19 ms·

Haiku R1/beta2 has been released

383 points by waddlesplash 6y ago

dmichulke 6y ago
Took me a while to figure out what it is: "While the first release(s) of Haiku will be very much like the BeOS R5, the operating system it is reimplementing ..."
- wtallis 6y ago
  The domain name is haiku-os.org. Every page includes an "About" link at the top, and the root page has a two-sentence description in a large font at the top. They really couldn't make it any easier to figure out what Haiku is.
  - dmichulke 6y ago
    The news release doesn't show a thing about what it is nor is there a link. The URL with an OS in the name tells me what category it is in but not the USP (I don't really get that from the two sentences either but at least it's something) So I went looking (not via Home or About because usually they are useless, YMMV) but via Documents. So here I am, saying that it took me a while to figure out what it was.
    - hundchenkatze 6y ago
      Wait, are you saying you wondered what this project is and you saw the "About" link at the top and decided not to click it? About pages are indeed useless if no one visits them.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - vhodges 6y ago
      There is no USP really... it's an OpenSource reimplementation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS (before your time?). Haiku has been around in some guise or other since the early 2000's. BeOS was/is pervasively threaded and took full advantage of multiple cores (a very novel thing when it came out - BeBox had two PPC processors). Similar projects include: ReactOS (Windows 2000), AROS (AmigaOS), FreeDOS (MS-DOS), FreeMiNT (Atari ST). I think there might even be one for OS/2
      - slantyyz 6y ago
        For all intents and purposes, if you had no exposure to BeOS, you won't really get why this project exists. It is so crazy to think that we could be living in a completely different world today had Apple opted to acquire BeOS instead of NeXT.
        toyg 6y ago
        I suspect Apple would have struggled to attract the amount of developers they did, by moving to a non-unix systems; which in turn might have hampered their efforts on mobile.
        slantyyz 6y ago
        Well the bigger impact is that Steve Jobs may not have ever returned to Apple.
snicker7 6y ago
I would love a faithful replication of the BeOS/Haiku desktop on Linux.
- waddlesplash 6y ago
  People have tried it before, but all those projects are now defunct. Ultimately it winds up being "just another Linux desktop environment", or even a mere reskin of another DE. The kind of deep system integration that is possible when the entire system is developed as one project is extremely difficult, if not actually impossible, to do in the Linux ecosystem.
  - willtim 6y ago
    Unfortunately as much as I love Linux, you are absolutely right. But I think it more of a social problem than a technical one.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    The main appeal of Haiku OS back in the day was its soft-realtime focus wrt. UX and multimedia, and you could get there quite easily with modern-day Linux. Especially if you add the PREEMPT_RT patchset and use the cgroups2 tuning knobs to improve priority of user-interaction tasks.
    - outworlder 6y ago
      The filesystem was pretty amazing too (and maybe still is?).
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Crazy idea: Have you ever thought of porting your desktop environment to Genode? ( https://genode.org/ https://genode.org/ ) And fully integrating their Sculpt into it? I mean, on Amd64 you are already binary incompatible, so that wouldn't count as an argument against it.
    - 6y ago
mullsork 6y ago
Congrats to the Haiku team! I recently started testing it out, hoping to contribute soon, and it's pretty neat. I last played with it 10 years ago, and it feels a lot more solid today. Really looking forward to what's in store for R2 when R1 is released!
return 6y ago
The actual R1/Beta 2 release notes provide more details on what's in this release [0]: [0] https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta2/release-notes/ https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta2/release-notes/
moreorless 6y ago
It has been a long long time since I gave Haiku a look. It is getting there. Setup on KVM took less than a minute. Looking nice. Networking seems a little slow when loading web pages, otherwise looks good. I miss WebPositive.
- extro 6y ago
  WebPositive is included.
  - moreorless 6y ago
    Yes. I know. I am posting from it right now.
colesantiago 6y ago
Interesting to see this isn't another linux distribution, but a real OS. Some of the software ported to this OS [0] (some not on this list but looking at their repo [1] ): LibreOffice Krita Telegram Jetbrains (PyCharm, ItelliJ) Rust, Node.JS, Python, Java 12 Qt Creator Arduino Obviously there's more in their repo, looking promising though. (Try find your favourite software in there!) [0] https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta2/release-notes#more-ported-software https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta2/release-notes#mor... [1] https://depot.haiku-os.org https://depot.haiku-os.org
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  Though IMO this misses the point of the OS which is the deep integration and fast UI the native APIs allow that these cross platform applications (and any application ported to Haiku through Qt and Java) ignore. There is no real reason to use Haiku over some Linux desktop (you can even make XFCE look kinda similar to Haiku/BeOS if you want) if the applications you use do not take advantage of it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - waddlesplash 6y ago
    As a Haiku developer (and user, naturally!) I have to disagree. Obviously native software would be preferred, just as it is on macOS, but I am pretty sure that macOS users will tell you that they still prefer macOS, even if they are using Firefox, or JetBrains, or Inkscape, etc., yes? The Linux desktop is a horribly fragmented and fragile ecosystem. Haiku lacks a lot of features the Linux kernel has, but the overall system architecture and design is significantly cleaner and less fundamentally fragile.
    - dingdingdang 6y ago
      Hey, thanks for your good work! Haiku is like "enjoyable computing" restarted, reminds me of the spirit of the Amiga with the stability of proper modern OS! :)
rwmj 6y ago
Haiku has a really lovely smooth "90s-style" graphical interface. Always responsive whether you run it locally or (as I more often do) run it in a VM.
charlesdaniels 6y ago
I'm glad to see Haiku is still making progress! I really enjoy the visual style of Haiku. The look-n-feel of it seems better to me than any other UI I've seen, and I say that as someone who never used BeOS, so it's not the nostalgia talking. It would be really cool if Haiku was able to get to a state were it's usable as a daily driver. I think having an OS and interface more focused on a single user at a graphical terminal rather than a multi-user system with graphics tacked on would be positive. BeFS also has some really great ideas that aren't replicated in other more modern FSes, namely it includes database-like functionality that enables some really neat features via a standardized interface, rather than hiding them away in vendor-specific file formats. If you're interested, Practical File System Design[0] uses beFS as it's example filesystem (and it's also a really good book in general). 0 - https://www.amazon.com/Practical-System-Design-Dominic-Giampaolo/dp/1558604979 https://www.amazon.com/Practical-System-Design-Dominic-Giamp...
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  I had Haiku installed for a while. I think it could be a pretty effective daily driver as-is, depending on what you need to do in your daily driving. (If you're a Peruvian long-haul mountain bus driver and failed to reveal that in your pre-qualification, then that's on you...)
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    What's the hardware support like?
    - themodelplumber 6y ago
      No idea really, except that I ran it on an old netbook, plugged in an external monitor and mouse, and that specific set of things worked great. This is what led me to install it rather than just running from the USB disk.
    - taborj 6y ago
      Running it on a USB stick will give you a great idea about hardware support.
croo 6y ago
I tried haiku back in 2011, it was a fun 2 hour then I forgot about it. Since that short experience, every other year news find me that it reached a new milestone. It does sound like fun to write a new os... but this project is at least 10 years old. How and why did it survive and reached beta? Why does it still exist? What practical applications does this OS has (or will have) over the commonly knowns?
- azinman2 6y ago
  Why do people work on old cars? For the love of it.
  - vvpan 6y ago
    So you are saying Haiku is a hobby project with no goal of being um... "production"? Are you sure that people building it feel the same way?
    - azinman2 6y ago
      Considering it's a small set of developers who all work part time re-implementing an OS from the 90s that failed when it was a commercial entity fully staffed, it's hard to imagine that they're super serious about it being a "production" OS.
      - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
        A couple quick comments: (1) While Be, Inc., failed, it's debatable whether it failed because the OS wasn't good enough. It was certainly being used in commercial production in certain places already -- not just by hobbyists. Steinberg was selling a BeOS version of their (very high-grade and expensive!) audio production system, Nuendo, and I actually saw Level Control Systems' CueStation, an "audio automation system" for Broadway-grade live performance systems, running on BeOS in the wild -- it was running the control booth of Cirque de Soleil's permanent installation at Disney World. BeOS was doing shockingly well in attracting commercial applications in 1997-1999 given its tiny user base -- what they were failing at was attracting hardware companies to ship pre-installed systems. Be's management was dead set on the idea that "steady and slow growth as a niche OS" just wouldn't do, and they needed to either be the next Apple or die trying. And, when they punted on desktop BeOS in favor of a custom version for what turned out to be the absolutely imaginary market for internet appliances, they pretty much chose "die trying." (2) I think it depends on what you mean by "production". I mean, it's probably never going to be competing with Linux servers. But is it possible it could be competitive with Linux as a desktop OS? Maybe. A few years ago I wouldn't have been that optimistic, but they've done a tremendous job with ports.
dang 6y ago
Those curious for more may wish to see also: 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099127 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15973918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15973918 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12566056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12566056 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5564766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5564766 2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123941 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334827 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820844 Sundry: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=comments%3E0%20haiku-os.org&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
aquabeagle 6y ago
I've tried Haiku a few times and liked it, but it feels like the beta label has been around forever and is not doing them any favors. It's 2020, you're not publishing software as a big-box release in stores, just cut a release already and then keep iterating! From Wikipedia: It wasn't until September, 2009 that Haiku reached its first milestone with the release of Haiku R1/Alpha 1. Then in November, 2012 the R1/Alpha 4.1 was released, while work continued on nightly builds.[8] On September 28, 2018, the Haiku R1/Beta 1 was released.[9] On June 9, 2020, Haiku R1/Beta 2 was released. Almost 11 years and it's still not out of beta?!
- the-dude 6y ago
  So what?
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    Beta means "not production-ready." (10+ years is an awfully long time for something to become production ready from the commercial standpoint.)
    - slantyyz 6y ago
      If you want to count back to its initial development, we're going back to 2001, almost two decades. I remember being optimistic/hopeful about the project in its earliest days (following its progress on OSNews). I wanted to see something like BeOS on x86 hardware after seeing how fast it ran on my first PC (after a long stint with Apple IIs and Macs). A lot has changed in those 19 years, but still, kudos to the team for sticking at it.
    - thesuitonym 6y ago
      >to become production ready from the commercial It's not a commercial product. Even if it was, what ever happened to releasing quality software? Sure, Google and Facebook release new builds constantly but everybody hates them. There used to be a time when a new version of software meant new features, not new bugs, and it seems like Haiku hearkens back to that time.
olah_1 6y ago
Hidden gem of the Haiku project is the "Learning to Code in C++" tutorials. https://www.haiku-os.org/development/ https://www.haiku-os.org/development/
MintelIE 6y ago
I used BeOS for a couple years in the 1990s as my exclusive OS. It had all the software I needed at the time. I especially liked the feature where you could clone your whole working system to another drive or partition, live. That actually saved me on a couple occasions, I would perform a weekly backup of my whole live system to a secondary drive. It's so nice to see this project making great progress.
memexy 6y ago
The ideals of Haiku are great but is anyone using it consistently? If they are what workflows benefit from Haiku's feature set? I understand the theoretical benefits. I'm curious if anyone is actually using Haiku features in some non-trivial way, e.g. > Database-like file system (BFS) with support for indexed metadata A filesystem with indexed metadata sounds great but who is actually using it and how? I tried to search for comments with the obvious phrases but all I found was this comment from 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1335692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1335692.
- jessermeyer 6y ago
  > A filesystem with indexed metadata sounds great but who is actually using it and how? One of my first sour experiences with NTFS was the horror involved in learning how to find which files have changed since some given time in a directory. I expected a SQL-ish interface but...omg. omg. The reason for tracking changes in files was for hot loading art assets into a running program.
  - memexy 6y ago
    Yup, filesystems in general should have a database/SQL interface. I'm currently using CouchDB and Apache Tika to index and search my files. It works but there is no way people who are not programmers would enjoy using such a system. It's extremely inelegant and requires constant context switching and I'd much rather be using an operating system that had all this functionality as part of the filesystem interface.
    - jessermeyer 6y ago
      A visual interface that sorts by type, file size, date time, name, etc, are just intuitive group_by SQL commands.
    - mycall 6y ago
      > Yup, filesystems in general should have a database/SQL interface That's basically what FILESTREAM is in SQL Server if you squint.
lordleft 6y ago
I remember folks who would wax nostalgic about BeOS, and claim it trounced Unix & Windows when it came to performance. Could anyone speak to the technical strengths / interesting aspects of this OS?
- kitotik 6y ago
  I think most of the perceived performance was a result of pervasive multi threading, which was novel at the time. For example, I remember being able to simultaneously play 5-6 mp3 files, load a web page, play an mpeg video, and browse the local file system while having complete UI responsiveness and no audible/visual glitches. This was pretty much unheard of at the time, especially on modest consumer hardware (pentium 2 ~350mhz IIRC)
  - slantyyz 6y ago
    Yeah that pretty much sums it up. The OS ran circles around pretty much any other OS you had running on the same hardware. I remember the OS installing in a crazy short amount of time.
    - einr 6y ago
      It booted in ~10 seconds on my Pentium II 266 system, which was a VERY BIG DEAL back then.
  - danans 6y ago
    IIRC, it was the only desktop OS at the time that used a separate OS thread per window, and each window had a asynchronous message queue which received objects of type BMessage. Programmers were admonished to quickly process the messages, or if they could not, to hand the task off to a different thread, so that the message queue was not blocked. In contrast, other platforms at the time used 1 process per app, and would block all the apps other windows from updating while the active window was processing, unless the developer made a point of multithreading their apps UI. Some platforms blocked the entire system UI if a window froze. Today lots of platforms use BeOS' paradigm, and it seems obvious in retrospect, but at the time, it was very novel.
jqpabc123 6y ago
Haiku looks like an interesting project. I like the concept and the consistent design, but ... it is still missing one critical feature ... a viable business model. Linux is an example of what to expect without this critical piece. Decades of manhours from some of the best and brightest, millions of lines of code ... and a miniscule marketshare on the desktop.
- mulmen 6y ago
  There are many successful businesses built on top of Linux. The install base of Linux is small on desktops but it's the most common OS on all other platforms.
  - jqpabc123 6y ago
    Yes, I know. Linux is most successful where only a shell interface is required. But this is not what Haiku is about.
    - zlynx 6y ago
      Cars. Airplanes. Space capsules. Coffee machines. Linux shows up everywhere. With a GUI.
      - jqpabc123 6y ago
        Dedicated, embedded, custom made, single purpose GUIs where the OS is buried so deep that most users will never find it. Again, not what Haiku is about.
        cmrdporcupine 6y ago
        your phone is a 'custom made' 'single purpose' GUI? android is linux
        jqpabc123 6y ago
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Sigh. Probably will try it later. Did try the R1/beta1, and had to fiddle in the BIOS to get usable output on secondary display (can't remember if i managed dual-screen) on intel graphics. Liked the look and feel of it, mostly. Because on the secondary display on 24"@1920X1200 the icons looked somehow stretched wide, but just a little. Not so on the internal 13"@1280x800. Question is: what to do with it? How stable is the FS? Where are the videos/intros which really show what i can do with it, which i can't with other desktops? Haven't found a really compelling reason so far. (Hmmm, seems like they updated their slideshows and list of videos...) Would FreeCiv stop slowing down to a crawl on larger maps in late game? Could i abuse AQEMU as performant dockerthingy for the applications i need?
- stOneskull 6y ago
  > Question is: what to do with it? perfect for an old 32 bit computer lying around. a computer for the grandparents. or the kids. or dual-boot into it for a focus for writing, with minimal distractions.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Dual-booting is a distraction to me. Could also blow up some editor into fullscreen while having no messengers/mails running and be done with it.
trarman 6y ago
I'm amazed! On a whim, I tried installing it to my old ASUS EEE 7" netbook. Everything seems to work! Haiku just breathed new life into that old device.
- UncleSlacky 6y ago
  I tried the last major beta release on my 701 4G, but couldn't get it to work, I think due to the minimum screen resolution requirements. I'll try again with this one - some people on the Haiku community forums reported success with their 7" netbooks.
miki123211 6y ago
How does Haiku's accessibility story look like? Any plans for a screen reader? Blind user here, I would like to try this out and see what all this fuss is about, but I think I can't. Can someone explain what's so great about Haiku's UI?
- waddlesplash 6y ago
  (Haiku developer here.) The way the UI is structured, creating a screen reader would not be too difficult, and I think one of our developers attempted it at one point, but it was certainly never finished and is not usable right now. Sorry :( Beyond the spirit of and compatibility with BeOS, Haiku's advantages are being full-fledged desktop operating system developed by a single team as a single unit (that is, unlike Linux or the BSDs where the kernel, window manager, GUI toolkit, application suite, etc. are developed by separate teams and combined by yet other groups); and also our occasionally unique approach to systems design and implementation (for instance, the Haiku package manager is based around a union mount of block-compressed filesystem images.) The UI itself is reminiscent of 1990s UIs (gradients, bevels, more saturated colors), with a modern feel (modern fonts, antialiasing, etc.) The window borders are not rectangular, but are instead yellow "tabs" which are only as wide as their text is, and so windows from separate applications can be "stacked" and used as a unit, like tabs within applications.
wodenokoto 6y ago
Legends of BeOS’s fast multimedia handling still lives on and I wonder if Haiku has some sort of edge today when it comes to playing multimedia or recording music?
- slantyyz 6y ago
  It was bonkers. I could barely play two videos simultaneously on my Pentium in Windows 9x, but I could play four simultaneously on the same box booted into BeOS. The OS was small and fast.
Koshkin 6y ago
So..... Why would Jane the User pick Haiku OS over, say, Ubuntu?
- jdboyd 6y ago
  Because she really wants something fringe and not really Unix. I'd be surprised if there was any user or developer that didn't do Haiku as a hobby. I've never heard of a single person making money from it.
  - waddlesplash 6y ago
    Well, you're about to: http://tunetrackersystems.com/ http://tunetrackersystems.com/
    - OldHand2018 6y ago
      I think that's really impressive. An expensive piece of software shipping an operating system to go along with it. And they have a video showing worldwide installations, demonstrating that it is a successful product. Well done!
- ecpottinger 6y ago
  Because if Jane the User tries to read the source code, the Linux versions are a real mess compared to what Haiku source reads like.
jug 6y ago
Interesting— two showstoppers for me fixed since Beta 1. USB 3 is now much better supported including as boot devices, and NVMe drives are now also supported. I might just be able to at least boot and see this! Judging by this, the traction actually sounds decent. Wait - what? It’s 10+ years old. Yes, but that was just two major improvements out of several, and during 20 months.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
By complete coincidence, today was the day that I finally decided to try Haiku on a spare laptop... and it just worked. Battery's recognized, display's running at full resolution (no VESA or whatever), wifi worked without issue. I'm typing this comment in WebPositive:) This is actually pretty great.
agambrahma 6y ago
I get (I think) how this is different from a Linux desktop, being developed in entirety as a single project, instead of being split into a kernel, and user-space distro, and fragmented apps on top of that, but ... is there a tl;dr on how this compares to (say) FreeBSD, which is another "kernel + user-space in one package" thing?
- waddlesplash 6y ago
  FreeBSD still runs X11 and a bunch of other applications on top of it to get a working desktop, and the result is ... even less pleasant than the Linux desktop, according to some reviews: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-linux-distro-review-freebsd-12-1-release/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-linux-d...
libx 6y ago
Haiku lags and will lag main stream operating systems regarding drivers for hardware. But if they could make it run in Raspberry Pis, with one set of hardware it would be awesome. A light weight operating system on a light weight computer. RPi's could be the killer "app" for Haiku.
- waddlesplash 6y ago
  Honestly the main way we lag right now is missing sleep support (nobody has attempted it) and 3D acceleration. Otherwise, Haiku runs on modern hardware just fine. I have a custom build from this year under my desk with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (8c16t), an NVMe drive, and Haiku boots off the NVMe and runs great with all 16 threads. It even can connect to the internet via the WiFi card on the motherboard.
  - hedora 6y ago
    I’m curious. I’ve long suspected hardware compatibility would get easier as everything moves into the same package as the CPU. Have things been playing out that way?
    - waddlesplash 6y ago
      Sort of. Things like USB, which past 1.0 has only one controller per generation, released the current controller design in 2010 with the first chipsets on the market in 2011. So that at least is less of a moving target than it once was. But, I mean, NVMe follows on SATA much like SATA followed on IDE, so on that front things are not so different. And for WiFi, there is not a common device interface for that, so each new generation of hardware from each manufacturer requires a large chunk of new driver code. Haiku reuses FreeBSD's WiFi drivers and 802.11 layer, but as you can see, they are having a hard time keeping up (only recently was one developer hired part-time to work on it, I believe.) So, it's kind of a wash, really -- on x86 commodity PC hardware, that is. Part of the reason Haiku on ARM still has not taken off is how wildly diverse that ecosystem is, especially how much of a moving target it is.
  - rcarmo 6y ago
qwerty456127 6y ago
It has one of (together with QNX Photon) the most beautiful widget look-and-feels I've ever seen. Can I have similar for Qt, Gtk and/or Windows?
noisy_boy 6y ago
Window stacking is one of the best features of Haiku. Gnome should consider useful features like this to improve the user experience.
- yyx 6y ago
  If they implement it, then it would be a hamburger menu.
  - noisy_boy 6y ago
    Its all three vertical dots and/or gear icon now. Only place I can see the hamburger menu is Firefox.
berry6 6y ago
It reminds me (maybe just for me) old Amiga OS called "Workbench". I mean I like this.
bjoli 6y ago
I just saw that it has guile and Emacs. Together with Firefox that means 99% of my computer usage is covered.
- anthk 6y ago
  WebPositive and/or Qupzilla/Falkon.

383 points by waddlesplash 6y ago

Took me a while to figure out what it is: "While the first release(s) of Haiku will be very much like the BeOS R5, the operating system it is reimplementing ..."

wtallis 6y ago
The domain name is haiku-os.org. Every page includes an "About" link at the top, and the root page has a two-sentence description in a large font at the top. They really couldn't make it any easier to figure out what Haiku is.
- dmichulke 6y ago
  The news release doesn't show a thing about what it is nor is there a link. The URL with an OS in the name tells me what category it is in but not the USP (I don't really get that from the two sentences either but at least it's something) So I went looking (not via Home or About because usually they are useless, YMMV) but via Documents. So here I am, saying that it took me a while to figure out what it was.
  - hundchenkatze 6y ago
    Wait, are you saying you wondered what this project is and you saw the "About" link at the top and decided not to click it? About pages are indeed useless if no one visits them.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - vhodges 6y ago
    There is no USP really... it's an OpenSource reimplementation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS (before your time?). Haiku has been around in some guise or other since the early 2000's. BeOS was/is pervasively threaded and took full advantage of multiple cores (a very novel thing when it came out - BeBox had two PPC processors). Similar projects include: ReactOS (Windows 2000), AROS (AmigaOS), FreeDOS (MS-DOS), FreeMiNT (Atari ST). I think there might even be one for OS/2
    - slantyyz 6y ago
      For all intents and purposes, if you had no exposure to BeOS, you won't really get why this project exists. It is so crazy to think that we could be living in a completely different world today had Apple opted to acquire BeOS instead of NeXT.
      - toyg 6y ago
        I suspect Apple would have struggled to attract the amount of developers they did, by moving to a non-unix systems; which in turn might have hampered their efforts on mobile.
        slantyyz 6y ago
        Well the bigger impact is that Steve Jobs may not have ever returned to Apple.

snicker7 6y ago

I would love a faithful replication of the BeOS/Haiku desktop on Linux.

waddlesplash 6y ago
People have tried it before, but all those projects are now defunct. Ultimately it winds up being "just another Linux desktop environment", or even a mere reskin of another DE. The kind of deep system integration that is possible when the entire system is developed as one project is extremely difficult, if not actually impossible, to do in the Linux ecosystem.
- willtim 6y ago
  Unfortunately as much as I love Linux, you are absolutely right. But I think it more of a social problem than a technical one.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  The main appeal of Haiku OS back in the day was its soft-realtime focus wrt. UX and multimedia, and you could get there quite easily with modern-day Linux. Especially if you add the PREEMPT_RT patchset and use the cgroups2 tuning knobs to improve priority of user-interaction tasks.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    The filesystem was pretty amazing too (and maybe still is?).
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Crazy idea: Have you ever thought of porting your desktop environment to Genode? ( https://genode.org/ https://genode.org/ ) And fully integrating their Sculpt into it? I mean, on Amd64 you are already binary incompatible, so that wouldn't count as an argument against it.
  - 6y ago

mullsork 6y ago

Congrats to the Haiku team! I recently started testing it out, hoping to contribute soon, and it's pretty neat. I last played with it 10 years ago, and it feels a lot more solid today. Really looking forward to what's in store for R2 when R1 is released!

return 6y ago

The actual R1/Beta 2 release notes provide more details on what's in this release [0]: [0] https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta2/release-notes/ https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta2/release-notes/

moreorless 6y ago

It has been a long long time since I gave Haiku a look. It is getting there. Setup on KVM took less than a minute. Looking nice. Networking seems a little slow when loading web pages, otherwise looks good. I miss WebPositive.

extro 6y ago
WebPositive is included.
- moreorless 6y ago
  Yes. I know. I am posting from it right now.

colesantiago 6y ago

Interesting to see this isn't another linux distribution, but a real OS. Some of the software ported to this OS [0] (some not on this list but looking at their repo [1] ): LibreOffice Krita Telegram Jetbrains (PyCharm, ItelliJ) Rust, Node.JS, Python, Java 12 Qt Creator Arduino Obviously there's more in their repo, looking promising though. (Try find your favourite software in there!) [0] https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta2/release-notes#more-ported-software https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta2/release-notes#mor... [1] https://depot.haiku-os.org https://depot.haiku-os.org

badsectoracula 6y ago
Though IMO this misses the point of the OS which is the deep integration and fast UI the native APIs allow that these cross platform applications (and any application ported to Haiku through Qt and Java) ignore. There is no real reason to use Haiku over some Linux desktop (you can even make XFCE look kinda similar to Haiku/BeOS if you want) if the applications you use do not take advantage of it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- waddlesplash 6y ago
  As a Haiku developer (and user, naturally!) I have to disagree. Obviously native software would be preferred, just as it is on macOS, but I am pretty sure that macOS users will tell you that they still prefer macOS, even if they are using Firefox, or JetBrains, or Inkscape, etc., yes? The Linux desktop is a horribly fragmented and fragile ecosystem. Haiku lacks a lot of features the Linux kernel has, but the overall system architecture and design is significantly cleaner and less fundamentally fragile.
  - dingdingdang 6y ago
    Hey, thanks for your good work! Haiku is like "enjoyable computing" restarted, reminds me of the spirit of the Amiga with the stability of proper modern OS! :)

rwmj 6y ago

Haiku has a really lovely smooth "90s-style" graphical interface. Always responsive whether you run it locally or (as I more often do) run it in a VM.

charlesdaniels 6y ago

I'm glad to see Haiku is still making progress! I really enjoy the visual style of Haiku. The look-n-feel of it seems better to me than any other UI I've seen, and I say that as someone who never used BeOS, so it's not the nostalgia talking. It would be really cool if Haiku was able to get to a state were it's usable as a daily driver. I think having an OS and interface more focused on a single user at a graphical terminal rather than a multi-user system with graphics tacked on would be positive. BeFS also has some really great ideas that aren't replicated in other more modern FSes, namely it includes database-like functionality that enables some really neat features via a standardized interface, rather than hiding them away in vendor-specific file formats. If you're interested, Practical File System Design[0] uses beFS as it's example filesystem (and it's also a really good book in general). 0 - https://www.amazon.com/Practical-System-Design-Dominic-Giampaolo/dp/1558604979 https://www.amazon.com/Practical-System-Design-Dominic-Giamp...

themodelplumber 6y ago
I had Haiku installed for a while. I think it could be a pretty effective daily driver as-is, depending on what you need to do in your daily driving. (If you're a Peruvian long-haul mountain bus driver and failed to reveal that in your pre-qualification, then that's on you...)
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  What's the hardware support like?
  - themodelplumber 6y ago
    No idea really, except that I ran it on an old netbook, plugged in an external monitor and mouse, and that specific set of things worked great. This is what led me to install it rather than just running from the USB disk.
  - taborj 6y ago
    Running it on a USB stick will give you a great idea about hardware support.

croo 6y ago

I tried haiku back in 2011, it was a fun 2 hour then I forgot about it. Since that short experience, every other year news find me that it reached a new milestone. It does sound like fun to write a new os... but this project is at least 10 years old. How and why did it survive and reached beta? Why does it still exist? What practical applications does this OS has (or will have) over the commonly knowns?

azinman2 6y ago
Why do people work on old cars? For the love of it.
- vvpan 6y ago
  So you are saying Haiku is a hobby project with no goal of being um... "production"? Are you sure that people building it feel the same way?
  - azinman2 6y ago
    Considering it's a small set of developers who all work part time re-implementing an OS from the 90s that failed when it was a commercial entity fully staffed, it's hard to imagine that they're super serious about it being a "production" OS.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      A couple quick comments: (1) While Be, Inc., failed, it's debatable whether it failed because the OS wasn't good enough. It was certainly being used in commercial production in certain places already -- not just by hobbyists. Steinberg was selling a BeOS version of their (very high-grade and expensive!) audio production system, Nuendo, and I actually saw Level Control Systems' CueStation, an "audio automation system" for Broadway-grade live performance systems, running on BeOS in the wild -- it was running the control booth of Cirque de Soleil's permanent installation at Disney World. BeOS was doing shockingly well in attracting commercial applications in 1997-1999 given its tiny user base -- what they were failing at was attracting hardware companies to ship pre-installed systems. Be's management was dead set on the idea that "steady and slow growth as a niche OS" just wouldn't do, and they needed to either be the next Apple or die trying. And, when they punted on desktop BeOS in favor of a custom version for what turned out to be the absolutely imaginary market for internet appliances, they pretty much chose "die trying." (2) I think it depends on what you mean by "production". I mean, it's probably never going to be competing with Linux servers. But is it possible it could be competitive with Linux as a desktop OS? Maybe. A few years ago I wouldn't have been that optimistic, but they've done a tremendous job with ports.

dang 6y ago

Those curious for more may wish to see also: 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099127 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15973918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15973918 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12566056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12566056 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5564766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5564766 2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123941 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334827 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820844 Sundry: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=comments%3E0%20haiku-os.org&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

aquabeagle 6y ago

I've tried Haiku a few times and liked it, but it feels like the beta label has been around forever and is not doing them any favors. It's 2020, you're not publishing software as a big-box release in stores, just cut a release already and then keep iterating! From Wikipedia: It wasn't until September, 2009 that Haiku reached its first milestone with the release of Haiku R1/Alpha 1. Then in November, 2012 the R1/Alpha 4.1 was released, while work continued on nightly builds.[8] On September 28, 2018, the Haiku R1/Beta 1 was released.[9] On June 9, 2020, Haiku R1/Beta 2 was released. Almost 11 years and it's still not out of beta?!

the-dude 6y ago
So what?
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Beta means "not production-ready." (10+ years is an awfully long time for something to become production ready from the commercial standpoint.)
  - slantyyz 6y ago
    If you want to count back to its initial development, we're going back to 2001, almost two decades. I remember being optimistic/hopeful about the project in its earliest days (following its progress on OSNews). I wanted to see something like BeOS on x86 hardware after seeing how fast it ran on my first PC (after a long stint with Apple IIs and Macs). A lot has changed in those 19 years, but still, kudos to the team for sticking at it.
  - thesuitonym 6y ago
    >to become production ready from the commercial It's not a commercial product. Even if it was, what ever happened to releasing quality software? Sure, Google and Facebook release new builds constantly but everybody hates them. There used to be a time when a new version of software meant new features, not new bugs, and it seems like Haiku hearkens back to that time.

olah_1 6y ago

Hidden gem of the Haiku project is the "Learning to Code in C++" tutorials. https://www.haiku-os.org/development/ https://www.haiku-os.org/development/

MintelIE 6y ago

I used BeOS for a couple years in the 1990s as my exclusive OS. It had all the software I needed at the time. I especially liked the feature where you could clone your whole working system to another drive or partition, live. That actually saved me on a couple occasions, I would perform a weekly backup of my whole live system to a secondary drive. It's so nice to see this project making great progress.

memexy 6y ago

The ideals of Haiku are great but is anyone using it consistently? If they are what workflows benefit from Haiku's feature set? I understand the theoretical benefits. I'm curious if anyone is actually using Haiku features in some non-trivial way, e.g. > Database-like file system (BFS) with support for indexed metadata A filesystem with indexed metadata sounds great but who is actually using it and how? I tried to search for comments with the obvious phrases but all I found was this comment from 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1335692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1335692.

jessermeyer 6y ago
> A filesystem with indexed metadata sounds great but who is actually using it and how? One of my first sour experiences with NTFS was the horror involved in learning how to find which files have changed since some given time in a directory. I expected a SQL-ish interface but...omg. omg. The reason for tracking changes in files was for hot loading art assets into a running program.
- memexy 6y ago
  Yup, filesystems in general should have a database/SQL interface. I'm currently using CouchDB and Apache Tika to index and search my files. It works but there is no way people who are not programmers would enjoy using such a system. It's extremely inelegant and requires constant context switching and I'd much rather be using an operating system that had all this functionality as part of the filesystem interface.
  - jessermeyer 6y ago
    A visual interface that sorts by type, file size, date time, name, etc, are just intuitive group_by SQL commands.
  - mycall 6y ago
    > Yup, filesystems in general should have a database/SQL interface That's basically what FILESTREAM is in SQL Server if you squint.

lordleft 6y ago

I remember folks who would wax nostalgic about BeOS, and claim it trounced Unix & Windows when it came to performance. Could anyone speak to the technical strengths / interesting aspects of this OS?

kitotik 6y ago
I think most of the perceived performance was a result of pervasive multi threading, which was novel at the time. For example, I remember being able to simultaneously play 5-6 mp3 files, load a web page, play an mpeg video, and browse the local file system while having complete UI responsiveness and no audible/visual glitches. This was pretty much unheard of at the time, especially on modest consumer hardware (pentium 2 ~350mhz IIRC)
- slantyyz 6y ago
  Yeah that pretty much sums it up. The OS ran circles around pretty much any other OS you had running on the same hardware. I remember the OS installing in a crazy short amount of time.
  - einr 6y ago
    It booted in ~10 seconds on my Pentium II 266 system, which was a VERY BIG DEAL back then.
- danans 6y ago
  IIRC, it was the only desktop OS at the time that used a separate OS thread per window, and each window had a asynchronous message queue which received objects of type BMessage. Programmers were admonished to quickly process the messages, or if they could not, to hand the task off to a different thread, so that the message queue was not blocked. In contrast, other platforms at the time used 1 process per app, and would block all the apps other windows from updating while the active window was processing, unless the developer made a point of multithreading their apps UI. Some platforms blocked the entire system UI if a window froze. Today lots of platforms use BeOS' paradigm, and it seems obvious in retrospect, but at the time, it was very novel.

jqpabc123 6y ago

Haiku looks like an interesting project. I like the concept and the consistent design, but ... it is still missing one critical feature ... a viable business model. Linux is an example of what to expect without this critical piece. Decades of manhours from some of the best and brightest, millions of lines of code ... and a miniscule marketshare on the desktop.

mulmen 6y ago
There are many successful businesses built on top of Linux. The install base of Linux is small on desktops but it's the most common OS on all other platforms.
- jqpabc123 6y ago
  Yes, I know. Linux is most successful where only a shell interface is required. But this is not what Haiku is about.
  - zlynx 6y ago
    Cars. Airplanes. Space capsules. Coffee machines. Linux shows up everywhere. With a GUI.
    - jqpabc123 6y ago
      Dedicated, embedded, custom made, single purpose GUIs where the OS is buried so deep that most users will never find it. Again, not what Haiku is about.
      - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
        your phone is a 'custom made' 'single purpose' GUI? android is linux
        jqpabc123 6y ago

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

Sigh. Probably will try it later. Did try the R1/beta1, and had to fiddle in the BIOS to get usable output on secondary display (can't remember if i managed dual-screen) on intel graphics. Liked the look and feel of it, mostly. Because on the secondary display on 24"@1920X1200 the icons looked somehow stretched wide, but just a little. Not so on the internal 13"@1280x800. Question is: what to do with it? How stable is the FS? Where are the videos/intros which really show what i can do with it, which i can't with other desktops? Haven't found a really compelling reason so far. (Hmmm, seems like they updated their slideshows and list of videos...) Would FreeCiv stop slowing down to a crawl on larger maps in late game? Could i abuse AQEMU as performant dockerthingy for the applications i need?

stOneskull 6y ago
> Question is: what to do with it? perfect for an old 32 bit computer lying around. a computer for the grandparents. or the kids. or dual-boot into it for a focus for writing, with minimal distractions.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Dual-booting is a distraction to me. Could also blow up some editor into fullscreen while having no messengers/mails running and be done with it.

trarman 6y ago

I'm amazed! On a whim, I tried installing it to my old ASUS EEE 7" netbook. Everything seems to work! Haiku just breathed new life into that old device.

UncleSlacky 6y ago
I tried the last major beta release on my 701 4G, but couldn't get it to work, I think due to the minimum screen resolution requirements. I'll try again with this one - some people on the Haiku community forums reported success with their 7" netbooks.

miki123211 6y ago

How does Haiku's accessibility story look like? Any plans for a screen reader? Blind user here, I would like to try this out and see what all this fuss is about, but I think I can't. Can someone explain what's so great about Haiku's UI?

waddlesplash 6y ago
(Haiku developer here.) The way the UI is structured, creating a screen reader would not be too difficult, and I think one of our developers attempted it at one point, but it was certainly never finished and is not usable right now. Sorry :( Beyond the spirit of and compatibility with BeOS, Haiku's advantages are being full-fledged desktop operating system developed by a single team as a single unit (that is, unlike Linux or the BSDs where the kernel, window manager, GUI toolkit, application suite, etc. are developed by separate teams and combined by yet other groups); and also our occasionally unique approach to systems design and implementation (for instance, the Haiku package manager is based around a union mount of block-compressed filesystem images.) The UI itself is reminiscent of 1990s UIs (gradients, bevels, more saturated colors), with a modern feel (modern fonts, antialiasing, etc.) The window borders are not rectangular, but are instead yellow "tabs" which are only as wide as their text is, and so windows from separate applications can be "stacked" and used as a unit, like tabs within applications.

wodenokoto 6y ago

Legends of BeOS’s fast multimedia handling still lives on and I wonder if Haiku has some sort of edge today when it comes to playing multimedia or recording music?

slantyyz 6y ago
It was bonkers. I could barely play two videos simultaneously on my Pentium in Windows 9x, but I could play four simultaneously on the same box booted into BeOS. The OS was small and fast.

Koshkin 6y ago

So..... Why would Jane the User pick Haiku OS over, say, Ubuntu?

jdboyd 6y ago
Because she really wants something fringe and not really Unix. I'd be surprised if there was any user or developer that didn't do Haiku as a hobby. I've never heard of a single person making money from it.
- waddlesplash 6y ago
  Well, you're about to: http://tunetrackersystems.com/ http://tunetrackersystems.com/
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    I think that's really impressive. An expensive piece of software shipping an operating system to go along with it. And they have a video showing worldwide installations, demonstrating that it is a successful product. Well done!
ecpottinger 6y ago
Because if Jane the User tries to read the source code, the Linux versions are a real mess compared to what Haiku source reads like.

jug 6y ago

Interesting— two showstoppers for me fixed since Beta 1. USB 3 is now much better supported including as boot devices, and NVMe drives are now also supported. I might just be able to at least boot and see this! Judging by this, the traction actually sounds decent. Wait - what? It’s 10+ years old. Yes, but that was just two major improvements out of several, and during 20 months.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

By complete coincidence, today was the day that I finally decided to try Haiku on a spare laptop... and it just worked. Battery's recognized, display's running at full resolution (no VESA or whatever), wifi worked without issue. I'm typing this comment in WebPositive:) This is actually pretty great.

agambrahma 6y ago

I get (I think) how this is different from a Linux desktop, being developed in entirety as a single project, instead of being split into a kernel, and user-space distro, and fragmented apps on top of that, but ... is there a tl;dr on how this compares to (say) FreeBSD, which is another "kernel + user-space in one package" thing?

waddlesplash 6y ago
FreeBSD still runs X11 and a bunch of other applications on top of it to get a working desktop, and the result is ... even less pleasant than the Linux desktop, according to some reviews: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-linux-distro-review-freebsd-12-1-release/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-linux-d...

libx 6y ago

Haiku lags and will lag main stream operating systems regarding drivers for hardware. But if they could make it run in Raspberry Pis, with one set of hardware it would be awesome. A light weight operating system on a light weight computer. RPi's could be the killer "app" for Haiku.

waddlesplash 6y ago
Honestly the main way we lag right now is missing sleep support (nobody has attempted it) and 3D acceleration. Otherwise, Haiku runs on modern hardware just fine. I have a custom build from this year under my desk with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (8c16t), an NVMe drive, and Haiku boots off the NVMe and runs great with all 16 threads. It even can connect to the internet via the WiFi card on the motherboard.
- hedora 6y ago
  I’m curious. I’ve long suspected hardware compatibility would get easier as everything moves into the same package as the CPU. Have things been playing out that way?
  - waddlesplash 6y ago
    Sort of. Things like USB, which past 1.0 has only one controller per generation, released the current controller design in 2010 with the first chipsets on the market in 2011. So that at least is less of a moving target than it once was. But, I mean, NVMe follows on SATA much like SATA followed on IDE, so on that front things are not so different. And for WiFi, there is not a common device interface for that, so each new generation of hardware from each manufacturer requires a large chunk of new driver code. Haiku reuses FreeBSD's WiFi drivers and 802.11 layer, but as you can see, they are having a hard time keeping up (only recently was one developer hired part-time to work on it, I believe.) So, it's kind of a wash, really -- on x86 commodity PC hardware, that is. Part of the reason Haiku on ARM still has not taken off is how wildly diverse that ecosystem is, especially how much of a moving target it is.
- rcarmo 6y ago

qwerty456127 6y ago

It has one of (together with QNX Photon) the most beautiful widget look-and-feels I've ever seen. Can I have similar for Qt, Gtk and/or Windows?

noisy_boy 6y ago

Window stacking is one of the best features of Haiku. Gnome should consider useful features like this to improve the user experience.

yyx 6y ago
If they implement it, then it would be a hamburger menu.
- noisy_boy 6y ago
  Its all three vertical dots and/or gear icon now. Only place I can see the hamburger menu is Firefox.

berry6 6y ago

It reminds me (maybe just for me) old Amiga OS called "Workbench". I mean I like this.

bjoli 6y ago

I just saw that it has guile and Emacs. Together with Firefox that means 99% of my computer usage is covered.

anthk 6y ago
WebPositive and/or Qupzilla/Falkon.