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How usable is this as a general purpose OS? I seldom see people running it outside VMs. How hard is it to find compatible hardware such as wireless cards. Does

How usable is this as a general purpose OS? I seldom see people running it outside VMs. How hard is it to find compatible hardware such as wireless cards. Does sleep/suspend work reliably? Lastly, I just LOVE the aesthetics. Even XFCE could not resist the allure of "improved" themes and also ended up welcoming CSDs.

hakfoo 6y ago
I know it basically worked out of the box on a Thinkpad x230 Tablet, running off a flash drive.
morganvachon 6y ago
There is no hardware 3D acceleration at all, but most GPUs supported by FreeBSD and Linux work fine for everyday use. Sleep and suspend are still a work in progress. WiFi and Ethernet support is heavily dependent on FreeBSD drivers, as such not every card is supported but there are a good number of supported devices. In general, a well-supported Linux/BSD machine will likely work well under Haiku (Thinkpads in particular). For me personally, the biggest thing holding it back from becoming a daily use computer is the lack of a really good web browser. WebPositive has made great strides as the native browser, but it still has a long way to go. There are ports of other mainstream browsers but most are incomplete or unstable. I sorely miss the era around 2000-2001 where I used BeOS successfully as a daily machine, able to browse the Web, access email, do document management and creation (word processing and spreadsheets), photo editing, music production, and video editing all with native-to-BeOS software. It transformed my Windows 98 machine from a slow, clunky, stuttering mess into a computer that felt like it was from the future. Nothing since has come close to that level of technological Nirvana.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  > Nothing since has come close to that level of technological Nirvana. Amiga.
- unicornporn 6y ago
  Thanks for the short review!
- dleslie 6y ago
  Forget the Web Browser, the biggest barrier is the lack of wireless drivers. I've tried it on a half dozen laptops and couldn't get a single one to work. At the time I last tried there was no support for USB Wifi, so using a trusty TP-Link wasn't an option.
  - morganvachon 6y ago
    You should try a nightly build, there is pretty good USB WiFi support at this time: https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/HardwareInfo#USBwlan https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/HardwareInfo#USBwlan
    - unicornporn 6y ago
      Thanks!
Jkvngt 6y ago
It has emacs and a modern browser and a compiler, what else do you need?

hakfoo 6y ago

I know it basically worked out of the box on a Thinkpad x230 Tablet, running off a flash drive.

morganvachon 6y ago

There is no hardware 3D acceleration at all, but most GPUs supported by FreeBSD and Linux work fine for everyday use. Sleep and suspend are still a work in progress. WiFi and Ethernet support is heavily dependent on FreeBSD drivers, as such not every card is supported but there are a good number of supported devices. In general, a well-supported Linux/BSD machine will likely work well under Haiku (Thinkpads in particular). For me personally, the biggest thing holding it back from becoming a daily use computer is the lack of a really good web browser. WebPositive has made great strides as the native browser, but it still has a long way to go. There are ports of other mainstream browsers but most are incomplete or unstable. I sorely miss the era around 2000-2001 where I used BeOS successfully as a daily machine, able to browse the Web, access email, do document management and creation (word processing and spreadsheets), photo editing, music production, and video editing all with native-to-BeOS software. It transformed my Windows 98 machine from a slow, clunky, stuttering mess into a computer that felt like it was from the future. Nothing since has come close to that level of technological Nirvana.

pjmlp 6y ago
> Nothing since has come close to that level of technological Nirvana. Amiga.
unicornporn 6y ago
Thanks for the short review!
dleslie 6y ago
Forget the Web Browser, the biggest barrier is the lack of wireless drivers. I've tried it on a half dozen laptops and couldn't get a single one to work. At the time I last tried there was no support for USB Wifi, so using a trusty TP-Link wasn't an option.
- morganvachon 6y ago
  You should try a nightly build, there is pretty good USB WiFi support at this time: https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/HardwareInfo#USBwlan https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/HardwareInfo#USBwlan
  - unicornporn 6y ago
    Thanks!

Jkvngt 6y ago

It has emacs and a modern browser and a compiler, what else do you need?