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> Haiku is an operating system which is known for its speed and being easy for anyone to use. That's a fairly bold claim. Haiku is an OS that basically no one

> Haiku is an operating system which is known for its speed and being easy for anyone to use. That's a fairly bold claim. Haiku is an OS that basically no one uses for any purpose. Why should I take any sort of design advice from them?

adamnemecek 8y ago
Haha no one using it means they can go ham on trying good designs as they are unbound by legacy reasons.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  Actually, looks like Haiku is a compatible reimplementation of a "legacy" OS.
  - waddlesplash 8y ago
    Depends what you mean by "compatible." We preserve binary compatibility on 32-bit x86 with BeOS, indeed. But it hasn't stopped us from re-arranging parts of the GUI, or adding new APIs, or experimenting with the kernel, or ... etc.
waddlesplash 8y ago
Being "known for its speed and ease of use" and "very low user base" are ... not mutually exclusive in the slightest, so I fail to see how your comment has relevance? By your logic, since macOS has ~1/10 the install base of Windows, clearly this means that "very few" people use it and we should not take Apple's advice on anything design-related.
- oralty 8y ago
  >> Haiku is an OS that basically no one uses for any purpose. > By your logic, since macOS has ~1/10 the install base of Windows, Does not follow. MacOS use relative to Windows is not at all a fair comparison. Firstly "everybody" uses Windows, so 1/10 of huge number is still a huge number. Second, except for gaming and some particular areas like EDA, MacOS has a general software library with a broad-base of technical and non-technical users throughout the world. Haiku OS cannot claim to have anything like that.
  - waddlesplash 8y ago
    > MacOS has a general software library with a broad-base of technical and non-technical users throughout the world. Haiku OS cannot claim to have anything like that. That was the second half of my comment. Please re-read the first half. My point in that part, though, was that macOS has ~1/10 the users of Windows, but Windows' UI/UX was/is widely regarded as absolutely atrocious, and macOS' as being pretty good to great, depending on who you ask. So "if it has less users, their thoughts on design are irrelevant" is ... not a good argument.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - pooppaint 8y ago
      I reread and it didn’t make any difference. MacOS may have 1/10 the Windows base but that is not having “very low userbase”, while I think it is quite reasonable to say that about Haiku. Reread what I said, the MacOS base is large and it is a general base of highly technical and non-technical users alike that are not all hobbyists. This does not describe Haiku in the slightest. There is a valid point to be made about verifying usability and the need for a large and diverse userbase. How much you want to bet that the Haiku userbase is overwhelmingly male? And this is not to make some concerned sexism argument but to illustrate that the community is more representative of the IT crowd rather than the general population.
      - waddlesplash 8y ago
        > There is a valid point to be made about verifying usability and the need for a large and diverse userbase. OK, that is indeed a valid point, but not one I got from the first comments. I think Haiku has a diverse enough following that we are past most of these concerns, and a lot of our major paradigms which differ from other OSes were validated in the BeOS days. There are some areas where we still have work to do -- e.g. interfaces for the blind -- but overall we are doing quite well. > How much you want to bet that the Haiku userbase is overwhelmingly male? And this is not to make some concerned sexism argument but to illustrate that the community is more representative of the IT crowd rather than the general population. Oh, I know it's true of Haiku, but I practically can guarantee the same is true of Linux/BSD/etc. So then, can only "mainstream" operating systems have anything to say here?
- mattnewport 8y ago
  Haiku, unlike Mac OS, is barely known at all, even among highly technical and knowledgeable computer users. I'm a long term computer enthusiast and regular hacker news reader for many years and I'm just barely aware that something called Haiku exists (I'd forgotten until reading this article then vaguely remembered hearing about it before) and I certainly don't know it for its speed and ease of use. I'm old enough and enough of a computer enthusiast to remember when BeOS came onto the scene. Even most computer enthusiasts today probably haven't heard of it and of those who have I imagine only a subset have heard of Haiku. Now maybe Haiku really is great, fast and easy to use but I think it's a stretch to claim it's "known for" those traits when (perhaps undeservedly) I think it's more accurate to say to a first approximation it's not known at all. In this regard it's nothing like Mac OS which while much less popular than Window, even my parents have heard of.
- Illniyar 8y ago
  Being fast and easy doesn't conflict with having a low user base. Being known for anything really mostly requires having some userbase.

adamnemecek 8y ago

Haha no one using it means they can go ham on trying good designs as they are unbound by legacy reasons.

Koshkin 8y ago
Actually, looks like Haiku is a compatible reimplementation of a "legacy" OS.
- waddlesplash 8y ago
  Depends what you mean by "compatible." We preserve binary compatibility on 32-bit x86 with BeOS, indeed. But it hasn't stopped us from re-arranging parts of the GUI, or adding new APIs, or experimenting with the kernel, or ... etc.

waddlesplash 8y ago

Being "known for its speed and ease of use" and "very low user base" are ... not mutually exclusive in the slightest, so I fail to see how your comment has relevance? By your logic, since macOS has ~1/10 the install base of Windows, clearly this means that "very few" people use it and we should not take Apple's advice on anything design-related.

oralty 8y ago
>> Haiku is an OS that basically no one uses for any purpose. > By your logic, since macOS has ~1/10 the install base of Windows, Does not follow. MacOS use relative to Windows is not at all a fair comparison. Firstly "everybody" uses Windows, so 1/10 of huge number is still a huge number. Second, except for gaming and some particular areas like EDA, MacOS has a general software library with a broad-base of technical and non-technical users throughout the world. Haiku OS cannot claim to have anything like that.
- waddlesplash 8y ago
  > MacOS has a general software library with a broad-base of technical and non-technical users throughout the world. Haiku OS cannot claim to have anything like that. That was the second half of my comment. Please re-read the first half. My point in that part, though, was that macOS has ~1/10 the users of Windows, but Windows' UI/UX was/is widely regarded as absolutely atrocious, and macOS' as being pretty good to great, depending on who you ask. So "if it has less users, their thoughts on design are irrelevant" is ... not a good argument.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - pooppaint 8y ago
    I reread and it didn’t make any difference. MacOS may have 1/10 the Windows base but that is not having “very low userbase”, while I think it is quite reasonable to say that about Haiku. Reread what I said, the MacOS base is large and it is a general base of highly technical and non-technical users alike that are not all hobbyists. This does not describe Haiku in the slightest. There is a valid point to be made about verifying usability and the need for a large and diverse userbase. How much you want to bet that the Haiku userbase is overwhelmingly male? And this is not to make some concerned sexism argument but to illustrate that the community is more representative of the IT crowd rather than the general population.
    - waddlesplash 8y ago
      > There is a valid point to be made about verifying usability and the need for a large and diverse userbase. OK, that is indeed a valid point, but not one I got from the first comments. I think Haiku has a diverse enough following that we are past most of these concerns, and a lot of our major paradigms which differ from other OSes were validated in the BeOS days. There are some areas where we still have work to do -- e.g. interfaces for the blind -- but overall we are doing quite well. > How much you want to bet that the Haiku userbase is overwhelmingly male? And this is not to make some concerned sexism argument but to illustrate that the community is more representative of the IT crowd rather than the general population. Oh, I know it's true of Haiku, but I practically can guarantee the same is true of Linux/BSD/etc. So then, can only "mainstream" operating systems have anything to say here?
mattnewport 8y ago
Haiku, unlike Mac OS, is barely known at all, even among highly technical and knowledgeable computer users. I'm a long term computer enthusiast and regular hacker news reader for many years and I'm just barely aware that something called Haiku exists (I'd forgotten until reading this article then vaguely remembered hearing about it before) and I certainly don't know it for its speed and ease of use. I'm old enough and enough of a computer enthusiast to remember when BeOS came onto the scene. Even most computer enthusiasts today probably haven't heard of it and of those who have I imagine only a subset have heard of Haiku. Now maybe Haiku really is great, fast and easy to use but I think it's a stretch to claim it's "known for" those traits when (perhaps undeservedly) I think it's more accurate to say to a first approximation it's not known at all. In this regard it's nothing like Mac OS which while much less popular than Window, even my parents have heard of.
Illniyar 8y ago
Being fast and easy doesn't conflict with having a low user base. Being known for anything really mostly requires having some userbase.