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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

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! :)
- waddlesplash 6y ago
  Thanks! :)
72deluxe 6y ago
Is there any good intro on how to get developing under Haiku? I seem to remember there being a wxWidgets port years ago but the documentation regarding it is scant. I would like to know which development environment I could use (Qt Creator perhaps?) and get to writing some apps on it as I really enjoyed using Haiku and BeOS for fun. Do you have any tips or pointers? Thanks in advance
- waddlesplash 6y ago
  There is wxQt running on top of the Qt5 port, yes, but it isn't that well used. I know someone got Code::Blocks running under it, but they were working on some issues in the wx port still. Development should be like it is under Linux with that. Qt Creator is indeed in the depots and works pretty well, so you can use that. If you have more questions, feel free to find us on IRC (Freenode#haiku), the forums, the mailing lists, the bug tracker, or (for ported software) on GitHub (@haikuports/haikuports). Or continue asking here if you prefer :)
- VZ 6y ago
  The really interesting thing would be to have a wx port using the native API for it, but unfortunately the last time I heard about wxBe was in the last century...
- tqh 6y ago
  Haiku has it own set of API's, that is a bit different than other platforms (message passing, multi-threaded). The UI API's is defined in the Interface Kit. See https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/ https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/ Here is the code for the Magnify App in Haiku: https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/src/apps/magnify/Magnify.cpp https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/src/apps/magnify/...
reddotX 6y ago
the fragmentation is in the non Ubuntu distros. Ubuntu alone has probably 70% linux market share
- waddlesplash 6y ago
  That's not what I mean by "fragmentation"; I mean that the Linux desktop is a collection of different software projects (GRUB, the kernel, X11, ALSA, systemd, GNOME, ...) which are combined to form the operating system proper. Ubuntu is just as fragmented as any other distribution here. In Haiku, on the other hand, the bootloader, the kernel, window manager / display server, init system, base applications, etc. are all developed by one team in one source code repository.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    Ha. Recommended exercise for people who might be inclined to believe this hogwash: Go find where in that "one source code repository" for Haiku they implement RSA to make their web browser work. You won't find it. After a while you'll dig down to a layer that just calls OpenSSL, the same OpenSSL you'd be calling on a Linux distribution. Was this developed by Haiku's "one team" in their "one source code repository"? No of course not and yet here it is, foundational to their operating system.
    - waddlesplash 6y ago
      Okay. And the same is true of macOS; they use LibreSSL. We also use libpng, libgif, libjpeg, etc. and of course WebKit for the web browser. Nobody is claiming that this is a 100%-from-scratch-no-reuse-allowed project. What's your point?
      - wadera 6y ago
        To use Haiku in a decent way (not complete, but close enough), you need to use all the Qt and other ported software. So your arguments don't stand.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
What do you view as fragile about Linux distros? Just the lack of tight integration, or something else?
- waddlesplash 6y ago
  See my reply to reddotX below for the "theory"; in practice, this winds up causing all kinds of breakage when e.g. you are using a "non-default" configuration, and then upgrading fails to change some critical line in a configuration file, and now you have no audio out and must spend multiple hours Googling to even find an error message and install a missing package and start a daemon manually (true story, happened to me on Kubuntu some years ago.) Or you want to use Xrdp to connect to your desktop via Windows RDP, but the default shipped configuration enables the wrong plugin, so you can connect but get cryptic errors when signing in, so you have to edit the Xrdp configuration file and change the plugin load order and then restart X11 while signed in via SSH (happened to me a few months ago, on 18.04 LTS.) Those are just two examples off the top of my head; back when I did use Linux as a daily driver, I would spend multiple hours a month fixing something that got broken or did not work as it was supposed to, and this was just on Ubuntu, not even on Arch or some more up-to-date distro like that.
  - hedora 6y ago
    > and this was just on Ubuntu I’ve been a desktop Linux user for at least 27 years (pre 1.0 days), and I can’t get Ubuntu to work at all anymore. (Ubuntu was my daily driver for over ten years.) I agree with the sentiment that Linux stability isn’t where it should be. I swear it used to be better. I’m definitely looking for a new OS. OpenBSD is on my list. I think I’ll give Haiku a spin. I liked BeOS back in the day, but couldn’t afford hardware it ran well on.
nix23 6y ago
WoW thank you very much for working on that OS, as a Desktop OS it's blazing fast! Have matured non-native 'apps' is a big YESYES, it flattens the adaption curve. Hope more peoples test Haiku, they will love it, its so fast and un-bloated and still has everything a Desktop OS need's...oh man and the startup...i mean even OpenBSD feels bloated, the booting time is phenomenal.
jqpabc123 6y ago
Haiku lacks a lot of features the Linux kernel has, but the overall system architecture and design is significantly cleaner and less fundamentally fragile. Yes, absolutely, spot on. But an OS does not exist on it's own. I'm afraid it will all be for naught unless you (or someone) has a viable business model to push the surrounding ecosystem forward.
- azinman2 6y ago
  I don’t think anyone is suggesting Haiku to compete against windows or macOS. It seems to be more of a hobby play than anything else. The real company failed trying to commercialize this — why would a design from the 90s be commercially viable now when the main selling features are standard, and all the innovation is on phones anyway?
  - tekknik 6y ago
    And how can one even make money selling an OS these days? They may have a small marketshare from techies wanting it for fun but turning this into an actual business I would think would be very difficult these days.
badsectoracula 6y ago
I never implied that the Haiku developers would dislike these applications, so i'm not sure you being a Haiku developer has anything to do with your disagreement. And yes, macOS users probably also tell you that they prefer macOS, though note that they also are often very loud about preferring software that takes advantage of their OS' features because this is why they use that OS. The thing is, macOS has a much richer selection of software than Haiku has (and most likely, ever have) so macOS users at least can fall back to those. But if all you are going to use on Haiku is ported software that ignores native APIs then what is the point of using an OS with less hardware support and features? The Linux desktop being fragmented doesn't mean much - your Qt application ported to Haiku will also work on KDE perfectly fine and chances are even if you limit your software selection to Qt-only applications, you'll still have more applications to work with. Though that fragmentation is really a poor description since there are standards you can rely on, like X11 - sure someone might be using Gnome or XFCE or Window Maker or i3 or whatever as their desktop, but applications do not target those environments, they target a lower level of the stack that is shared among these and making an application on XFCE doesn't mean it'll only run under XFCE. So yeah, it might look fragmented, but unless you are some custom support worker that tries to navigate someone through the UI via phone, that isn't much of an issue in practice (and "in practice" is the important bit here because the reasons i've seen people put forth for having Qt/Java applications ported to Haiku and ignore Haiku's own APIs are all about practicality - which ignores the elephant in the room which is that if you care about practicality using Haiku in the first place wouldn't be a good choice anyway).
- return 6y ago
  > But if all you are going to use on Haiku is ported software that ignores native APIs then what is the point of using an OS with less hardware support and features? Haiku already has its own third-party 'native apps' that directly use its APIs and also promotes them in HaikuDepot [0]. Users from other OSes will always ask for other apps and if the OS has a 'modern browser' even when WebPositive is based on the same technology as Safari. i.e, WebKit. But they'll still ask for Firefox and Chrome. The fragmentation argument can be made from a maintenance point of view. For typical platform support, it's easier to maintain and target one OS that has a single unified stack and SDKs (GUI toolkit, sound, input APIs, etc) than to do this on multiple distros and to only officially support 5 Linux distros, which is why Windows and Mac are always targeted easily. There is no 'standard' SDK on Linux distros, which is why one user could be using ALSA or OSS, X11, XWayland or pure Wayland with Sway, etc. Haiku has first-party default system components which it maintains. It also sits in middle of macOS and Linux, being that its open-source like Linux and has a standard defaults and a SDK like macOS. So maintenance-wise, maintaining one of each OS like macOS or Windows sounds less expensive than targeting 3 separate distros here. [0] https://depot.haiku-os.org/ https://depot.haiku-os.org/
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
> 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? To an extent, most of my software is cross platform and most runs better on Windows but the only real app keeping me on MacOS is TextMate. If I couldn't use that anymore I'd probably just switch fully to windows. Ported apps are great for extremely complicated things but then there are other parts where there is a lot of UX benefit if the soul of the OS shines through them.
wadera 6y ago
As a long time BeOS (and Haiku) developer, I agree that the design is significantly cleaner. Your argument however is significantly false. Haiku has several design problems in the Kernel and the Filesystem, any serious use other than hobbyist is quite limited. Definitely Linux could have a better Desktop, but saying that the Haiku design is less fundamentally fragile is a complete lie. Linux desktop may be more conservative, and may not really adhere to a truly common standard, but they offer several orders of magnitude more what Haiku could hope to have by far. This includes Security, IPC capabilities, Virtualization, Containerization. Android is an example of a Linux platform, that still retains an high number of native apps, coherence of UI etc.
- waddlesplash 6y ago
  Linux has a lot more features than Haiku, for sure, but a lot of these are oriented towards servers, which we probably will never implement because we are not targeting servers. Obviously there are others which we will eventually implement, sooner or later (like virtualization). However, I have no idea what you mean when you say that Haiku's kernel and filesystem has "several design problems."

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! :)

waddlesplash 6y ago
Thanks! :)

72deluxe 6y ago

Is there any good intro on how to get developing under Haiku? I seem to remember there being a wxWidgets port years ago but the documentation regarding it is scant. I would like to know which development environment I could use (Qt Creator perhaps?) and get to writing some apps on it as I really enjoyed using Haiku and BeOS for fun. Do you have any tips or pointers? Thanks in advance

waddlesplash 6y ago
There is wxQt running on top of the Qt5 port, yes, but it isn't that well used. I know someone got Code::Blocks running under it, but they were working on some issues in the wx port still. Development should be like it is under Linux with that. Qt Creator is indeed in the depots and works pretty well, so you can use that. If you have more questions, feel free to find us on IRC (Freenode#haiku), the forums, the mailing lists, the bug tracker, or (for ported software) on GitHub (@haikuports/haikuports). Or continue asking here if you prefer :)
VZ 6y ago
The really interesting thing would be to have a wx port using the native API for it, but unfortunately the last time I heard about wxBe was in the last century...
tqh 6y ago
Haiku has it own set of API's, that is a bit different than other platforms (message passing, multi-threaded). The UI API's is defined in the Interface Kit. See https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/ https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/ Here is the code for the Magnify App in Haiku: https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/src/apps/magnify/Magnify.cpp https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/src/apps/magnify/...

reddotX 6y ago

the fragmentation is in the non Ubuntu distros. Ubuntu alone has probably 70% linux market share

waddlesplash 6y ago
That's not what I mean by "fragmentation"; I mean that the Linux desktop is a collection of different software projects (GRUB, the kernel, X11, ALSA, systemd, GNOME, ...) which are combined to form the operating system proper. Ubuntu is just as fragmented as any other distribution here. In Haiku, on the other hand, the bootloader, the kernel, window manager / display server, init system, base applications, etc. are all developed by one team in one source code repository.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  Ha. Recommended exercise for people who might be inclined to believe this hogwash: Go find where in that "one source code repository" for Haiku they implement RSA to make their web browser work. You won't find it. After a while you'll dig down to a layer that just calls OpenSSL, the same OpenSSL you'd be calling on a Linux distribution. Was this developed by Haiku's "one team" in their "one source code repository"? No of course not and yet here it is, foundational to their operating system.
  - waddlesplash 6y ago
    Okay. And the same is true of macOS; they use LibreSSL. We also use libpng, libgif, libjpeg, etc. and of course WebKit for the web browser. Nobody is claiming that this is a 100%-from-scratch-no-reuse-allowed project. What's your point?
    - wadera 6y ago
      To use Haiku in a decent way (not complete, but close enough), you need to use all the Qt and other ported software. So your arguments don't stand.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

What do you view as fragile about Linux distros? Just the lack of tight integration, or something else?

waddlesplash 6y ago
See my reply to reddotX below for the "theory"; in practice, this winds up causing all kinds of breakage when e.g. you are using a "non-default" configuration, and then upgrading fails to change some critical line in a configuration file, and now you have no audio out and must spend multiple hours Googling to even find an error message and install a missing package and start a daemon manually (true story, happened to me on Kubuntu some years ago.) Or you want to use Xrdp to connect to your desktop via Windows RDP, but the default shipped configuration enables the wrong plugin, so you can connect but get cryptic errors when signing in, so you have to edit the Xrdp configuration file and change the plugin load order and then restart X11 while signed in via SSH (happened to me a few months ago, on 18.04 LTS.) Those are just two examples off the top of my head; back when I did use Linux as a daily driver, I would spend multiple hours a month fixing something that got broken or did not work as it was supposed to, and this was just on Ubuntu, not even on Arch or some more up-to-date distro like that.
- hedora 6y ago
  > and this was just on Ubuntu I’ve been a desktop Linux user for at least 27 years (pre 1.0 days), and I can’t get Ubuntu to work at all anymore. (Ubuntu was my daily driver for over ten years.) I agree with the sentiment that Linux stability isn’t where it should be. I swear it used to be better. I’m definitely looking for a new OS. OpenBSD is on my list. I think I’ll give Haiku a spin. I liked BeOS back in the day, but couldn’t afford hardware it ran well on.

nix23 6y ago

WoW thank you very much for working on that OS, as a Desktop OS it's blazing fast! Have matured non-native 'apps' is a big YESYES, it flattens the adaption curve. Hope more peoples test Haiku, they will love it, its so fast and un-bloated and still has everything a Desktop OS need's...oh man and the startup...i mean even OpenBSD feels bloated, the booting time is phenomenal.

jqpabc123 6y ago

Haiku lacks a lot of features the Linux kernel has, but the overall system architecture and design is significantly cleaner and less fundamentally fragile. Yes, absolutely, spot on. But an OS does not exist on it's own. I'm afraid it will all be for naught unless you (or someone) has a viable business model to push the surrounding ecosystem forward.

azinman2 6y ago
I don’t think anyone is suggesting Haiku to compete against windows or macOS. It seems to be more of a hobby play than anything else. The real company failed trying to commercialize this — why would a design from the 90s be commercially viable now when the main selling features are standard, and all the innovation is on phones anyway?
- tekknik 6y ago
  And how can one even make money selling an OS these days? They may have a small marketshare from techies wanting it for fun but turning this into an actual business I would think would be very difficult these days.

badsectoracula 6y ago

I never implied that the Haiku developers would dislike these applications, so i'm not sure you being a Haiku developer has anything to do with your disagreement. And yes, macOS users probably also tell you that they prefer macOS, though note that they also are often very loud about preferring software that takes advantage of their OS' features because this is why they use that OS. The thing is, macOS has a much richer selection of software than Haiku has (and most likely, ever have) so macOS users at least can fall back to those. But if all you are going to use on Haiku is ported software that ignores native APIs then what is the point of using an OS with less hardware support and features? The Linux desktop being fragmented doesn't mean much - your Qt application ported to Haiku will also work on KDE perfectly fine and chances are even if you limit your software selection to Qt-only applications, you'll still have more applications to work with. Though that fragmentation is really a poor description since there are standards you can rely on, like X11 - sure someone might be using Gnome or XFCE or Window Maker or i3 or whatever as their desktop, but applications do not target those environments, they target a lower level of the stack that is shared among these and making an application on XFCE doesn't mean it'll only run under XFCE. So yeah, it might look fragmented, but unless you are some custom support worker that tries to navigate someone through the UI via phone, that isn't much of an issue in practice (and "in practice" is the important bit here because the reasons i've seen people put forth for having Qt/Java applications ported to Haiku and ignore Haiku's own APIs are all about practicality - which ignores the elephant in the room which is that if you care about practicality using Haiku in the first place wouldn't be a good choice anyway).

return 6y ago
> But if all you are going to use on Haiku is ported software that ignores native APIs then what is the point of using an OS with less hardware support and features? Haiku already has its own third-party 'native apps' that directly use its APIs and also promotes them in HaikuDepot [0]. Users from other OSes will always ask for other apps and if the OS has a 'modern browser' even when WebPositive is based on the same technology as Safari. i.e, WebKit. But they'll still ask for Firefox and Chrome. The fragmentation argument can be made from a maintenance point of view. For typical platform support, it's easier to maintain and target one OS that has a single unified stack and SDKs (GUI toolkit, sound, input APIs, etc) than to do this on multiple distros and to only officially support 5 Linux distros, which is why Windows and Mac are always targeted easily. There is no 'standard' SDK on Linux distros, which is why one user could be using ALSA or OSS, X11, XWayland or pure Wayland with Sway, etc. Haiku has first-party default system components which it maintains. It also sits in middle of macOS and Linux, being that its open-source like Linux and has a standard defaults and a SDK like macOS. So maintenance-wise, maintaining one of each OS like macOS or Windows sounds less expensive than targeting 3 separate distros here. [0] https://depot.haiku-os.org/ https://depot.haiku-os.org/

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

> 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? To an extent, most of my software is cross platform and most runs better on Windows but the only real app keeping me on MacOS is TextMate. If I couldn't use that anymore I'd probably just switch fully to windows. Ported apps are great for extremely complicated things but then there are other parts where there is a lot of UX benefit if the soul of the OS shines through them.

wadera 6y ago

As a long time BeOS (and Haiku) developer, I agree that the design is significantly cleaner. Your argument however is significantly false. Haiku has several design problems in the Kernel and the Filesystem, any serious use other than hobbyist is quite limited. Definitely Linux could have a better Desktop, but saying that the Haiku design is less fundamentally fragile is a complete lie. Linux desktop may be more conservative, and may not really adhere to a truly common standard, but they offer several orders of magnitude more what Haiku could hope to have by far. This includes Security, IPC capabilities, Virtualization, Containerization. Android is an example of a Linux platform, that still retains an high number of native apps, coherence of UI etc.

waddlesplash 6y ago
Linux has a lot more features than Haiku, for sure, but a lot of these are oriented towards servers, which we probably will never implement because we are not targeting servers. Obviously there are others which we will eventually implement, sooner or later (like virtualization). However, I have no idea what you mean when you say that Haiku's kernel and filesystem has "several design problems."