack surface —code execution by unauthenticated users (the world of the web) and the presumption of no offline access to local hardware (NTchngpwd)—) that required strengthening and reinforcement, whereas BeOS (and DOS/Windows9x) are totally unprepared for this kind of thinking.
- rglullis 10y ago
  Why would you be interested in it over Linux? If you are comparing it for 2016 state of PC computing Linux, nothing. There is no killer app on BeOS/Haiku that could justify it. But if you want to compare it to 1998-style PC, BeOS was a really high-performance, POSIX-compatible OS. It could do things that neither Windows NT, Linux or MacOS (pre- OSX) could do, and it could do it even on very limited hardware. Nowadays, I think that if Haiku could be ported to ARM, it would become a very interesting alternative for any kind of SOC-based appliance where you'd need more than a microcontroller but something like Linux/Android is overkill: smart TVs, audio/video receivers, smart home hubs, some cool guitar sound effect pedal, etc...
  - djsumdog 10y ago
    Huh..never thought about that. The trouble is, of course, porting anything to ARM. You'd have to maintain builds for hundreds of ARM devices with individual images and kernels, or you'd have to choose to explicitly support just a couple of devices (and then maybe people in the community will have unofficial builds for the rest). ..or you could only chose to support devices that support device tree configuration, but there's a good chance your kernel still won't boot on half of them. ARM isn't an architecture. It's just a chip, with people implementing stuff in crazy ways all over the place that will never make it back upstream to the mainline kernel. It's a fragmented mess and there's no incentive to fix it since most ARM devices are build around planned obsolescence to be replaced every two years.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    "Why would you be interested in it over Linux? " Personal pleasure of an alternative desktop. Experimental playground for OS developers. Minimalist box for older hardware with high performance. Obscurity benefit against hackers that I hear PPC Mac users still get. A few things like that. It's not competitive against Linux/BSD desktops in about any other case.
    - stOneskull 10y ago
      "Minimalist box for older hardware with high performance. " That's what I like. For when even a good Linux distro is too much for the hardware. The slow, old thing can be transformed into a nice, new thing.
- zokula 10y ago
  BeOS and Haiku are fun and fast hobby toy OS'es however do not expect to do any heavy duty work under them. Back in the day BeOS would play games plus opening a bunch of videos and mp3s at the same time and have them run smooth, but it would also grind to a halt doing any networking activity outside of web browsing, printing, running Mozilla or using its native Office Suite GoBe Office or Abiword. The shine came off BeOS around around 1999/2000 when Windows 2000 and Mac OS X came out along with Linux and FreeBSD were much better OS'es for getting real work done with better networking and better heavy load tolerance. And you could do BeOS tricks on top of that on those OS'es. On top of that the Amiga OS was doing what BeOS was famous for years before just without memory protection slower hardware.
userbinator 10y ago
From the BeOS wiki page: "It has partial POSIX compatibility and access to a command-line interface through Bash, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system." From that and just browsing around, it seems to be a vaguely Unix-ish environment; or at least it has more in common with Unices than the CPM/DOS/Windows or other OS families.
- qubex 10y ago
  The BeOS kernel is as totally un-UNIX-like as (say) Windows NT/2K/XP/7/8/10, designed from the bottom-up to be “pervasively multi-threaded” at a time when multi-core chips were at least fifteen years away and multi-processor systems were utterly exotic, lacking even the most fundamental UNIX precepts (everything-is-a-file; multi-user environment; GUI mandatory and in-built). It just ‘seems’ UNIX-ish at first glance because it has a POSIX compatibility layer added on top in hindsight (or foresight) to provide a standardised shell and GNU userland utilities, as well as providing the key compiler toolchain (GCC 2-or-3-dot-something, if memory serves). HAIKU is basically a clean-room reimplementation of the public (and private) framework modules' APIs and as such doesn't even (really) descend from BeOS-proper at all. (Avid late-1990s BeOS user, dual PowerPC 603e-133 BeBox owner, HAIKU supporter.)
  - callinyouin 10y ago
    > dual PowerPC 603e-133 BeBox owner That's kind of amazing given how rare those were/are. I definitely can't top that, but I had a dual Pentium III machine that ran R5 (and ZETA for a while, which I had problems with) in the early 2000's. That thing seemed faster than the machines I have today. Good times.
    - daenney 10y ago
      Same here. Stuff flew on my little Celeron with 64MB of SDRAM. I could do so much stuff in BeOS that my Windows 2000 installation couldn't, like actually play a DVD full screen. I was so sad to see it go, it breathed life into a system everyone else would make fun of.
    - 10y ago

by Lio 10y ago

From the website:- "Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful."

hyperhopper 10y ago

That still doesn't say much. Why would I be interested in this over linux? The FAQ doesn't even say whats good about it, just that it targets personal computing, which windows and OSX would also say. Ubuntu too, probably.

qubex 10y ago
You would not be ’interested’ in “running [Haiku] over Linux”: the latter has evolved, the former is a re-implementation of an innovative 1990s OS that has since been left behind by about fifteen years of lack of progress. It was fascinating and awesome at the time, however, and for many of us this project brings back those erstwhile thrills. It's a kind of futuristic retrocomputing thing that (I guess) leads others to still wax lyrical about other obsolete platforms such as (say) Amiga.
- jaclaz 10y ago
  Risking to go off topic, I remember a few years before, playing with these systems: http://www.vrexperience.net/Newsroom.aspx?id=120 http://www.vrexperience.net/Newsroom.aspx?id=120 Amiga 3000 based, and they were like supercomputers ... ... and we liked it!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Steeeve 10y ago
Haiku is a good system for computing things but details are slim
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jaclaz 10y ago
You are probably too young to have tested in the good ol'times the original BeOS. It was IMHO a "revolution" that - for whatever reasons - never happened. Don't ask me the actual "technical" details, but it was small, very, very fast, even on the limited hardware of the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS I have no idea if Haiku is (will be) as faster as it was BeOS at the time (when compared on the same hardware to Windows 9x or NT 4.00) when compared to a "current" Windows or Linux or MacOS, but at the time it blew away any other OS, particularly when it came to browsing the web or for music, video, etc.
- ashark 10y ago
  For those of us who had the pleasure of using it, the fact that BeOS isn't the dominant desktop OS is proof that we're not living in the best of all possible worlds.
  - qubex 10y ago
    I adored BeOS but I am not sure whether the single-user “wide open” lack-of-security model it embodied was a path worth taking. Surely one can question whether it makes sense to have purportedly multi-user UNIX-derived OSes on single-user mobile devices, but...
    - jaclaz 10y ago
      Or NT based for that matters. Talking of PC's still today, some 20 years later, more or less the only thing that may prevent unauthorized access from an intruder with physical access to a machine is the BIOS password, anything else is just something that may slow down him/her a little bit.
      - qubex 10y ago
        Well, yeah — but NT was maimed mainly by flawed implementation and assumptions made in the threat model (crucially, assumptions about the remote and local attack surface —code execution by unauthenticated users (the world of the web) and the presumption of no offline access to local hardware (NTchngpwd)—) that required strengthening and reinforcement, whereas BeOS (and DOS/Windows9x) are totally unprepared for this kind of thinking.
rglullis 10y ago
Why would you be interested in it over Linux? If you are comparing it for 2016 state of PC computing Linux, nothing. There is no killer app on BeOS/Haiku that could justify it. But if you want to compare it to 1998-style PC, BeOS was a really high-performance, POSIX-compatible OS. It could do things that neither Windows NT, Linux or MacOS (pre- OSX) could do, and it could do it even on very limited hardware. Nowadays, I think that if Haiku could be ported to ARM, it would become a very interesting alternative for any kind of SOC-based appliance where you'd need more than a microcontroller but something like Linux/Android is overkill: smart TVs, audio/video receivers, smart home hubs, some cool guitar sound effect pedal, etc...
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Huh..never thought about that. The trouble is, of course, porting anything to ARM. You'd have to maintain builds for hundreds of ARM devices with individual images and kernels, or you'd have to choose to explicitly support just a couple of devices (and then maybe people in the community will have unofficial builds for the rest). ..or you could only chose to support devices that support device tree configuration, but there's a good chance your kernel still won't boot on half of them. ARM isn't an architecture. It's just a chip, with people implementing stuff in crazy ways all over the place that will never make it back upstream to the mainline kernel. It's a fragmented mess and there's no incentive to fix it since most ARM devices are build around planned obsolescence to be replaced every two years.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  "Why would you be interested in it over Linux? " Personal pleasure of an alternative desktop. Experimental playground for OS developers. Minimalist box for older hardware with high performance. Obscurity benefit against hackers that I hear PPC Mac users still get. A few things like that. It's not competitive against Linux/BSD desktops in about any other case.
  - stOneskull 10y ago
    "Minimalist box for older hardware with high performance. " That's what I like. For when even a good Linux distro is too much for the hardware. The slow, old thing can be transformed into a nice, new thing.
zokula 10y ago
BeOS and Haiku are fun and fast hobby toy OS'es however do not expect to do any heavy duty work under them. Back in the day BeOS would play games plus opening a bunch of videos and mp3s at the same time and have them run smooth, but it would also grind to a halt doing any networking activity outside of web browsing, printing, running Mozilla or using its native Office Suite GoBe Office or Abiword. The shine came off BeOS around around 1999/2000 when Windows 2000 and Mac OS X came out along with Linux and FreeBSD were much better OS'es for getting real work done with better networking and better heavy load tolerance. And you could do BeOS tricks on top of that on those OS'es. On top of that the Amiga OS was doing what BeOS was famous for years before just without memory protection slower hardware.

userbinator 10y ago

From the BeOS wiki page: "It has partial POSIX compatibility and access to a command-line interface through Bash, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system." From that and just browsing around, it seems to be a vaguely Unix-ish environment; or at least it has more in common with Unices than the CPM/DOS/Windows or other OS families.

qubex 10y ago
The BeOS kernel is as totally un-UNIX-like as (say) Windows NT/2K/XP/7/8/10, designed from the bottom-up to be “pervasively multi-threaded” at a time when multi-core chips were at least fifteen years away and multi-processor systems were utterly exotic, lacking even the most fundamental UNIX precepts (everything-is-a-file; multi-user environment; GUI mandatory and in-built). It just ‘seems’ UNIX-ish at first glance because it has a POSIX compatibility layer added on top in hindsight (or foresight) to provide a standardised shell and GNU userland utilities, as well as providing the key compiler toolchain (GCC 2-or-3-dot-something, if memory serves). HAIKU is basically a clean-room reimplementation of the public (and private) framework modules' APIs and as such doesn't even (really) descend from BeOS-proper at all. (Avid late-1990s BeOS user, dual PowerPC 603e-133 BeBox owner, HAIKU supporter.)
- callinyouin 10y ago
  > dual PowerPC 603e-133 BeBox owner That's kind of amazing given how rare those were/are. I definitely can't top that, but I had a dual Pentium III machine that ran R5 (and ZETA for a while, which I had problems with) in the early 2000's. That thing seemed faster than the machines I have today. Good times.
  - daenney 10y ago
    Same here. Stuff flew on my little Celeron with 64MB of SDRAM. I could do so much stuff in BeOS that my Windows 2000 installation couldn't, like actually play a DVD full screen. I was so sad to see it go, it breathed life into a system everyone else would make fun of.
  - 10y ago