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(Haiku developer here.) This review misses or misstates some pretty key details about Haiku: * The statement that "Haiku's design diverges radically enough fr

(Haiku developer here.) This review misses or misstates some pretty key details about Haiku: * The statement that "Haiku's design diverges radically enough from modern standards to make application porting very difficult" is just plain false. Haiku is extremely POSIX compliant and we have ports of Qt (as you may have noticed from Otter), etc. The reason there is no Firefox or Chromium is not due to any technical limitation of the OS itself, but purely because none of us devs know a lot about those codebases (which are larger than Haiku itself!) and want to put the time in. We would be happy to help others port them. * The "OS crash" on YouTube is not really an OS crash but rather a window manager / display server crash, which is much more recoverable than an actual kernel panic. Yeah, we probably should have caught that one before the release, but somehow we did not... * It's also not the case that we do not support "any USB network interfaces whatsoever"; as the screenshot you have shows, we don't support USB WiFi adapters. We do support USB ECM ethernet dongles, USB Pegasus, and at least some USB ASIX ones.

perardi 6y ago
Yeah, harping on the browser situation seems a bit unfair. Chromium is phenomenally complex, almost an operating system unto itself. It’s not like porting a text editor. https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/displaying-a-web-page-in-chrome https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/display...
- linux2647 6y ago
  Yes, and then there’s Emacs…
  - torstenvl 6y ago
    Or VSCode or Atom... built on top of Chromium...
  - wtetzner 6y ago
    Actually, Emacs would probably be easier to port, given that a large chunk of it is implemented in Emacs Lisp.
    - kazinator 6y ago
      GNU Emacs contains over a quarter million lines of C.
      - wtetzner 6y ago
        Right, compared to the 4.8 million lines of C++ in Chromium...
Panino 6y ago
> Haiku is extremely POSIX compliant I once needed help compiling software with an unusual build system, on Haiku. The fix was trivial and purely to the app's build system, and the Haiku devs were friendly and helpful. It was a very positive experience that I remember whenever seeing an article about Haiku. Just donated $25, keep up the good work!
tmikaeld 6y ago
I've always been curious, is security something that's been thought of from the start or is this something you plan on tackling after it's "mature"?
- waddlesplash 6y ago
  It definitely was not thought of from the start, no. We have already made significant improvements in the past few years in the security department, with NX bit (DEP), ASLR (including KASLR), W^X (kernel only for now), and SMAP/SMEP all now functional and enabled by default. However, there is still a long way to go. Not all syscalls do correct access checking (I started an audit here but I haven't finished it yet) and the GUI runs as uid 0 (you can run CLI apps and sign in via SSH as other users, though.) Slowly but surely...
  - tmikaeld 6y ago
    I'm actually impressed that you've made strides with it thus far, I'm really looking forward to start using it as a daily driver for my laptop!
kome 6y ago
I have nothing to say, besides thank you for your amazing job! Projects like Haiku put fun back in computing.
nullc 6y ago
Years ago I used Haiku as a "different but compatible enough that it was easy to target" test point for packages that I worked on. It caught a few linuxisms that hadn't been caught by testing on *BSD, but wasn't a pain to target.

perardi 6y ago

Yeah, harping on the browser situation seems a bit unfair. Chromium is phenomenally complex, almost an operating system unto itself. It’s not like porting a text editor. https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/displaying-a-web-page-in-chrome https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/display...

linux2647 6y ago
Yes, and then there’s Emacs…
- torstenvl 6y ago
  Or VSCode or Atom... built on top of Chromium...
- wtetzner 6y ago
  Actually, Emacs would probably be easier to port, given that a large chunk of it is implemented in Emacs Lisp.
  - kazinator 6y ago
    GNU Emacs contains over a quarter million lines of C.
    - wtetzner 6y ago
      Right, compared to the 4.8 million lines of C++ in Chromium...

Panino 6y ago

> Haiku is extremely POSIX compliant I once needed help compiling software with an unusual build system, on Haiku. The fix was trivial and purely to the app's build system, and the Haiku devs were friendly and helpful. It was a very positive experience that I remember whenever seeing an article about Haiku. Just donated $25, keep up the good work!

tmikaeld 6y ago

I've always been curious, is security something that's been thought of from the start or is this something you plan on tackling after it's "mature"?

waddlesplash 6y ago
It definitely was not thought of from the start, no. We have already made significant improvements in the past few years in the security department, with NX bit (DEP), ASLR (including KASLR), W^X (kernel only for now), and SMAP/SMEP all now functional and enabled by default. However, there is still a long way to go. Not all syscalls do correct access checking (I started an audit here but I haven't finished it yet) and the GUI runs as uid 0 (you can run CLI apps and sign in via SSH as other users, though.) Slowly but surely...
- tmikaeld 6y ago
  I'm actually impressed that you've made strides with it thus far, I'm really looking forward to start using it as a daily driver for my laptop!

kome 6y ago

I have nothing to say, besides thank you for your amazing job! Projects like Haiku put fun back in computing.

nullc 6y ago

Years ago I used Haiku as a "different but compatible enough that it was easy to target" test point for packages that I worked on. It caught a few linuxisms that hadn't been caught by testing on *BSD, but wasn't a pain to target.