4 ms·
Semi-related to this and the recent Haiku R1/beta2 announcement: just for giggles, I installed that inage on a USB3 external SSD and fired it up under KVM, and
by rcoder 6y ago
Semi-related to this and the recent Haiku R1/beta2 announcement: just for giggles, I installed that inage on a USB3 external SSD and fired it up under KVM, and was suddenly greeted with a faster, more polished desktop environment than Windows 10 or Ubuntu offer out of the box. Consistent UI patterns, applications that open in less than the 250ms perception threshold, and some truly useful utilities installed (a fast POSIX terminal, programmer's editor, media viewers, basic but serviceable WebKit-based browser, etc.). All of it happy to run in 1-2 GB of RAM and two cores of my six-core laptop, even under virtualization.
Running on an Atom-based SBC I had on the workbench, it's even more responsive.
Yes, building native apps requires at least a basic knowledge of C++. No, it won't seamlessly run the latest React SPAs as well as Chrome. The driver situation isn't as good as (say) Linux or FreeBSD.
And yet, the focus on providing a productive environment for normal computing tasks instead of endless up-selling to an app store, countless background updaters, and vendor-bundled crapware is like a breath of fresh air.
This is what we've lost in the move to impose ever more layers of services, unique per-app GUIs, and ubiquitous (even gratuitous) packaging of "webapps" in lieu of targeted, native apps.
To be clear: this isn't a unique property of Haiku. A nice clean install of FreeBSD or Debian has many of the same properties, and I have reason to believe that a Windows 10 "distro" based on something like Server Core could be similarly light and responsive.
Unfortunately, the major platform providers seem deeply uninterested in building systems that don't push you aggressively towards newer hardware, loads of subscription services, and "strategic" software bundles no one asked for.
- yellowapple 6y agoYeah, I feel like as soon as Haiku has support for encrypted partitions it'll be my daily driver (even if it's a performance hit, I'll take that over my data being in the clear should someone snag my laptop). Implementing support for it is something I'd love to try my hand at as soon as I can figure out how I'd go about doing so (namely: how to make an encrypted partition look like a normal partition to the overall system while still providing some mechanism to prompt for a passphrase or key).
- waddlesplash 6y agoHaiku already has support for encrypted partitions via "DriveEncryption" ... but no support for encrypted boot drives, yet, indeed.
- yellowapple 6y agoWhoa! How long has that been around? Even without boot partition support, if Haiku's able to keep my user files on a DriveEncryption'd partition and automatically decrypt it on boot (i.e. with a password prompt at some point in the boot process or immediately after), then that's good enough for me.
- waddlesplash 6y agoI think DriveEncryption needs a few tweaks now that Beta2 is out to work again, but it's been around for quite a long time. It was made by one of the foremost kernel developers who certainly knew what he was doing. I think it's based on TrueCrypt, though he may have updated it to VeraCrypt at some point... Here's the GitHub, anyway: https://github.com/axeld/driveencryption https://github.com/axeld/driveencryption
- yellowapple 6y agoDefinitely looks interesting, and the advertised support for decrypt-on-login is exactly what I'd need. Doesn't look like it's working on x86-64; I wonder how hard that'd be to fix... Whatever the case, thanks! I left enough room on my disk to add an encrypted partition later (and move the stuff currently in ~ over to it), so hopefully I can get up and running with this.
- waddlesplash 6y agoProbably not that hard to fix, there are a few potential issues that come to mind but all have simple solutions, if you know where to look (and if you don't, as in Freenode#haiku.)