6 ms·

It's always nice to see the wonderful advancements the HaikuOS devs make. As an operating system it's very nice and fun to use. It gives me the same vibes as ol

It's always nice to see the wonderful advancements the HaikuOS devs make. As an operating system it's very nice and fun to use. It gives me the same vibes as old workstations from the 90s. Although it still has a bit longer to go before it could be considered as a daily driver for any useful assortment of applications.

andi999 5y ago
I am very pessimistic. I think it would need a strong usp or some killer app. Maybe going into hard real time direction might allow it to live in a niche in audio and machine operation console. But currently I don't see a path.
- ozfive 5y ago
  This was the same argument for BeOS back in the day.
- techrat 5y ago
  Realtime audio on hardware that isn't sold by Apple would be quite a killer reason to use Haiku. Especially seeing Apple is progressively abandoning the Pro, configurable market again.
  - skavi 5y ago
    realtime audio and good color management are two things a lot of people use macOS for..
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    They released a Mac Pro, as configurable as you could desire, less than two years ago and have a replacement already in the works. They aren’t abandoning the market.
    - samatman 5y ago
      I agree with that for what it's worth. People who aren't in the industry don't really realize that the Mac Mini is the entry-level into audio production for most people (iMac is the same for video). It has just enough to get started, and when you're making the big bucks the Mac Pro is in fact affordable for what you get. Developers only see MacBooks for so long that they forget the rest of the product line exists, yet it's there for a reason.
      - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
        What profession is the Mac Pro targeted? They used to be great for video production and 3D modeling, animation, and light baking, but the current version just isn’t good enough and I’m seeing more and more professionals opt for a pc with a big dedicated gpu.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      It starts at 6000 and has similar specs to $2600 dell or alternatively a $1500 machine you could build. Just going from the dinky 256GB SSD your 6000 machine comes with to a more reasonable 2TB actually takes you to 6800. Furthermore for this very substantial price you are buying a machine on an arch they are in the process of abandoning a bigger issue than the price. To recap in 2013 the trash can came out. It was I guess OK but by 2015 its specs were noncompetitive. Between 2015-most of 2019 there was no real great answer for a mac tower. At the cusp of 2020 the new tower emerged followed 1 year later by the announcement that everything is moving to arm sooner or later. Out of the last 8 years there has been one year in which it was a great year to get a mac tower and only if you are rich.
      - bboygravity 5y ago
        Yes. But you get properly working real-time audio out of the box with the Mac Pro that you don't get with any PC system. Assuming that this is true (which it is based off of the other comments) then that is EASILY worth the extra 4000 or even 10.000 USD to someone who needs real-time audio to do their recording or other audio creation job. When I became a professional (in another field than audio/music) I developed 0 tolerance for tech that didn't work or that has me fiddle around with it for hours to work. It financially just doesn't make any sense to spend your time on that. It also doesn't make any sense from a mental health and free-time point of view. I think that was the point (even though I'm not knowledgeable on the subject, other than having spent many day of my hobby-life trying to get Cubase to record with audio monitor (VST) without jittery latency on Windows and utterly failed).
  - diskzero 5y ago
    Our final pivot at Be was HARP, the Home Audio Reference Platform, which we thought would be a killer reason to use BeOS. It was not a success.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    I would definitely consider Haiku for music if it had the same low latency capabilities as BeOS, but latency aside, a lot changed since the BeOS era: today pretty much all non consumer audio interfaces are external, therefore driver support for them is needed as well. Also it's not uncommon to see hybrid systems in which Linux runs a DAW and its plugins under WINE. It's a mess to configure and breaks very easily (lesson learned: don't do that in your tinkering machine that you upgrade often or install/compile different kernels etc. use a separate machine for Linux+music), so a WINE port would be useful as well, but I guess it'd be a huge job.
- agildehaus 5y ago
  Why does everything need commercial success? It's survived for 20 years despite having none. It will continue as long as there are interested developers.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  If I'm not mistaken it already has a bit of an audience as a replacement for old BeOS boxes in radio broadcasting.
  - themodelplumber 5y ago
    The Channel Caster 16, probably the most capable Haiku OS commercial system available at present. Yours for only $3199. http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/command-center-system-packages.html http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/command-center-system-pack...
    - brirec 5y ago
      > probably the most capable Haiku OS commercial system Not knocking this Caster, but it might also be the ONLY Haiku OS commercial system
    - bboygravity 5y ago
      Wow, how cool is that. It seems rather ballsy of them to go for HaikuOS. Is it because of BeOS legacy software they had developed? They have another system at the bottom of the page for a mere 1600 USD.
      - tialaramex 5y ago
        Yes, this product historically was a BeOS product, and eventually it became cheaper to put together a version of Haiku with no show stopping bugs for their customers on hardware you can actually buy than to try to find hardware that would still run an obscure 1990s operating system. The very first versions of this product are essentially BeOS, plus an existing MP3-player type application, plus a little bit of software glue, the right off-the-shelf hardware and the know-how to use it for radio broadcast. It's definitely one of those products some HN regulars would dismiss as "I could basically make that in an hour". Me too. But, after an hour nobody else can maintain it and it doesn't work on anybody else's computer. The hard work is in turning that into a product that generates some net revenue, which is mostly non-technical work.
      - 5y ago
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  I've heard that Haiku's audio APIs are similar to those of BeOS, which are harder to use than today's APIs. I hope they can be improved though, if Haiku is a better foundation for real-time media than standard Linux (or even realtime).
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    The BeOS Media APIs enshrine a strange way to think about multimedia latency, which is maybe useful if your central idea is that you need to synchronise audio and video through different production pipelines, but doesn't serve real time audio work at all. I believe Haiku did eventually fix some of the most egregious mistakes in their audio handling for example for years if you played silence it made everything else quieter, which is a classic goof†. But it's a long way from ideal for this application. You can of course use anything, if your hobby is making music with Haiku, knock yourself out, same with a ZX Spectrum or a toy xylophone, but yeah, not ideal. † How do I mix samples for N channels together? Adding them together and dividing by N ought to work right? No.
    - smallstepforman 5y ago
      The Haiku MediaKit API was available 5 years before Fabrice Bellard published ffmpeg, and back in the early 90’s BeInc’s goal was to attract the next successor to the NewTek toaster, and to be the next real time audio mixer. This is why they emphasised chaining of media nodes and sorting our “performance time” synchronisation issues with their API. The famous BeOS marketing video demos such a device. BeOS kernel allows unique app access to a shared memory area, eliminating memory copies when sharing data. When creating the shared area, media apps can set several media access flags to engage the “fast path” if the devices have that buffer. These days modern graphics API’s (eg. Vulkan) offer the same buffer creation hints to help the driver figure out where to best allocate memory (device local, host accessible etc). Because not all memory is equal. I’ve used both ffmpeg API and BMediaKit (I’m the author of a Haiku native video editor, https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo). The BMediaKit API is trivially easy to use. ffmpeg is notoriously convoluted. Likewise, the native GUI API is also a pleasure to use. This is why my open source media editor is Haiku native (and not cross platform).
qwerty456127 5y ago
There isn't much needed to make an OS usable as a daily driver today. Just port Firefox.
- tempodox 5y ago
  On a sarcastic note, I'd agree. But not in all seriousness :)
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    Why not serious in this case? A full-featured browser makes is the most important thing to make an OS usable today, isn't it? Of course I assume all the basic stuff like file system and device drivers, relevant multimedia codecs, bash or a likely-featured shell, SSH, basic GNU/BSD/alike command-line tools are already there. And that things like LibreOffice, ImageMagick, LaTeX, GnuPlot, Inkscape, VLC, runtimes like CPython and OpenJDK are next in the queue. But what is the most important thing which makes an OS usable today? For me it seems obvious it's the browser. If only there was a browser supporting all the today standards (including the H264 and AAC codecs support) I would already be able to do everything I need in it, the rest mentioned (after "And that things like") would just make my life slightly more convenient and fun.

andi999 5y ago

I am very pessimistic. I think it would need a strong usp or some killer app. Maybe going into hard real time direction might allow it to live in a niche in audio and machine operation console. But currently I don't see a path.

ozfive 5y ago
This was the same argument for BeOS back in the day.
techrat 5y ago
Realtime audio on hardware that isn't sold by Apple would be quite a killer reason to use Haiku. Especially seeing Apple is progressively abandoning the Pro, configurable market again.
- skavi 5y ago
  realtime audio and good color management are two things a lot of people use macOS for..
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  They released a Mac Pro, as configurable as you could desire, less than two years ago and have a replacement already in the works. They aren’t abandoning the market.
  - samatman 5y ago
    I agree with that for what it's worth. People who aren't in the industry don't really realize that the Mac Mini is the entry-level into audio production for most people (iMac is the same for video). It has just enough to get started, and when you're making the big bucks the Mac Pro is in fact affordable for what you get. Developers only see MacBooks for so long that they forget the rest of the product line exists, yet it's there for a reason.
    - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
      What profession is the Mac Pro targeted? They used to be great for video production and 3D modeling, animation, and light baking, but the current version just isn’t good enough and I’m seeing more and more professionals opt for a pc with a big dedicated gpu.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    It starts at 6000 and has similar specs to $2600 dell or alternatively a $1500 machine you could build. Just going from the dinky 256GB SSD your 6000 machine comes with to a more reasonable 2TB actually takes you to 6800. Furthermore for this very substantial price you are buying a machine on an arch they are in the process of abandoning a bigger issue than the price. To recap in 2013 the trash can came out. It was I guess OK but by 2015 its specs were noncompetitive. Between 2015-most of 2019 there was no real great answer for a mac tower. At the cusp of 2020 the new tower emerged followed 1 year later by the announcement that everything is moving to arm sooner or later. Out of the last 8 years there has been one year in which it was a great year to get a mac tower and only if you are rich.
    - bboygravity 5y ago
      Yes. But you get properly working real-time audio out of the box with the Mac Pro that you don't get with any PC system. Assuming that this is true (which it is based off of the other comments) then that is EASILY worth the extra 4000 or even 10.000 USD to someone who needs real-time audio to do their recording or other audio creation job. When I became a professional (in another field than audio/music) I developed 0 tolerance for tech that didn't work or that has me fiddle around with it for hours to work. It financially just doesn't make any sense to spend your time on that. It also doesn't make any sense from a mental health and free-time point of view. I think that was the point (even though I'm not knowledgeable on the subject, other than having spent many day of my hobby-life trying to get Cubase to record with audio monitor (VST) without jittery latency on Windows and utterly failed).
- diskzero 5y ago
  Our final pivot at Be was HARP, the Home Audio Reference Platform, which we thought would be a killer reason to use BeOS. It was not a success.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  I would definitely consider Haiku for music if it had the same low latency capabilities as BeOS, but latency aside, a lot changed since the BeOS era: today pretty much all non consumer audio interfaces are external, therefore driver support for them is needed as well. Also it's not uncommon to see hybrid systems in which Linux runs a DAW and its plugins under WINE. It's a mess to configure and breaks very easily (lesson learned: don't do that in your tinkering machine that you upgrade often or install/compile different kernels etc. use a separate machine for Linux+music), so a WINE port would be useful as well, but I guess it'd be a huge job.
agildehaus 5y ago
Why does everything need commercial success? It's survived for 20 years despite having none. It will continue as long as there are interested developers.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
If I'm not mistaken it already has a bit of an audience as a replacement for old BeOS boxes in radio broadcasting.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  The Channel Caster 16, probably the most capable Haiku OS commercial system available at present. Yours for only $3199. http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/command-center-system-packages.html http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/command-center-system-pack...
  - brirec 5y ago
    > probably the most capable Haiku OS commercial system Not knocking this Caster, but it might also be the ONLY Haiku OS commercial system
  - bboygravity 5y ago
    Wow, how cool is that. It seems rather ballsy of them to go for HaikuOS. Is it because of BeOS legacy software they had developed? They have another system at the bottom of the page for a mere 1600 USD.
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      Yes, this product historically was a BeOS product, and eventually it became cheaper to put together a version of Haiku with no show stopping bugs for their customers on hardware you can actually buy than to try to find hardware that would still run an obscure 1990s operating system. The very first versions of this product are essentially BeOS, plus an existing MP3-player type application, plus a little bit of software glue, the right off-the-shelf hardware and the know-how to use it for radio broadcast. It's definitely one of those products some HN regulars would dismiss as "I could basically make that in an hour". Me too. But, after an hour nobody else can maintain it and it doesn't work on anybody else's computer. The hard work is in turning that into a product that generates some net revenue, which is mostly non-technical work.
    - 5y ago
nyanpasu64 5y ago
I've heard that Haiku's audio APIs are similar to those of BeOS, which are harder to use than today's APIs. I hope they can be improved though, if Haiku is a better foundation for real-time media than standard Linux (or even realtime).
- tialaramex 5y ago
  The BeOS Media APIs enshrine a strange way to think about multimedia latency, which is maybe useful if your central idea is that you need to synchronise audio and video through different production pipelines, but doesn't serve real time audio work at all. I believe Haiku did eventually fix some of the most egregious mistakes in their audio handling for example for years if you played silence it made everything else quieter, which is a classic goof†. But it's a long way from ideal for this application. You can of course use anything, if your hobby is making music with Haiku, knock yourself out, same with a ZX Spectrum or a toy xylophone, but yeah, not ideal. † How do I mix samples for N channels together? Adding them together and dividing by N ought to work right? No.
  - smallstepforman 5y ago
    The Haiku MediaKit API was available 5 years before Fabrice Bellard published ffmpeg, and back in the early 90’s BeInc’s goal was to attract the next successor to the NewTek toaster, and to be the next real time audio mixer. This is why they emphasised chaining of media nodes and sorting our “performance time” synchronisation issues with their API. The famous BeOS marketing video demos such a device. BeOS kernel allows unique app access to a shared memory area, eliminating memory copies when sharing data. When creating the shared area, media apps can set several media access flags to engage the “fast path” if the devices have that buffer. These days modern graphics API’s (eg. Vulkan) offer the same buffer creation hints to help the driver figure out where to best allocate memory (device local, host accessible etc). Because not all memory is equal. I’ve used both ffmpeg API and BMediaKit (I’m the author of a Haiku native video editor, https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo). The BMediaKit API is trivially easy to use. ffmpeg is notoriously convoluted. Likewise, the native GUI API is also a pleasure to use. This is why my open source media editor is Haiku native (and not cross platform).

qwerty456127 5y ago

There isn't much needed to make an OS usable as a daily driver today. Just port Firefox.

tempodox 5y ago
On a sarcastic note, I'd agree. But not in all seriousness :)
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  Why not serious in this case? A full-featured browser makes is the most important thing to make an OS usable today, isn't it? Of course I assume all the basic stuff like file system and device drivers, relevant multimedia codecs, bash or a likely-featured shell, SSH, basic GNU/BSD/alike command-line tools are already there. And that things like LibreOffice, ImageMagick, LaTeX, GnuPlot, Inkscape, VLC, runtimes like CPython and OpenJDK are next in the queue. But what is the most important thing which makes an OS usable today? For me it seems obvious it's the browser. If only there was a browser supporting all the today standards (including the H264 and AAC codecs support) I would already be able to do everything I need in it, the rest mentioned (after "And that things like") would just make my life slightly more convenient and fun.