20 ms·

What makes BeOS and Haiku unique

303 points by valeg 8y ago

glenrivard 8y ago
Curious what from BeOS will carry over to Zircon?
Fronzie 8y ago
Back in the day, BeOS used to be quite more capable with regards to multi-threading. The used to demo this with multiple videos playing. Does BeOS/Haiku still have a technological edge somewhere (compared to say, linux or windows)?
- kitsunesoba 8y ago
  Haiku doesn’t have much of a technological edge at the moment, given that the current goal is to reproduce BeOS 5 PE to its fullest extent before modernizing. Where it does have an edge, though, is how’s its being designed first and foremost as a desktop OS with responsiveness as the top priority above all else. The latter especially is depressingly uncommon in modern operating systems.
  - snazz 8y ago
    I agree on the responsiveness part and would like to add that the fact that BeOS dropped you to a debugger shell when it crashed is something missing from modern desktop OSs. Just like the Lisp Machine (Genera, at least), introspection is something that’s present in Haiku and BeOS that was cut out of many modern desktop operating systems for “security” and “ease of use”.
    - erikpukinskis 8y ago
      In the JavaScript world, debugging is almost a bad word. It’s almost impossible to maintain a sane debuggable trace though a “modern” JavaScript application. I find I have to ignore basically all of the standard frameworks and transpiration pipelines and just write old school PHP-like code in Node. I say all of this because I feel that my community has lost control of the debugging pipeline and I applaud Be and Haiku for making that a priority. I find the benefits of committing to an always-running, always-traceable-in-production execution thread is an EXTRAORDINARY productivity gain (vs console.logs and connecting to IDEs manually via various witchcraft)
      - porker 8y ago
        > In the JavaScript world, debugging is almost a bad word. It’s almost impossible to maintain a sane debuggable trace though a “modern” JavaScript application. I felt this last week as I tried Webpack 4 on a new project. The source maps weren't correct, and instead of debugging my app I had to debug multiple Webpack plugins and work out which one was breaking the source maps. Never did find out, but I fixed my app by debugging it mentally. It sure made me wish for a developer-first language.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      > The fact that BeOS dropped you to a debugger shell when it crashed is something missing from modern desktop OSs. Windows has that - if you have e.g. Visual Studio installed (or any other app that registers itself as a system-wide debugger), then application crash dialog will immediately offer to attach the debugger at the point of the crash.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        Since Windows 3.1 actually, famous Dr. Watson.
    - dpg23 8y ago
      Check out GuixSD if you like Guile Scheme REPLs when something breaks! I also recall OpenBSD and FreeBSD dropping to debuggers on kernel panics.
  - mdasen 8y ago
    As someone who likes responsiveness, I've always wanted BeOS to take off. However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter? I'm running three apps right now: VSCode, Slack, and a web browser. Given that VSCode and Slack are basically other browsers, how much does OS responsiveness matter? Has the responsiveness battle just moved to the browser? How much are people really running other than a web browser on a desktop/laptop now-a-days? When I evaluate an OS today, I'm going to care about how good its trackpad drivers are, whether I'm likely to have wifi issues, whether it can run the *nix tools I need to do my work, maybe whether I like the way it switches between windows/apps, and whether there are modern browsers to run on it. Responsiveness was a big deal back when I was running a Pentium II and BeOS had amazing demos (and I presume real-world usage) with uninterrupted video while multi-tasking and just buttery-smooth context switching in an era where you'd have your system lock-up. Heck, it was many years before OS X got past the beach ball of death happening constantly. However, today, it's my browser that locks up; it's my browser that I want to be able to smoothly scroll through a web page. I really want Haiku to succeed, but it feels like we might have moved beyond the OS for so much that the OS can't have the same impact it once had. On the one hand, the web has made it so that alternative OSs don't need a boat load of software to be usable. On the other hand, because the browser is now the OS, the usefulness of an alternative OS is lower.
    - Annatar 8y ago
      "However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter?" It always matters; I don't want to waste my life away in front of someone's irresponsive, laggy, slow software.
      - garmaine 8y ago
        You’re missing the point. With concurrency handled in user code and (I’d add) reduced latency from SSD storage, do you even want the OS to be excessively preemptive? Doing so has large drawbacks in terms of cache performance, and the difference is no longer noticeable.
        Annatar 8y ago
  - mverwijs 8y ago
    The thing that always blew me away with BeOS was the time it took to cold boot. From powering on a machine to being ready to work. It was seconds. Still faster than a chromebook. That sure is something that most OS'es today can't do.
    - Annatar 8y ago
      AmigaOS can, and yes it's still being developed.
    - swiftcoder 8y ago
      You can configure most Debian variants to boot in seconds from a decent SSD. Ubuntu Server edition was really pushing this for a while, the desktop editions don't seem to prioritise boot times quite so highly. Hell, even Windows 10 boots from an SSD these days in less time than my BIOS takes to start the Windows boot process...
      - reaperducer 8y ago
        By introducing SSD into the equation, you're creating a false equivalency.
        swiftcoder 8y ago
        Sure, but it's a lot less disruptive solution to boot times than switching OS.
      - chungy 8y ago
        Desktop boot time mostly doesn't matter, it is an infrequent event -- once a day at most, if the system is shut down at night. Server boot time, on the other hand, does matter. You really don't want a server to be down for longer than it has to. Being able to reboot in 10 seconds is huge compared to rebooting in a couple minutes. Now, given that servers are fundamentally running the same OS, improvements geared towards that market tend to bleed over to desktop as well. Desktop just has a bit more to bring up, with a graphical environment and everything.
- monocasa 8y ago
  AFAIK, the kernel is actually real time in a way that Linux and NT aren't. Even RT-Linux is very soft real time.
  - garmaine 8y ago
    BeOS wasn’t hard real time afaik.
    - monocasa 8y ago
      The NewOS kernel is from what I can tell.
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    "in a way that Linux and NT aren't" BeOS offered the same FIFO scheduling mechanic that allows Linux to support soft real-time. RTLinux was a hard real-time OS which runs Linux as a lower priority service you can pre-empt with your actual hard real-time stuff. Similar systems still exist today. They work fine, if, in fact, what you needed actually was "hard real-time". If your idea of the potential consequences when your system misses a deadline is more like "Some users are annoyed and demand refunds" rather than "I might go to jail for manslaughter" or "The $40M space probe turns into space garbage" then "hard real-time" probably wasn't what you needed after all.
    - monocasa 8y ago
      My point was that (in my experience as a embedded engineer for high availability systems) NewOS has much smaller windows between kernel preemption points, particularly in comparison to Linux (even RT) and NT. Is Haiku only soft real time? Yes, and I never said anything different. Does it do a markedly better job at making real time commitments than NT or even RT-Linux? Absolutely mainly due to how much simpler of a kernel it is. Also, I'm going to throw out there that if you're going to get uppity about hard real time guarantees out of nowhere and throwing out concepts lime manslaughtee charges out of nowhere, I hope that you're only choosing sel4 as last time I checked it was the only kernel that backed up it's guarantees in a way that it can be checked.
- tialaramex 8y ago
  Other contemporary multi-processor operating systems were also easily capable of displaying a handful of postage stamp (QVGA or smaller IIRC) videos. This was a demo other people weren't doing mostly not because it was hard to achieve but because it was pointless, what use did you have for showing several videos simultaneously? They chose to show several postage stamp videos because they only had software decoding. At the time the way most competitors handled video on consumer hardware was to decode to YUV and then overlay and scale that with dedicated hardware, and on most systems you could only play one video this way. BeOS would be much worse at that with a software decoder, by showing many videos they could "make a virtue of a necessity" as they say. The best thing in Haiku is probably their vector icon format, which offers a good mix of basic vector features for small pictures in a compact binary format. It's mentioned briefly in that article.
  - acdha 8y ago
    In my experience BeOS had much better single, full-resolution video playback or editing experience as well. Editing DV footage on BeOS had a no-stutter experience which took MacOS and Windows another decade to deliver, especially since it was rock-solid under multitasking – not just not needing to close your email client or browser but even things like compiling Mozilla from source didn’t cause a dropped frame.
  - laumars 8y ago
    I don't think that's entirely fair. Back then I used to be quite an whore when it came to operating systems. I had Windows 2000, Windows 95 (for the rare game that wouldn't run on 2k), BeOS, Linux and Mac OS 9. BeOS was by far the snappiest (actually it was 95, but that was 5 years old by that point, only running DOS games and didn't take advantage of the SMP I was running). BeOS ran circles around everything else - particularly when multitasking - and I was did use each platform heavily.
    - keithnoizu 8y ago
      I had a similar experience. Windows 2000, ME, 98 and 95, Suse Linux, BeOS. BeOS was way better at multitasking, video playback, etc. I really lamented it's fall.
- ianai 8y ago
  A GUI feature I read about in 5: menus were going to have a colorized band that followed through all the menus and submenus. It seemed like a feature that would really help with complex software, but of course never saw the light of day. To this day, drilling down to deep submenus quickly becomes user abuse. It wastes a lot of time to have to drill down to something only to have all the menus disappear because the mouse tracked off the submenu accidentally. It was also just cool to have a GUI mounted on a Unix like os - which wasn’t Linux. Nowadays though I’d like to see some Plan9-isms adopted instead of cloud stuff. I think people would benefit from being able to make their own user experience that was kept more or less unchanged and the same files and preferences available on all of their devices. I’d also like to be able to “mount” processor/memory hardware from networked machines and delegate processing to them and output results to the local GUI. Like tunneling X but without actually needing to pipe the whole user stack - just the compute input/output.
- gsich 8y ago
  Pretty sure that other OSes could do that too. But most people can't watch 5 videos simultaneously so why try?
  - eitland 8y ago
    > But most people can't watch 5 videos simultaneously so why try? Off the top of my head: security guards do. And if you limit a general purpose (operating) system by what most users need you'll soon end up with a system where most users miss something.
    - gsich 8y ago
      The "why try" was not meant that other OS can't do it. Just that users don't have the need for that. Showing that BeOS can do it, does not mean other OS can't do it too.
spystath 8y ago
I don't know if this is nostalgia talking but there is something particularly attractive about the BeOS and Haiku desktop both in terms of design and aesthetics. The interface actually has a certain depth and this is consistent across icons, windows, dialogs, menus, buttons, etc. It's a shame that interfaces nowadays are completely flat. They are almost... expressionless and with the exception of the odd drop shadow they completely lack a third dimension. When I first learned of Haiku (and BeOS), back when Gnome was in the 2.x days, I was so impressed by the interface that I installed a look-alike desktop and icon theme. I used it for quite a long time until GTK+ 3.x eventually became prevalent.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  All 90s GUIs have something that I miss[1]. I think the flat movement was a desire for hyper genericity .. but turns out that a bit (just a bit) of visual signal and faux skeumorphism (some widgets emulated actual LED keys found on hardware) is good. ps: also, flat came after both the aqua trend where effects were everywhere and skeumorphism was pushed higher. Not that surprising in a way. [1] beos, win311, macos classic, win95 (office97 era) and nt5
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    I mis those from the 90's GUIs: - Standard interaction widgets. There was no breaking the scroll, there was no button that you can't discover how to press. - Expert oriented interfaces. There was no action without a shortcut. The most complex software always had some CLI or an API (optionally with an intepreter). - Discoverability features. The sortcut descriptions were embedded on the same places you had to click to get the functionality. Buttons were clearly marked. There was almost always some text area telling you what was happening. I don't miss skeumorphism, but it was often used to mark real features, and those features were gone with the arbitrary skeumorphisms. Current GUI trends were created by people with no interest on making their software useful, instead they only keep an eye on showroom conversion rate. (Whether they are right or not on doing so, it's a problem nonetheless.)
    - 8y ago
SvetlanaYak 8y ago
I like the read!
gradys 8y ago
Does anyone here use Haiku regularly? Would you recommend it?
- dleslie 8y ago
  I do. It's fantastic for browser-and-code hacktops with limited ability.
Annatar 8y ago
"3. States" Solaris 10 (and now by heritage illumos) has had this with beadm(1M) since ten years ago, if not longer.
- deleted 8y ago
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- deleted 8y ago
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laumars 8y ago
BeOS was by far my favourite operating system of that era. Fantastic platform that really put the competition to shame. Fast, stable, pretty and powerful.
- ChristianGeek 8y ago
  Same here. I still remember when I first booted it up and ran a demo app (video playing on all sides of a rotating cube), how much it put OS 9 to shame in terms of responsiveness and performance. I’m still pissed that Apple went with NeXTSTEP instead of BeOS for OS X, but I’m glad they went with something.
protomyth 8y ago
Looking at the screenshots, I really still like the look of the windows and icons, but the system font is really holding it back. I didn't realize how bad it looked compared to modern system fonts. I get the feeling a font switch would really improve the look.
- waddlesplash 8y ago
  Uh, the font is modern, it's "Noto Sans" from Google's new "Noto" family of fonts: https://www.google.com/get/noto/ https://www.google.com/get/noto/ Previously the default font was DejaVu Sans, which really looked a lot worse.
  - protomyth 8y ago
    Well, it doesn't look very good in any of the screenshots.
    - waddlesplash 8y ago
      Perhaps because there's no subpixel hinting, I guess? Haiku does have it (it was hard-disabled for a long time due to patent concerns), but there's a bug relating to how the main text control draws strings that causes characters to overlap one another with it enabled, and so things generally look worse when it is. Someone should take the time to fix that...
- Gracana 8y ago
  The screenshots are scaled a bit. They look better full-size: https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/dano-people-info.png https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/dano-people-in...
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    Hm, character spacing is pretty much broken in this screenshot. Not sure what is going on there, but it is certainly not completely correct.
k__ 8y ago
Wasn't that the base of Zeta? An OS sold by a home shopping channel around 2000. I never understood the hype and then they went bust.
- rayiner 8y ago
  Zeta was based on binaries of BeOS Dano (what was going to be the next version of BeOS before Be went under). It's unclear whether the company ever had the source code.
  - waddlesplash 8y ago
    They absolutely did. What came out towards the end was that they didn't really have a license for it; it's likely they had based their work on the BeOS source code leak that occurred in the last few weeks of Be Inc.'s existence.
eecc 8y ago
If it runs the jvm, a modern browser and it handles laptop standby I’m sold
- waddlesplash 8y ago
  OpenJDK 1.8 is (finally) back, and with Swing support even (though only on 32-bit, it still needs to be boostrapped on 64-bit.) WebPositive works "acceptably", Otter/QupZilla are significantly better. All can at least play YouTube, etc. We don't have standby support at all. :/ Most of the device hooks are there, and we use ACPICA for ACPI support, so it's just a matter of wiring all the right things up and adding some buttons... but we are pretty starved for time as-is, so nobody is working on it at present.
hanniabu 8y ago
Linux could kill windows and Microsoft if it just had an improved UI. Currently it looks like a mashup between windows and mac and it's just not working. I've noticed improvements over the years getting closer to Apple's designs, but not quite there and it's unfortunate how much that last minute matters. Once that list mile is covered I think we'll see linux becoming more and more popular as a standard OS. If Office Libre were to update their UI I think it would make a killer combination.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Microsoft windows 8 had a worse ui than any current popular ui in linux. People won't install their own os even if you have a better one to sell them.
  - flukus 8y ago
    Windows 8 was a train wreck, but gnome still has the full-screen start menu that everyone hated in windows 8. At least the search functionality works well in the menu, the MS one hasn't since windows 7.
    - andai 8y ago
      I recently heard a friend say that Windows 8 was her favorite version because it was so simple. I thought that was really interesting. I never really got to experience it the way it was intended, because upon first booting it I became horrified that everything had changed, and installed a bunch of tweaks to make it behave like Windows 7.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      Conversely, KDE has always offered what is essentially WinXP++ UX (which is exactly what so many people say they want). And there are distros that use that as the default DE, too.
- travisgriggs 8y ago
  I used to think this too. But I’ve come to wonder. My more recent hypothesis is that it’s not actually possible to do so. My reasoning is basically economics. Free software developers improve and maintain the UI experience that best fits their needs. If there’s shared ground between what the casual user wants and what the developer wants, they’ll even often err on the side of the casual user. The developer community will even reach into casual user space somewhat because it indirectly responds to the recognition and feedback loop that a wider user base is good for the effort in general, helping to secure other forms of acceptance and therefore employment opportunities. But that’s all only up to a point. There are concessions one starts making as you woo the business/casual user more and more. Since there is no direct financial compensation to offset the increased sacrifice, an equilibrium arises. An equilibrium of good enough for general consumption, enough of a concession for the developer. Unless something changes the balancing point of that equilibrium, then it’s likely to stay about there. It’s like a neighborhood handyman/craftsman who first fixed up his own house and then, because it gives him purpose and makes him feel good and contributes to the general betterment of the neighbor hood begins doing the odd project throughout the community. The work is quality AND it’s free(ish). As the community embraces the handyman’s efforts more and more, he begins having to do things more and more that don’t fit his vision or lifestyle. He has two choices: start charging or stick to the projects he likes to do. If he starts charging though, now he becomes dependent on trading concessions for income. The relationship fundamentally alters.
totfz 8y ago
>One of the coolest areas of package management is that you can go back in time and boot up into a previous state of the system, all thanks to the new packaging system. To do this, simply open the boot menu, choose the boot volume, and select Latest state or a nicely time stamped ‘version’. Very cool. New versions of programs may modify the user config files in a way that old versions may not be able to read those config files anymore and even corrupt them. How is this handled, if at all?
- waddlesplash 8y ago
  What config file format are you using that applications would corrupt newer ones? The only one I can think of would be raw memory structs written to disk, which is nasty and ridiculously unportable even across 32-bit vs. 64-bit, let alone other architectures. On Haiku, config files are generally either plaintext (kernel/drivers/a few core apps, so they are easily editable) or archived-BMessage format. The former are almost always read and not written, and the latter are key/value based so at worst the application would just not know about the new keys, and possibly remove them, which isn't the end of the world.
  - zlynx 8y ago
    Configuration changes depend on the developers. For example, I used to use Evolution on Linux / Gnome as my email client. Their attitude to compatibility is terrible. As in, they just don't care at all. If you allowed it to upgrade your Evolution data store there was no going back. In a BeOS case it would be as if it migrated to different configuration keys in the new version, then the old version would detect corruption, throw a fit and erase ALL the keys.
Ericson2314 8y ago
Some of this stuff sounds vaguely reminiscent of Nix. Which is unfortunate. I rather see a port of Nix(pkgs) to Haiku so Haiku is able to continue their wonderful unique innovations rather than reinvent the (albeit rarer and hirer quality) wheel.
- PyroLagus 8y ago
  What except for the rollback reminds you of Nix?
  - Ericson2314 8y ago
    The immutable filesystem stuff that goes with it. Even if that's not to much, are the goals different? I'd assume they're compatible enough.
snazz 8y ago
Am I the only one who wants a modern OS designed for single-user use as opposed to one that descends from a long line of time-sharing systems? That isn’t a mobile operating system?
- andai 8y ago
  I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm becoming a big fan of minimalism and simplicity. I find it particularly funny that Android is based on an OS designed for thousands of simultaneous users (although they did get some nice security / isolation out of it).
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    > although they did get some nice security / isolation out of it It's hard to understate this. The rampant security vulns of Windows were due largely to its heritage as a single user, sparingly networked computer.
    - snazz 8y ago
      As much as I agree with this, are security and single-user truly mutally exclusive, or is it just that all the single user operating systems we know of (correct me if I'm wrong) have poor security records?
      - phamilton 8y ago
        Solving multi user inherently results in building isolation which translates well to security.
        earenndil 8y ago
        But you can build isolation as a part of single user.
        phamilton 8y ago
mimixco 8y ago
Thank you for posting this! Just got a new USB SSD stick and I'm gonna try it out. :-)
YetAnotherNick 8y ago
Sometimes, I feel bad for OS with lower number of users like these, FreeBSD etc. There are so many important things in OS that even if it really excels in few things, it doesn't really count. The work that goes into creating these is phenomenal, yet I cannot replace my Mac. I have been paying at least $300 extra for a laptop and have been making so many compromises on the recent hardware.
- lcampbell 8y ago
  Eh, I've been running FreeBSD on my primary desktop for about a decade now (and have been running it on every server I can get my grubby hands on). It's equally painful for me to use any other OS because of similar workflow issues. We've all got a wide variety of tasks to complete and a good handful of specialized tools to complete them with -- use whatever works best. If you're doing server work, I recommend giving FreeBSD a trial run!
yawaramin 8y ago
I only read about BeOS in exuberant PC World articles in the early '00s, but I got the impression it was really, really good–pre-emptive multi-tasking and all. Now this blog post says that Haiku has device servers. That sounds like the 'fast flyweight delegation' technique described here: https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/12/04/ffwd-delegation-is-much-faster-than-you-think/ https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/12/04/ffwd-delegation-is-much-... ... and also used by the Erlang VM.
snvzz 8y ago
For some reason, there's no mention of datatypes, a very nice concept they took from AmigaOS3.
qwerty456127 8y ago
Haiku is just so cool (although it probably can be made even better, UI included, e.g. I really love the modern Win7/macOS/KDE5/Unity desktops idea od using one icon for both launching and minimizing/restoring/switching an app). I wish it could get more popular and developed more actively. I'd also love to have Haiku-like window management (and widgets toolkit skin if possible, but this is less important of course) on Linux (in KDE preferably).
rixrax 8y ago
I realize this maybe a corner case and slightly off-topic, but it would be really nice to be able to boot Haiku via PXE boot in our network infrastructure. This would make it so much easier for people to play with it casually. It seems[0] that there has been some effort to support this, but last time I tried (about 3 months a go), I couldn't get it boot with couple of hours effort (I know, may very well be user error ;-) ). If anyone from Haiku is reading, would be really cool if you also offered network bootable image by default that can successfully boot from 'standard' PXE boot server setup. [0] https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/network_booting/ https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/network_booting/
- waddlesplash 8y ago
  The PXE bootloader was broken following the merge of the package manager (which as this article implies, required changes to the boot process.) Nobody has taken the time to fix it again since then... help wanted, I guess.
pjmlp 8y ago
Being one of the first C++ OSes. I really enjoyed that feature. And having a certain Amiga feeling to its culture and multimedia capabilities.
xte 8y ago
Sincerely the sole BeOS concept I found really nice that is also by some extent in NEXT is the "fs database" or the ability to "query" storage by file types etc vs only access in a classic files/directories tree. On package management IMO Nix and derived Guix are real revolution...

303 points by valeg 8y ago

Curious what from BeOS will carry over to Zircon?

Back in the day, BeOS used to be quite more capable with regards to multi-threading. The used to demo this with multiple videos playing. Does BeOS/Haiku still have a technological edge somewhere (compared to say, linux or windows)?

kitsunesoba 8y ago
Haiku doesn’t have much of a technological edge at the moment, given that the current goal is to reproduce BeOS 5 PE to its fullest extent before modernizing. Where it does have an edge, though, is how’s its being designed first and foremost as a desktop OS with responsiveness as the top priority above all else. The latter especially is depressingly uncommon in modern operating systems.
- snazz 8y ago
  I agree on the responsiveness part and would like to add that the fact that BeOS dropped you to a debugger shell when it crashed is something missing from modern desktop OSs. Just like the Lisp Machine (Genera, at least), introspection is something that’s present in Haiku and BeOS that was cut out of many modern desktop operating systems for “security” and “ease of use”.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    In the JavaScript world, debugging is almost a bad word. It’s almost impossible to maintain a sane debuggable trace though a “modern” JavaScript application. I find I have to ignore basically all of the standard frameworks and transpiration pipelines and just write old school PHP-like code in Node. I say all of this because I feel that my community has lost control of the debugging pipeline and I applaud Be and Haiku for making that a priority. I find the benefits of committing to an always-running, always-traceable-in-production execution thread is an EXTRAORDINARY productivity gain (vs console.logs and connecting to IDEs manually via various witchcraft)
    - porker 8y ago
      > In the JavaScript world, debugging is almost a bad word. It’s almost impossible to maintain a sane debuggable trace though a “modern” JavaScript application. I felt this last week as I tried Webpack 4 on a new project. The source maps weren't correct, and instead of debugging my app I had to debug multiple Webpack plugins and work out which one was breaking the source maps. Never did find out, but I fixed my app by debugging it mentally. It sure made me wish for a developer-first language.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    > The fact that BeOS dropped you to a debugger shell when it crashed is something missing from modern desktop OSs. Windows has that - if you have e.g. Visual Studio installed (or any other app that registers itself as a system-wide debugger), then application crash dialog will immediately offer to attach the debugger at the point of the crash.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Since Windows 3.1 actually, famous Dr. Watson.
  - dpg23 8y ago
    Check out GuixSD if you like Guile Scheme REPLs when something breaks! I also recall OpenBSD and FreeBSD dropping to debuggers on kernel panics.
- mdasen 8y ago
  As someone who likes responsiveness, I've always wanted BeOS to take off. However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter? I'm running three apps right now: VSCode, Slack, and a web browser. Given that VSCode and Slack are basically other browsers, how much does OS responsiveness matter? Has the responsiveness battle just moved to the browser? How much are people really running other than a web browser on a desktop/laptop now-a-days? When I evaluate an OS today, I'm going to care about how good its trackpad drivers are, whether I'm likely to have wifi issues, whether it can run the *nix tools I need to do my work, maybe whether I like the way it switches between windows/apps, and whether there are modern browsers to run on it. Responsiveness was a big deal back when I was running a Pentium II and BeOS had amazing demos (and I presume real-world usage) with uninterrupted video while multi-tasking and just buttery-smooth context switching in an era where you'd have your system lock-up. Heck, it was many years before OS X got past the beach ball of death happening constantly. However, today, it's my browser that locks up; it's my browser that I want to be able to smoothly scroll through a web page. I really want Haiku to succeed, but it feels like we might have moved beyond the OS for so much that the OS can't have the same impact it once had. On the one hand, the web has made it so that alternative OSs don't need a boat load of software to be usable. On the other hand, because the browser is now the OS, the usefulness of an alternative OS is lower.
  - Annatar 8y ago
    "However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter?" It always matters; I don't want to waste my life away in front of someone's irresponsive, laggy, slow software.
    - garmaine 8y ago
      You’re missing the point. With concurrency handled in user code and (I’d add) reduced latency from SSD storage, do you even want the OS to be excessively preemptive? Doing so has large drawbacks in terms of cache performance, and the difference is no longer noticeable.
      - Annatar 8y ago
- mverwijs 8y ago
  The thing that always blew me away with BeOS was the time it took to cold boot. From powering on a machine to being ready to work. It was seconds. Still faster than a chromebook. That sure is something that most OS'es today can't do.
  - Annatar 8y ago
    AmigaOS can, and yes it's still being developed.
  - swiftcoder 8y ago
    You can configure most Debian variants to boot in seconds from a decent SSD. Ubuntu Server edition was really pushing this for a while, the desktop editions don't seem to prioritise boot times quite so highly. Hell, even Windows 10 boots from an SSD these days in less time than my BIOS takes to start the Windows boot process...
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      By introducing SSD into the equation, you're creating a false equivalency.
      - swiftcoder 8y ago
        Sure, but it's a lot less disruptive solution to boot times than switching OS.
    - chungy 8y ago
      Desktop boot time mostly doesn't matter, it is an infrequent event -- once a day at most, if the system is shut down at night. Server boot time, on the other hand, does matter. You really don't want a server to be down for longer than it has to. Being able to reboot in 10 seconds is huge compared to rebooting in a couple minutes. Now, given that servers are fundamentally running the same OS, improvements geared towards that market tend to bleed over to desktop as well. Desktop just has a bit more to bring up, with a graphical environment and everything.
monocasa 8y ago
AFAIK, the kernel is actually real time in a way that Linux and NT aren't. Even RT-Linux is very soft real time.
- garmaine 8y ago
  BeOS wasn’t hard real time afaik.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    The NewOS kernel is from what I can tell.
- tialaramex 8y ago
  "in a way that Linux and NT aren't" BeOS offered the same FIFO scheduling mechanic that allows Linux to support soft real-time. RTLinux was a hard real-time OS which runs Linux as a lower priority service you can pre-empt with your actual hard real-time stuff. Similar systems still exist today. They work fine, if, in fact, what you needed actually was "hard real-time". If your idea of the potential consequences when your system misses a deadline is more like "Some users are annoyed and demand refunds" rather than "I might go to jail for manslaughter" or "The $40M space probe turns into space garbage" then "hard real-time" probably wasn't what you needed after all.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    My point was that (in my experience as a embedded engineer for high availability systems) NewOS has much smaller windows between kernel preemption points, particularly in comparison to Linux (even RT) and NT. Is Haiku only soft real time? Yes, and I never said anything different. Does it do a markedly better job at making real time commitments than NT or even RT-Linux? Absolutely mainly due to how much simpler of a kernel it is. Also, I'm going to throw out there that if you're going to get uppity about hard real time guarantees out of nowhere and throwing out concepts lime manslaughtee charges out of nowhere, I hope that you're only choosing sel4 as last time I checked it was the only kernel that backed up it's guarantees in a way that it can be checked.
tialaramex 8y ago
Other contemporary multi-processor operating systems were also easily capable of displaying a handful of postage stamp (QVGA or smaller IIRC) videos. This was a demo other people weren't doing mostly not because it was hard to achieve but because it was pointless, what use did you have for showing several videos simultaneously? They chose to show several postage stamp videos because they only had software decoding. At the time the way most competitors handled video on consumer hardware was to decode to YUV and then overlay and scale that with dedicated hardware, and on most systems you could only play one video this way. BeOS would be much worse at that with a software decoder, by showing many videos they could "make a virtue of a necessity" as they say. The best thing in Haiku is probably their vector icon format, which offers a good mix of basic vector features for small pictures in a compact binary format. It's mentioned briefly in that article.
- acdha 8y ago
  In my experience BeOS had much better single, full-resolution video playback or editing experience as well. Editing DV footage on BeOS had a no-stutter experience which took MacOS and Windows another decade to deliver, especially since it was rock-solid under multitasking – not just not needing to close your email client or browser but even things like compiling Mozilla from source didn’t cause a dropped frame.
- laumars 8y ago
  I don't think that's entirely fair. Back then I used to be quite an whore when it came to operating systems. I had Windows 2000, Windows 95 (for the rare game that wouldn't run on 2k), BeOS, Linux and Mac OS 9. BeOS was by far the snappiest (actually it was 95, but that was 5 years old by that point, only running DOS games and didn't take advantage of the SMP I was running). BeOS ran circles around everything else - particularly when multitasking - and I was did use each platform heavily.
  - keithnoizu 8y ago
    I had a similar experience. Windows 2000, ME, 98 and 95, Suse Linux, BeOS. BeOS was way better at multitasking, video playback, etc. I really lamented it's fall.
ianai 8y ago
A GUI feature I read about in 5: menus were going to have a colorized band that followed through all the menus and submenus. It seemed like a feature that would really help with complex software, but of course never saw the light of day. To this day, drilling down to deep submenus quickly becomes user abuse. It wastes a lot of time to have to drill down to something only to have all the menus disappear because the mouse tracked off the submenu accidentally. It was also just cool to have a GUI mounted on a Unix like os - which wasn’t Linux. Nowadays though I’d like to see some Plan9-isms adopted instead of cloud stuff. I think people would benefit from being able to make their own user experience that was kept more or less unchanged and the same files and preferences available on all of their devices. I’d also like to be able to “mount” processor/memory hardware from networked machines and delegate processing to them and output results to the local GUI. Like tunneling X but without actually needing to pipe the whole user stack - just the compute input/output.
gsich 8y ago
Pretty sure that other OSes could do that too. But most people can't watch 5 videos simultaneously so why try?
- eitland 8y ago
  > But most people can't watch 5 videos simultaneously so why try? Off the top of my head: security guards do. And if you limit a general purpose (operating) system by what most users need you'll soon end up with a system where most users miss something.
  - gsich 8y ago
    The "why try" was not meant that other OS can't do it. Just that users don't have the need for that. Showing that BeOS can do it, does not mean other OS can't do it too.

spystath 8y ago

I don't know if this is nostalgia talking but there is something particularly attractive about the BeOS and Haiku desktop both in terms of design and aesthetics. The interface actually has a certain depth and this is consistent across icons, windows, dialogs, menus, buttons, etc. It's a shame that interfaces nowadays are completely flat. They are almost... expressionless and with the exception of the odd drop shadow they completely lack a third dimension. When I first learned of Haiku (and BeOS), back when Gnome was in the 2.x days, I was so impressed by the interface that I installed a look-alike desktop and icon theme. I used it for quite a long time until GTK+ 3.x eventually became prevalent.

agumonkey 8y ago
All 90s GUIs have something that I miss[1]. I think the flat movement was a desire for hyper genericity .. but turns out that a bit (just a bit) of visual signal and faux skeumorphism (some widgets emulated actual LED keys found on hardware) is good. ps: also, flat came after both the aqua trend where effects were everywhere and skeumorphism was pushed higher. Not that surprising in a way. [1] beos, win311, macos classic, win95 (office97 era) and nt5
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  I mis those from the 90's GUIs: - Standard interaction widgets. There was no breaking the scroll, there was no button that you can't discover how to press. - Expert oriented interfaces. There was no action without a shortcut. The most complex software always had some CLI or an API (optionally with an intepreter). - Discoverability features. The sortcut descriptions were embedded on the same places you had to click to get the functionality. Buttons were clearly marked. There was almost always some text area telling you what was happening. I don't miss skeumorphism, but it was often used to mark real features, and those features were gone with the arbitrary skeumorphisms. Current GUI trends were created by people with no interest on making their software useful, instead they only keep an eye on showroom conversion rate. (Whether they are right or not on doing so, it's a problem nonetheless.)
  - 8y ago

SvetlanaYak 8y ago

I like the read!

gradys 8y ago

Does anyone here use Haiku regularly? Would you recommend it?

dleslie 8y ago
I do. It's fantastic for browser-and-code hacktops with limited ability.

Annatar 8y ago

"3. States" Solaris 10 (and now by heritage illumos) has had this with beadm(1M) since ten years ago, if not longer.

deleted 8y ago
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laumars 8y ago

BeOS was by far my favourite operating system of that era. Fantastic platform that really put the competition to shame. Fast, stable, pretty and powerful.

ChristianGeek 8y ago
Same here. I still remember when I first booted it up and ran a demo app (video playing on all sides of a rotating cube), how much it put OS 9 to shame in terms of responsiveness and performance. I’m still pissed that Apple went with NeXTSTEP instead of BeOS for OS X, but I’m glad they went with something.

protomyth 8y ago

Looking at the screenshots, I really still like the look of the windows and icons, but the system font is really holding it back. I didn't realize how bad it looked compared to modern system fonts. I get the feeling a font switch would really improve the look.

waddlesplash 8y ago
Uh, the font is modern, it's "Noto Sans" from Google's new "Noto" family of fonts: https://www.google.com/get/noto/ https://www.google.com/get/noto/ Previously the default font was DejaVu Sans, which really looked a lot worse.
- protomyth 8y ago
  Well, it doesn't look very good in any of the screenshots.
  - waddlesplash 8y ago
    Perhaps because there's no subpixel hinting, I guess? Haiku does have it (it was hard-disabled for a long time due to patent concerns), but there's a bug relating to how the main text control draws strings that causes characters to overlap one another with it enabled, and so things generally look worse when it is. Someone should take the time to fix that...
Gracana 8y ago
The screenshots are scaled a bit. They look better full-size: https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/dano-people-info.png https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/dano-people-in...
- gmueckl 8y ago
  Hm, character spacing is pretty much broken in this screenshot. Not sure what is going on there, but it is certainly not completely correct.

k__ 8y ago

Wasn't that the base of Zeta? An OS sold by a home shopping channel around 2000. I never understood the hype and then they went bust.

rayiner 8y ago
Zeta was based on binaries of BeOS Dano (what was going to be the next version of BeOS before Be went under). It's unclear whether the company ever had the source code.
- waddlesplash 8y ago
  They absolutely did. What came out towards the end was that they didn't really have a license for it; it's likely they had based their work on the BeOS source code leak that occurred in the last few weeks of Be Inc.'s existence.

eecc 8y ago

If it runs the jvm, a modern browser and it handles laptop standby I’m sold

waddlesplash 8y ago
OpenJDK 1.8 is (finally) back, and with Swing support even (though only on 32-bit, it still needs to be boostrapped on 64-bit.) WebPositive works "acceptably", Otter/QupZilla are significantly better. All can at least play YouTube, etc. We don't have standby support at all. :/ Most of the device hooks are there, and we use ACPICA for ACPI support, so it's just a matter of wiring all the right things up and adding some buttons... but we are pretty starved for time as-is, so nobody is working on it at present.

hanniabu 8y ago

Linux could kill windows and Microsoft if it just had an improved UI. Currently it looks like a mashup between windows and mac and it's just not working. I've noticed improvements over the years getting closer to Apple's designs, but not quite there and it's unfortunate how much that last minute matters. Once that list mile is covered I think we'll see linux becoming more and more popular as a standard OS. If Office Libre were to update their UI I think it would make a killer combination.

michaelmrose 8y ago
Microsoft windows 8 had a worse ui than any current popular ui in linux. People won't install their own os even if you have a better one to sell them.
- flukus 8y ago
  Windows 8 was a train wreck, but gnome still has the full-screen start menu that everyone hated in windows 8. At least the search functionality works well in the menu, the MS one hasn't since windows 7.
  - andai 8y ago
    I recently heard a friend say that Windows 8 was her favorite version because it was so simple. I thought that was really interesting. I never really got to experience it the way it was intended, because upon first booting it I became horrified that everything had changed, and installed a bunch of tweaks to make it behave like Windows 7.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Conversely, KDE has always offered what is essentially WinXP++ UX (which is exactly what so many people say they want). And there are distros that use that as the default DE, too.
travisgriggs 8y ago
I used to think this too. But I’ve come to wonder. My more recent hypothesis is that it’s not actually possible to do so. My reasoning is basically economics. Free software developers improve and maintain the UI experience that best fits their needs. If there’s shared ground between what the casual user wants and what the developer wants, they’ll even often err on the side of the casual user. The developer community will even reach into casual user space somewhat because it indirectly responds to the recognition and feedback loop that a wider user base is good for the effort in general, helping to secure other forms of acceptance and therefore employment opportunities. But that’s all only up to a point. There are concessions one starts making as you woo the business/casual user more and more. Since there is no direct financial compensation to offset the increased sacrifice, an equilibrium arises. An equilibrium of good enough for general consumption, enough of a concession for the developer. Unless something changes the balancing point of that equilibrium, then it’s likely to stay about there. It’s like a neighborhood handyman/craftsman who first fixed up his own house and then, because it gives him purpose and makes him feel good and contributes to the general betterment of the neighbor hood begins doing the odd project throughout the community. The work is quality AND it’s free(ish). As the community embraces the handyman’s efforts more and more, he begins having to do things more and more that don’t fit his vision or lifestyle. He has two choices: start charging or stick to the projects he likes to do. If he starts charging though, now he becomes dependent on trading concessions for income. The relationship fundamentally alters.

totfz 8y ago

>One of the coolest areas of package management is that you can go back in time and boot up into a previous state of the system, all thanks to the new packaging system. To do this, simply open the boot menu, choose the boot volume, and select Latest state or a nicely time stamped ‘version’. Very cool. New versions of programs may modify the user config files in a way that old versions may not be able to read those config files anymore and even corrupt them. How is this handled, if at all?

waddlesplash 8y ago
What config file format are you using that applications would corrupt newer ones? The only one I can think of would be raw memory structs written to disk, which is nasty and ridiculously unportable even across 32-bit vs. 64-bit, let alone other architectures. On Haiku, config files are generally either plaintext (kernel/drivers/a few core apps, so they are easily editable) or archived-BMessage format. The former are almost always read and not written, and the latter are key/value based so at worst the application would just not know about the new keys, and possibly remove them, which isn't the end of the world.
- zlynx 8y ago
  Configuration changes depend on the developers. For example, I used to use Evolution on Linux / Gnome as my email client. Their attitude to compatibility is terrible. As in, they just don't care at all. If you allowed it to upgrade your Evolution data store there was no going back. In a BeOS case it would be as if it migrated to different configuration keys in the new version, then the old version would detect corruption, throw a fit and erase ALL the keys.

Ericson2314 8y ago

Some of this stuff sounds vaguely reminiscent of Nix. Which is unfortunate. I rather see a port of Nix(pkgs) to Haiku so Haiku is able to continue their wonderful unique innovations rather than reinvent the (albeit rarer and hirer quality) wheel.

PyroLagus 8y ago
What except for the rollback reminds you of Nix?
- Ericson2314 8y ago
  The immutable filesystem stuff that goes with it. Even if that's not to much, are the goals different? I'd assume they're compatible enough.

snazz 8y ago

Am I the only one who wants a modern OS designed for single-user use as opposed to one that descends from a long line of time-sharing systems? That isn’t a mobile operating system?

andai 8y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm becoming a big fan of minimalism and simplicity. I find it particularly funny that Android is based on an OS designed for thousands of simultaneous users (although they did get some nice security / isolation out of it).
- paulddraper 8y ago
  > although they did get some nice security / isolation out of it It's hard to understate this. The rampant security vulns of Windows were due largely to its heritage as a single user, sparingly networked computer.
  - snazz 8y ago
    As much as I agree with this, are security and single-user truly mutally exclusive, or is it just that all the single user operating systems we know of (correct me if I'm wrong) have poor security records?
    - phamilton 8y ago
      Solving multi user inherently results in building isolation which translates well to security.
      - earenndil 8y ago
        But you can build isolation as a part of single user.
        phamilton 8y ago

mimixco 8y ago

Thank you for posting this! Just got a new USB SSD stick and I'm gonna try it out. :-)

YetAnotherNick 8y ago

Sometimes, I feel bad for OS with lower number of users like these, FreeBSD etc. There are so many important things in OS that even if it really excels in few things, it doesn't really count. The work that goes into creating these is phenomenal, yet I cannot replace my Mac. I have been paying at least $300 extra for a laptop and have been making so many compromises on the recent hardware.

lcampbell 8y ago
Eh, I've been running FreeBSD on my primary desktop for about a decade now (and have been running it on every server I can get my grubby hands on). It's equally painful for me to use any other OS because of similar workflow issues. We've all got a wide variety of tasks to complete and a good handful of specialized tools to complete them with -- use whatever works best. If you're doing server work, I recommend giving FreeBSD a trial run!

yawaramin 8y ago

I only read about BeOS in exuberant PC World articles in the early '00s, but I got the impression it was really, really good–pre-emptive multi-tasking and all. Now this blog post says that Haiku has device servers. That sounds like the 'fast flyweight delegation' technique described here: https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/12/04/ffwd-delegation-is-much-faster-than-you-think/ https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/12/04/ffwd-delegation-is-much-... ... and also used by the Erlang VM.

snvzz 8y ago

For some reason, there's no mention of datatypes, a very nice concept they took from AmigaOS3.

qwerty456127 8y ago

Haiku is just so cool (although it probably can be made even better, UI included, e.g. I really love the modern Win7/macOS/KDE5/Unity desktops idea od using one icon for both launching and minimizing/restoring/switching an app). I wish it could get more popular and developed more actively. I'd also love to have Haiku-like window management (and widgets toolkit skin if possible, but this is less important of course) on Linux (in KDE preferably).

rixrax 8y ago

I realize this maybe a corner case and slightly off-topic, but it would be really nice to be able to boot Haiku via PXE boot in our network infrastructure. This would make it so much easier for people to play with it casually. It seems[0] that there has been some effort to support this, but last time I tried (about 3 months a go), I couldn't get it boot with couple of hours effort (I know, may very well be user error ;-) ). If anyone from Haiku is reading, would be really cool if you also offered network bootable image by default that can successfully boot from 'standard' PXE boot server setup. [0] https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/network_booting/ https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/network_booting/

waddlesplash 8y ago
The PXE bootloader was broken following the merge of the package manager (which as this article implies, required changes to the boot process.) Nobody has taken the time to fix it again since then... help wanted, I guess.

pjmlp 8y ago

Being one of the first C++ OSes. I really enjoyed that feature. And having a certain Amiga feeling to its culture and multimedia capabilities.

xte 8y ago

Sincerely the sole BeOS concept I found really nice that is also by some extent in NEXT is the "fs database" or the ability to "query" storage by file types etc vs only access in a classic files/directories tree. On package management IMO Nix and derived Guix are real revolution...