7 ms·

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.

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.