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Jims review on Ars was a bit unfair, considering the enormous difference in man power involved with the Haiku community and the commercial support most other OS

Jims review on Ars was a bit unfair, considering the enormous difference in man power involved with the Haiku community and the commercial support most other OS’s have - there is a factor of at least x1000. Yet Haiku is brave enough to tackle an integrated system of its own. For instance, Web+ is a beta browser purposely built to target only Haiku, whose primary goal is to use native features. It would have been easier to port Firefox, there even was a port 15 years ago when it was still called Mozilla. But it was sluggish then, and a more native solution was suggested. Although Web+ is young, thorny and buggy (now), with every iteration it gets better, more stable, and faster. And the core OS functionality benefits with improvements other apps can utilise. For instance, lots of blending modes were added to AppServer to support web standards, so every native app gets these features as well. The net classes improved, media streaming improved. The article mentions a crash with YouTube by a refactored memory paging off-by-one error, which has been fixed 3 weeks ago, and this bug fix benefits all apps. All software has bugs, they get fixed eventually. There are benefits to Haiku which most casual observers don't register in their brief sessions. It requires a bit more “miles” before the benefits are discovered. It’s a young system with potential. It’s a beta of R1. There will be more revisions in the future, more iterations, more quality. Unlike the nix distros which are an amalgamation of various independant components with duplicate integration channels, Haiku is building a tailored unified system. The end benefit will be noticeable in component integration and efficiency, which the heterogeneous nix systems will struggle to match. Haiku is targetting the front end user, not the invisible back end.

waddlesplash 6y ago
> The article mentions a crash with YouTube by a refactored memory paging off-by-one error The memory paging refactor is not in the beta, so those bugs are not related. I think the WebPositive "system crash" (really a display server crash) is the AlphaMask reference-counting bug, which a fix was pushed for on the "master" channel but nobody has reported back that it is definitively fixed yet (but I also have not heard any reports that people still encounter it, so that's a good sign.)
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> Jims review on Ars was a bit unfair, considering the enormous difference in man power involved with the Haiku community and the commercial support most other OS’s have Does that really matter to the person who uses the end product though? I agree that Haiku has had a lot of work put into it by dedicated people and is something of a marvel because it's a non-Linux FOSS desktop OS that is actually usable, but I don't see why that need be a consideration of a review.
- smallstepforman 6y ago
  You are right regarding most people taking the path of least resistance and supporting the established players, but these players have the market to lose and there are a category of people who will support a quality underdog. Haiku is far from perfect but I’m frustrated with the behaviour of commercial OS vendors and I’m personally not aligned with the “Linux” road map (even though I professionally recommend Linux for my employers embedded products, I eagerly wait for Haiku to replace it, and it eventually will).
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    I'm in more or less the same position (but am less excited by Haiku), but as much as I am willing to overlook a lot of shortcomings for something that works the way I want and isn't beholden to corporate bullshit and desktop-hostile philosophies, I can't expect the same from someone reviewing the thing.
  - ac29 6y ago
    What advantages do you see Haiku having in the embedded space over Linux?
    - smallstepforman 6y ago
      It will never replace Linux on invisible devices, but on consumer facing devices with a screen (ie. car info systems, heck even possibly an Android competitor). First of all, there is no GPL, second its an integrated system with a single path from kernel to any component so makes customising easier, third the design emphasis is on latency not throughput (so great for GUI but not for file serving). If Haiku was available in 2004, Playstation 3 would be Haiku based (not FreeBSD based), and Android would have also been Haiku based. Google are working on Fuschia to replace Linux in Android, whose core development team are ex BeOS engineers who built the kernel Haiku is based on and there is talk of Fuschia adopting BeFS from Haiku.
slantyyz 6y ago
> Jims review on Ars was a bit unfair, considering the enormous difference in man power involved with the Haiku community and the commercial support most other OS’s have I get that context matters, but if you're going to write a review about a desktop operating system, you should be comparing it to the other desktop OSes that are available so that readers have a point of reference. > It’s a young system with potential. It’s a beta of R1. To be fair, it's taken almost twenty years to get to the R1 beta. I've been following its development on and off since the demise of BeOS. I remember reading about all of the in-fighting from the early days of OpenBeOS, so I'm glad that they've made all the progress they have. What they've produced is indeed admirable, but you can't ignore the fact that the technology world is in a very different place since they started this project. When I look at Haiku today, it is like opening up a time capsule of a late 90's era operating systems. Even when I had BeOS, I still had to dual boot with Windows due to the lack of broad application support. So as a somewhat interested observer/follower of the OS's development since the project began -- once I get past that feeling of nostalgia -- it's even hard for me to see the potential that you talking about.
- partdavid 6y ago
  Well, a more interesting review would address not only what doesn't work well and what you can't really use it for; but also what you can use it for. In other words, yes, it's fair to say "don't use this for surfing the web or if you have an EVOO laptap". But ideally you would then suggest what you could use it for and how it works in those areas. I would have expected at least to understand the state of desktop productivity software, music playing, networking, hacking, playing games, printing, etc. And given that a lot of readers (unlike yourself) will never have used BeOS or be that familiar with it, what's it like? If you read an email and someone sends you a PDF, do you save it and open it in a PDF reader? Does something else happen? Is any of it interesting in some way?
  - slantyyz 6y ago
    "Web surfing" might seem easy to dismiss, but look at the original iPhone. Sure, it had a nice form factor, etc., but the thing that made the iPhone a game changer was mobile Safari, a modern web browser. Remember when Apple's response to "hey there are no apps" was to use "web apps"? Well, I tend to consider the bare minimum for any desktop OS to be viable is the ability to run a modern web browser (which would let you do your email, desktop productivity, music playing, games and PDF viewing). Hell, I'd even go so far as to say that Haiku's next major milestone should be to get Firefox or Chromium to run on it. With a working modern browser, all of a sudden it's at least as functional as a Chromebook. Which means you might actually be able to use the OS as a daily driver in spite of its other shortcomings.

waddlesplash 6y ago

> The article mentions a crash with YouTube by a refactored memory paging off-by-one error The memory paging refactor is not in the beta, so those bugs are not related. I think the WebPositive "system crash" (really a display server crash) is the AlphaMask reference-counting bug, which a fix was pushed for on the "master" channel but nobody has reported back that it is definitively fixed yet (but I also have not heard any reports that people still encounter it, so that's a good sign.)

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

> Jims review on Ars was a bit unfair, considering the enormous difference in man power involved with the Haiku community and the commercial support most other OS’s have Does that really matter to the person who uses the end product though? I agree that Haiku has had a lot of work put into it by dedicated people and is something of a marvel because it's a non-Linux FOSS desktop OS that is actually usable, but I don't see why that need be a consideration of a review.

smallstepforman 6y ago
You are right regarding most people taking the path of least resistance and supporting the established players, but these players have the market to lose and there are a category of people who will support a quality underdog. Haiku is far from perfect but I’m frustrated with the behaviour of commercial OS vendors and I’m personally not aligned with the “Linux” road map (even though I professionally recommend Linux for my employers embedded products, I eagerly wait for Haiku to replace it, and it eventually will).
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  I'm in more or less the same position (but am less excited by Haiku), but as much as I am willing to overlook a lot of shortcomings for something that works the way I want and isn't beholden to corporate bullshit and desktop-hostile philosophies, I can't expect the same from someone reviewing the thing.
- ac29 6y ago
  What advantages do you see Haiku having in the embedded space over Linux?
  - smallstepforman 6y ago
    It will never replace Linux on invisible devices, but on consumer facing devices with a screen (ie. car info systems, heck even possibly an Android competitor). First of all, there is no GPL, second its an integrated system with a single path from kernel to any component so makes customising easier, third the design emphasis is on latency not throughput (so great for GUI but not for file serving). If Haiku was available in 2004, Playstation 3 would be Haiku based (not FreeBSD based), and Android would have also been Haiku based. Google are working on Fuschia to replace Linux in Android, whose core development team are ex BeOS engineers who built the kernel Haiku is based on and there is talk of Fuschia adopting BeFS from Haiku.

slantyyz 6y ago

> Jims review on Ars was a bit unfair, considering the enormous difference in man power involved with the Haiku community and the commercial support most other OS’s have I get that context matters, but if you're going to write a review about a desktop operating system, you should be comparing it to the other desktop OSes that are available so that readers have a point of reference. > It’s a young system with potential. It’s a beta of R1. To be fair, it's taken almost twenty years to get to the R1 beta. I've been following its development on and off since the demise of BeOS. I remember reading about all of the in-fighting from the early days of OpenBeOS, so I'm glad that they've made all the progress they have. What they've produced is indeed admirable, but you can't ignore the fact that the technology world is in a very different place since they started this project. When I look at Haiku today, it is like opening up a time capsule of a late 90's era operating systems. Even when I had BeOS, I still had to dual boot with Windows due to the lack of broad application support. So as a somewhat interested observer/follower of the OS's development since the project began -- once I get past that feeling of nostalgia -- it's even hard for me to see the potential that you talking about.

partdavid 6y ago
Well, a more interesting review would address not only what doesn't work well and what you can't really use it for; but also what you can use it for. In other words, yes, it's fair to say "don't use this for surfing the web or if you have an EVOO laptap". But ideally you would then suggest what you could use it for and how it works in those areas. I would have expected at least to understand the state of desktop productivity software, music playing, networking, hacking, playing games, printing, etc. And given that a lot of readers (unlike yourself) will never have used BeOS or be that familiar with it, what's it like? If you read an email and someone sends you a PDF, do you save it and open it in a PDF reader? Does something else happen? Is any of it interesting in some way?
- slantyyz 6y ago
  "Web surfing" might seem easy to dismiss, but look at the original iPhone. Sure, it had a nice form factor, etc., but the thing that made the iPhone a game changer was mobile Safari, a modern web browser. Remember when Apple's response to "hey there are no apps" was to use "web apps"? Well, I tend to consider the bare minimum for any desktop OS to be viable is the ability to run a modern web browser (which would let you do your email, desktop productivity, music playing, games and PDF viewing). Hell, I'd even go so far as to say that Haiku's next major milestone should be to get Firefox or Chromium to run on it. With a working modern browser, all of a sudden it's at least as functional as a Chromebook. Which means you might actually be able to use the OS as a daily driver in spite of its other shortcomings.