23 ms·

20 Years of Haiku

207 points by bitigchi 5y ago

oenetan 5y ago
One of my favorite operating systems, at least in terms of ideas and "what could have been"ness
- taxcoder 5y ago
  Could you details some of those ideas? I don't have time to install it right now, and am curious if I should add it to my list of things to try sometime.
  - bitigchi 5y ago
    Have a look at the slideshow[1] for some basic concepts. [1]: https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/ https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/
  - mtekman 5y ago
    Its a very opinionated OS, like iOS/Windows (but freer in every sense), where there is usually only one way to do something. No choice of desktop managers or window managers, just very lean and streamlined software with little redundancy I think people like it because its neat.
  - diskzero 5y ago
    One of the big ideas in BeOS was a thread per window, or even perhaps a thread per view. This helped realize a lot of the cool BeOS demos where multiple windows were open playing videos, rendering OpenGL or otherwise keeping the CPU busy.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      That's not really a good thing, though. You don't need "a thread per window" especially w/ modern async computation, you just need the UI to be in a separate thread from anything that might keep the CPU busy to begin with.
      - dbt00 5y ago
        Yes we've learned a lot in the last 25 years, and it certainly isn't a good idea, in retrospect, to have the C++ API for your GUI Frame object to extend the thread class. That said, in the days of single core, single event loop on all the major GUI frameworks (X11, Win32, Mac OS), it was absolutely a revelation about what was possible. The dovetails nicely with an earlier article about how quickly the pace of performance improvements felt magical in the early 90s, from the release of the 80386 to about 2010.
        sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
        BTW I think that OS/2 was NOT single event loop, right?
  - handrous 5y ago
    - Unixy desktop OS, at a time when there weren't other commercial desktop unices aimed at anything other than high-end workstations (Solaris). - Very friendly (but also effective) installer. Probably the best I'd seen, at the time. Hell, maybe still the best. - File meta-data as a 1st-class feature. Some cross-platform version of this remains a huge boon to computing efficiency that we've yet to work out. BeOS was ahead of the curve. - I cannot emphasize enough how magical the performance was. A single-core pentium back then with maybe 64-128MB of memory, if you wanted to browse the web and listen to an MP3, on Windows or Linux, you could expect pops and other problems with playback any time you hit the CPU. Video playback while doing anything else? You kinda could, but there'd be dropped frames and audio issues all over. BeOS? Buttery. Smooth. Practically no matter what you did to it. And the system would keep responding snappily to input, under load that'd have Windows or Linux lagging. UI and media rendering/playback prioritized over everything else, it seemed, and turns out that's 100% the right thing to do for a normal desktop OS. I've seen exactly two other operating systems that could even come close to touching it on low-end hardware, on this front: QNX (w/Photon) and iOS. And iOS cheats to achieve it, by aggressively killing anything that's not in the foreground—and it was kinda better at it in earlier versions, on worse hardware, when it hadn't bloated so much, so that's less true these days.
    - nix23 5y ago
      >Unixy desktop OS, at a time when there weren't other commercial desktop unices aimed at anything other than high-end workstations (Solaris). Well there was Coherent OS but yes Unix was considered high-end/high-price
    - somewhatbetter 5y ago
      > Very friendly (but also effective) installer. Probably the best I'd seen, at the time. Hell, maybe still the best. The Installer in BeOS/Haiku does't do anything special: it just copies everything from the source to the target. The Installer is available in the installed system too, therefore you can install your installed and personalized system to a different disk, basically cloning everything. But you forgot the bootmanager from your list. I still yet to see anything like this 2 in other OS.
smallstepforman 5y ago
Here is a representative screenshot of Haiku environment on 4k (3840x2160) screen running my native Media editor for Haiku (audio+video). It took me 2 years of a couple of hours per week to build it from scratch. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smallstepforman/Medo/main/Docs/Medo.jpeg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smallstepforman/Medo/main/...
- dleslie 5y ago
  Major props to you, this is really one of the best post-BeOS apps available on Haiku.
  - smallstepforman 5y ago
    Thank you, it was a labour of love :) I still have an enormous amount of work to do, eg. adding many more audio filters and effects, text effects, programable OpenGL effects, and of course bug fixing. Hopefully in a decade or so it will be a solid dependable application.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  That's a really great result, nice work. I'm curious what it's like to develop media applications for Haiku. Are there any advantages you felt made it easier or more enjoyable? Thanks for sharing.
  - smallstepforman 5y ago
    I enjoy the BeAPI. In my opinion, the Interface Kit (GUI) has just the right balance between having enough features to be useful and not getting in your way. The BMediaKit realistically has 2 purposes, decoding/encoding and streaming and ideally should be split up into 2 kits. The Haiku based packaging system is really great for developers, since installing headers/libs requires zero effort, it just works. Tracker (file navigation) is fantastic, finding header files takes less than a second. Deskbar needs to apply 20 years of modernisation and adopt features from other OS's. The browser situation is terrible, though. System administration is really well thought out, however, it needs user accounts and encrypted volumes. Regarding other development environments, I've done professional Qt development, and I'm displeased with the ownership and kitchen sink model. Ownership and auto layout make dynamic widget hiding a real pain, especially since you cannot remove a widget (ownership issues). Layouts with dynamic widgets are another pain point.
geocrasher 5y ago
Non Unix O S Open Source software project Twenty years on, wow
- tpoacher 5y ago
  nice.
- grexe 5y ago
  Computing should be at the speed of your thinking Haiku sets you free. :)
huachimingo 5y ago
Pretty cool to have the docs about the system available. It would be nicer with more drivers, but that's the price of being opensource (like GMA on Linux).
jeswin 5y ago
I've tried Haiku many times over the years, but still can't get used to the way menus work. It was hard a decade back, it's harder when I'm 40. I like everything else about it.
- unwind 5y ago
  Uh, not having used BeOS (but I remember really yearning for it in the mid-90s in college), it would be easier to understand your comment if you clarified. In what way is menu interaction different in BeOS/Haiku? It's one of those things that probably takes way less time for you to describe, than for me (and whoever else might be wondering) to go and find out on my own, so it would be super helpful. Thanks.
  - jeswin 5y ago
    I think it could be a personal preference, but I find multi-level cascading menus[1] somewhat difficult to use. [1]: Posting the relevant image from sibling comment https://www.haiku-os.org/files/slideshow/drilldown.png https://www.haiku-os.org/files/slideshow/drilldown.png
    - anthk 5y ago
      Haiku OS need an option to set sticky menus.
      - somewhatbetter 5y ago
        Why generalize? You need that.
        selfhoster11 5y ago
        Hence, "option". So you can toggle the feature on and off. Please don't deride people for needing special accommodations in their daily driver software.
linspace 5y ago
Seeing this and the other day about SerenityOS I have the feeling from checking the home page that focus is on certain graphics experience, and so I wonder why build a OS from scratch instead of a window manager over Linux, apart from the coolness factor. My question is what things can impact the user experience if you are allowed to start from a fresh design?
- armchairhacker 5y ago
  #1 reason is probably nostalgia, and just the idea that you have a simpler, older-style OS. vs a modern OS just reskinned to look old. Personally i think speed: I see a 90s UI and I expect stuff to happen almost instantly on my modern Desktop. Also expecting less bugs because it’s a simpler OS. But in practice even though Linux is much larger and more complex it’s probably still faster and less buggy. So probably just the idea. EDIT: Should also add, probably because these OSs do some core things differently than Unix and Windows. Those OSs are constantly updated but the core features are still old, so the niche OSs could possibly implement them “better”.
  - anthk 5y ago
    > Also expecting less bugs because it’s a simpler OS. That's not my experince on late 90's. You sneezed, and w98se BSOD'd.
    - somewhatbetter 5y ago
      You probably cannot add 1+1, that person meant the 90's style desktop means there is no unnecessary cruft in it, therefore it won't try to amaze the user with eyecandy, so operations will happen instantly. And less code means less chance for bugs.
      - anthk 5y ago
        > And less code means less chance for bugs. The OpenBSD bug on Xenocara which allowed root needed more code, not less. So this is the case with pledge(4) and unveil(4), you need (a little) more code in onder to sandbox setuff properly. NT4 was much more complex than W98SE, yet NT4/w2k was much better on multitasking (by a huge margin). I've seen w98se crawl even with a Pentium 4 and 512MB of RAM with just 3 IE windows open back in the day, while 2k flied.
iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
Is there anyone who uses Haiku seriously or is it just a nostalgic hobby? Does it have anything that Unix or Windows would want to copy?
- kristopolous 5y ago
  I've met the haiku devs, their answer is absolutely, and I don't want to misrepresent their reasons so forgive me if I misspeak, this was a while back. I believe they thought the graphic system was innovatively designed to be tightly integrated and straightforward to understand. I believe they also thought their audio stack, native file system and multitasking model was really great. I believe it's much more cathedral than Linux so ostensibly there's fewer interim layers and the ones that exist play nicer with each other. I'd guess this would be true for illumos as well but I am not going to pretend I've even looked at the source of either. If anyone says something in this thread that contradicts what I said, trust them over me. This was probably at least 10 years ago
- somewhatbetter 5y ago
  Me, since years as my main and only OS.
  - iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
    That's very interesting! What work and other activities do you do on it, and how does it compare to the last OS you used full time? I've been curious about BeOS since I read Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning There Was the Command Line", but I'm too young to have ever seen it in action.
    - somewhatbetter 5y ago
      >That's very interesting! It is not. We are talking about a tool. An OS never meant to be sexy or visible or distracting or eye candy. It should support and serve the user and only the user. It have no other task. >What work and other activities do you do on it, and how does it compare to the last OS you used full time? Some programming, porting, listening music, organizing files, email, chat. None of this requires a wannabe mainframe OS on desktop, but also way too cumbersome to do it on mobile devices. It works for me. It lets me eliminate most distraction from my life. I maintain the conviction: what not possible with Haiku should not be done at all. >I've been curious about BeOS since I read Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning There Was the Command Line", but I'm too young to have ever seen it in action. I have read it, it is a great example for the bias in the IT: always pick the mediocre solution and kill/ make impossible everything else. Sadly the programmers were always too autistic to understand what the auhor tried to say and the managers only interested in ROI. Therefore we are fucked with *nixes.
muth02446 5y ago
Not having proper (accelerated) graphics drivers seems to a problem that all alternative OSes suffer from. Is there any effort addressing that which is flexible enough that say both Haiku and Serenity could use it?
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  Isn't this an issue of GPU manufactures not releasing drivers? Hasn't Linux had issues with this before? (The famous "fuck you nvidia" Linus meme comes to mind).
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Well yes, but why should a company like nVidia or AMD make a driver for an OS with a user base that's a rounding error? Even if they just release all the information required to make one, you still need the labor to write the drivers. I think what parent is really asking is if there is something like rump kernels[0] for GPU. [0] is this even a thing anymore? rumpkernel.org seems to have become a generic IT news aggregator.
    - flatiron 5y ago
      Wouldn’t implementing Linux drm and stealing the drivers be easier?
      - anthk 5y ago
        OpenBSD adapted DRM and KMS.
    - blablabla123 5y ago
      > Well yes, but why should a company like nVidia or AMD make a driver for an OS with a user base that's a rounding error? Because 75% of all public servers are UNIX-like and nowadays by default most commodity computing capacity is on the GPU. Indeed Linux on the Desktop has been a disaster but that's no reason to make OpenCL and similar efforts a disaster too.
billfruit 5y ago
Is it possible to get the beos/haiku window manager/ desktop environment working on Linux?
- rvense 5y ago
  There isn't one. You might get something that looks a bit like it in screenshots, but there's nothing that works like BeOS tracker (filemanager) and deskbar do.
Koshkin 5y ago
With Windows 11 around the corner, how many of new home PCs will be left capable of running Haiku (or even Linux, for that matter)?
- nix23 5y ago
  ?? Buy good Hardware where you can disable TPM2 and Secure-boot?

20 Years of Haiku

207 points by bitigchi 5y ago

oenetan 5y ago

One of my favorite operating systems, at least in terms of ideas and "what could have been"ness

taxcoder 5y ago
Could you details some of those ideas? I don't have time to install it right now, and am curious if I should add it to my list of things to try sometime.
- bitigchi 5y ago
  Have a look at the slideshow[1] for some basic concepts. [1]: https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/ https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/
- mtekman 5y ago
  Its a very opinionated OS, like iOS/Windows (but freer in every sense), where there is usually only one way to do something. No choice of desktop managers or window managers, just very lean and streamlined software with little redundancy I think people like it because its neat.
- diskzero 5y ago
  One of the big ideas in BeOS was a thread per window, or even perhaps a thread per view. This helped realize a lot of the cool BeOS demos where multiple windows were open playing videos, rendering OpenGL or otherwise keeping the CPU busy.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    That's not really a good thing, though. You don't need "a thread per window" especially w/ modern async computation, you just need the UI to be in a separate thread from anything that might keep the CPU busy to begin with.
    - dbt00 5y ago
      Yes we've learned a lot in the last 25 years, and it certainly isn't a good idea, in retrospect, to have the C++ API for your GUI Frame object to extend the thread class. That said, in the days of single core, single event loop on all the major GUI frameworks (X11, Win32, Mac OS), it was absolutely a revelation about what was possible. The dovetails nicely with an earlier article about how quickly the pace of performance improvements felt magical in the early 90s, from the release of the 80386 to about 2010.
      - sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
        BTW I think that OS/2 was NOT single event loop, right?
- handrous 5y ago
  - Unixy desktop OS, at a time when there weren't other commercial desktop unices aimed at anything other than high-end workstations (Solaris). - Very friendly (but also effective) installer. Probably the best I'd seen, at the time. Hell, maybe still the best. - File meta-data as a 1st-class feature. Some cross-platform version of this remains a huge boon to computing efficiency that we've yet to work out. BeOS was ahead of the curve. - I cannot emphasize enough how magical the performance was. A single-core pentium back then with maybe 64-128MB of memory, if you wanted to browse the web and listen to an MP3, on Windows or Linux, you could expect pops and other problems with playback any time you hit the CPU. Video playback while doing anything else? You kinda could, but there'd be dropped frames and audio issues all over. BeOS? Buttery. Smooth. Practically no matter what you did to it. And the system would keep responding snappily to input, under load that'd have Windows or Linux lagging. UI and media rendering/playback prioritized over everything else, it seemed, and turns out that's 100% the right thing to do for a normal desktop OS. I've seen exactly two other operating systems that could even come close to touching it on low-end hardware, on this front: QNX (w/Photon) and iOS. And iOS cheats to achieve it, by aggressively killing anything that's not in the foreground—and it was kinda better at it in earlier versions, on worse hardware, when it hadn't bloated so much, so that's less true these days.
  - nix23 5y ago
    >Unixy desktop OS, at a time when there weren't other commercial desktop unices aimed at anything other than high-end workstations (Solaris). Well there was Coherent OS but yes Unix was considered high-end/high-price
  - somewhatbetter 5y ago
    > Very friendly (but also effective) installer. Probably the best I'd seen, at the time. Hell, maybe still the best. The Installer in BeOS/Haiku does't do anything special: it just copies everything from the source to the target. The Installer is available in the installed system too, therefore you can install your installed and personalized system to a different disk, basically cloning everything. But you forgot the bootmanager from your list. I still yet to see anything like this 2 in other OS.

smallstepforman 5y ago

Here is a representative screenshot of Haiku environment on 4k (3840x2160) screen running my native Media editor for Haiku (audio+video). It took me 2 years of a couple of hours per week to build it from scratch. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smallstepforman/Medo/main/Docs/Medo.jpeg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smallstepforman/Medo/main/...

dleslie 5y ago
Major props to you, this is really one of the best post-BeOS apps available on Haiku.
- smallstepforman 5y ago
  Thank you, it was a labour of love :) I still have an enormous amount of work to do, eg. adding many more audio filters and effects, text effects, programable OpenGL effects, and of course bug fixing. Hopefully in a decade or so it will be a solid dependable application.
themodelplumber 5y ago
That's a really great result, nice work. I'm curious what it's like to develop media applications for Haiku. Are there any advantages you felt made it easier or more enjoyable? Thanks for sharing.
- smallstepforman 5y ago
  I enjoy the BeAPI. In my opinion, the Interface Kit (GUI) has just the right balance between having enough features to be useful and not getting in your way. The BMediaKit realistically has 2 purposes, decoding/encoding and streaming and ideally should be split up into 2 kits. The Haiku based packaging system is really great for developers, since installing headers/libs requires zero effort, it just works. Tracker (file navigation) is fantastic, finding header files takes less than a second. Deskbar needs to apply 20 years of modernisation and adopt features from other OS's. The browser situation is terrible, though. System administration is really well thought out, however, it needs user accounts and encrypted volumes. Regarding other development environments, I've done professional Qt development, and I'm displeased with the ownership and kitchen sink model. Ownership and auto layout make dynamic widget hiding a real pain, especially since you cannot remove a widget (ownership issues). Layouts with dynamic widgets are another pain point.

geocrasher 5y ago

Non Unix O S Open Source software project Twenty years on, wow

tpoacher 5y ago
nice.
grexe 5y ago
Computing should be at the speed of your thinking Haiku sets you free. :)

huachimingo 5y ago

Pretty cool to have the docs about the system available. It would be nicer with more drivers, but that's the price of being opensource (like GMA on Linux).

jeswin 5y ago

I've tried Haiku many times over the years, but still can't get used to the way menus work. It was hard a decade back, it's harder when I'm 40. I like everything else about it.

unwind 5y ago
Uh, not having used BeOS (but I remember really yearning for it in the mid-90s in college), it would be easier to understand your comment if you clarified. In what way is menu interaction different in BeOS/Haiku? It's one of those things that probably takes way less time for you to describe, than for me (and whoever else might be wondering) to go and find out on my own, so it would be super helpful. Thanks.
- jeswin 5y ago
  I think it could be a personal preference, but I find multi-level cascading menus[1] somewhat difficult to use. [1]: Posting the relevant image from sibling comment https://www.haiku-os.org/files/slideshow/drilldown.png https://www.haiku-os.org/files/slideshow/drilldown.png
  - anthk 5y ago
    Haiku OS need an option to set sticky menus.
    - somewhatbetter 5y ago
      Why generalize? You need that.
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        Hence, "option". So you can toggle the feature on and off. Please don't deride people for needing special accommodations in their daily driver software.

linspace 5y ago

Seeing this and the other day about SerenityOS I have the feeling from checking the home page that focus is on certain graphics experience, and so I wonder why build a OS from scratch instead of a window manager over Linux, apart from the coolness factor. My question is what things can impact the user experience if you are allowed to start from a fresh design?

armchairhacker 5y ago
#1 reason is probably nostalgia, and just the idea that you have a simpler, older-style OS. vs a modern OS just reskinned to look old. Personally i think speed: I see a 90s UI and I expect stuff to happen almost instantly on my modern Desktop. Also expecting less bugs because it’s a simpler OS. But in practice even though Linux is much larger and more complex it’s probably still faster and less buggy. So probably just the idea. EDIT: Should also add, probably because these OSs do some core things differently than Unix and Windows. Those OSs are constantly updated but the core features are still old, so the niche OSs could possibly implement them “better”.
- anthk 5y ago
  > Also expecting less bugs because it’s a simpler OS. That's not my experince on late 90's. You sneezed, and w98se BSOD'd.
  - somewhatbetter 5y ago
    You probably cannot add 1+1, that person meant the 90's style desktop means there is no unnecessary cruft in it, therefore it won't try to amaze the user with eyecandy, so operations will happen instantly. And less code means less chance for bugs.
    - anthk 5y ago
      > And less code means less chance for bugs. The OpenBSD bug on Xenocara which allowed root needed more code, not less. So this is the case with pledge(4) and unveil(4), you need (a little) more code in onder to sandbox setuff properly. NT4 was much more complex than W98SE, yet NT4/w2k was much better on multitasking (by a huge margin). I've seen w98se crawl even with a Pentium 4 and 512MB of RAM with just 3 IE windows open back in the day, while 2k flied.

iamnotwhoiam 5y ago

Is there anyone who uses Haiku seriously or is it just a nostalgic hobby? Does it have anything that Unix or Windows would want to copy?

kristopolous 5y ago
I've met the haiku devs, their answer is absolutely, and I don't want to misrepresent their reasons so forgive me if I misspeak, this was a while back. I believe they thought the graphic system was innovatively designed to be tightly integrated and straightforward to understand. I believe they also thought their audio stack, native file system and multitasking model was really great. I believe it's much more cathedral than Linux so ostensibly there's fewer interim layers and the ones that exist play nicer with each other. I'd guess this would be true for illumos as well but I am not going to pretend I've even looked at the source of either. If anyone says something in this thread that contradicts what I said, trust them over me. This was probably at least 10 years ago
somewhatbetter 5y ago
Me, since years as my main and only OS.
- iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
  That's very interesting! What work and other activities do you do on it, and how does it compare to the last OS you used full time? I've been curious about BeOS since I read Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning There Was the Command Line", but I'm too young to have ever seen it in action.
  - somewhatbetter 5y ago
    >That's very interesting! It is not. We are talking about a tool. An OS never meant to be sexy or visible or distracting or eye candy. It should support and serve the user and only the user. It have no other task. >What work and other activities do you do on it, and how does it compare to the last OS you used full time? Some programming, porting, listening music, organizing files, email, chat. None of this requires a wannabe mainframe OS on desktop, but also way too cumbersome to do it on mobile devices. It works for me. It lets me eliminate most distraction from my life. I maintain the conviction: what not possible with Haiku should not be done at all. >I've been curious about BeOS since I read Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning There Was the Command Line", but I'm too young to have ever seen it in action. I have read it, it is a great example for the bias in the IT: always pick the mediocre solution and kill/ make impossible everything else. Sadly the programmers were always too autistic to understand what the auhor tried to say and the managers only interested in ROI. Therefore we are fucked with *nixes.

muth02446 5y ago

Not having proper (accelerated) graphics drivers seems to a problem that all alternative OSes suffer from. Is there any effort addressing that which is flexible enough that say both Haiku and Serenity could use it?

0xdeadb00f 5y ago
Isn't this an issue of GPU manufactures not releasing drivers? Hasn't Linux had issues with this before? (The famous "fuck you nvidia" Linus meme comes to mind).
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Well yes, but why should a company like nVidia or AMD make a driver for an OS with a user base that's a rounding error? Even if they just release all the information required to make one, you still need the labor to write the drivers. I think what parent is really asking is if there is something like rump kernels[0] for GPU. [0] is this even a thing anymore? rumpkernel.org seems to have become a generic IT news aggregator.
  - flatiron 5y ago
    Wouldn’t implementing Linux drm and stealing the drivers be easier?
    - anthk 5y ago
      OpenBSD adapted DRM and KMS.
  - blablabla123 5y ago
    > Well yes, but why should a company like nVidia or AMD make a driver for an OS with a user base that's a rounding error? Because 75% of all public servers are UNIX-like and nowadays by default most commodity computing capacity is on the GPU. Indeed Linux on the Desktop has been a disaster but that's no reason to make OpenCL and similar efforts a disaster too.

billfruit 5y ago

Is it possible to get the beos/haiku window manager/ desktop environment working on Linux?

rvense 5y ago
There isn't one. You might get something that looks a bit like it in screenshots, but there's nothing that works like BeOS tracker (filemanager) and deskbar do.

Koshkin 5y ago

With Windows 11 around the corner, how many of new home PCs will be left capable of running Haiku (or even Linux, for that matter)?

nix23 5y ago
?? Buy good Hardware where you can disable TPM2 and Secure-boot?