20 ms·

Haiku has hired an existing contributor to work on Haiku full-time

284 points by aarroyoc 5y ago

xupybd 5y ago
I like the idea of more operating systems to pick from. I'd love to try Haiku or BSD one day soon. What motivates people to invest in these very niche systems? I'd love to play around with them for fun but is there more to it?
- azinman2 5y ago
  > What motivates people to invest in these very niche systems? Nostalgia, curiosity, and hobby
- hellcow 5y ago
  I use OpenBSD because it's a very pragmatic choice for servers. Nearly everything is "off" by default and I can add only the specific things I need, reducing the attack surface. Pledge/unveil makes sandboxing my applications very simple. The pf firewall is much easier to use with confidence than iptables. The manpages are great and the system is small relative to most Linux distros, so you can understand how everything works and fits together -- great for infra. It's well-designed and consistent throughout because the kernel, OS, and all core tools are designed by the same people. As of yet, no conntrack-style edge cases requiring days digging through kernel code. :) This of course involves many trade-offs (losing access to common "modern" tech like containers, slower performance) but for my company the trade-offs were justified.
  - clipradiowallet 5y ago
    > The pf firewall is much easier to use with confidence than iptables Tell me more! I cut my teeth on ipchains/iptables back in the early 90's, and feel very familiar with it. That said, I know that doesn't mean it's the best/easiest at all. I've tried to grok Pf once or twice, but never ended up getting very far. I wanted to ask you if you began with Pf, or if you came from something else? More or less, I'm trying to figure out if Pf was difficult for me just because it wasn't my first.
    - cpach 5y ago
      FWIW: No Starch Press has a book about PF. I haven’t read it myself, but it might be worth having a look at. https://mwl.io/archives/2232 https://mwl.io/archives/2232
    - hellcow 5y ago
      I came from iptables and still have the misfortune of needing to use that in my job. :) My favorite feature of pf is the configuration file, which is a human-readable/writable file which sets the state in a consistent way, rather than iptable's preferred mechanism of using a bunch of CLI commands executed in just the right sequence. I want a guaranteed consistent state when I'm configuring firewalls across a fleet, and pf.conf makes that not only easy to achieve, but the default behavior. Just modify the conf file, copy that to all the boxes, reload pf, and your firewalls are all updated and guaranteed to be in the same state, regardless of whatever state they were in before. You can read the pf.conf file from top to bottom to figure out what's going to happen to any packet. All the rules are included right there. I would just read the man page for pf.conf which gives helpful examples (https://man.openbsd.org/pf.conf.5#EXAMPLES https://man.openbsd.org/pf.conf.5#EXAMPLES) as well as this resource: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/config.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/config.html.
  - mrtweetyhack 5y ago
    That's one of the things I HATE about Debian. Install a package and it defaults to on at start up.
- donatj 5y ago
  As someone who used BeOS in the 90's, I think people investing their time in Haiku comes down to love, plain and simple. In the 20 years since, I have not used an OS that has made me as _happy_ to use as BeOS. Early OS X around 10.4-10.5 came closest.
  - RamRodification 5y ago
    Doesn't that apply to everyone's OS of choice though? Actually maybe it doesn't... But it's not very helpful unless you can be at least a little bit specific about why it makes you happy.
    - donatj 5y ago
      > Doesn't that apply to everyone's OS of choice though? Do people have love deep in their hearts for Windows or even macOS 11? It's hard to explain these days, but back in the late 90s it was just so far ahead of everything else except maybe NeXT and NeXT was entirely out of reach for 99% of the world. The UI was ridiculously smooth and fast and everything worked together like a well oiled machine. - https://youtu.be/cjriSNgFHsM?t=350 https://youtu.be/cjriSNgFHsM?t=350 Here they play an mp3 and a video that continue to render while you move the windows around, on a 133mhz machine without it even putting up a sweat. Clearly that's nothing today but that was unheard of at the time. Beyond that it had amazing features you still don't see on operating systems today like the file system being an actual queryable database. Common metadata like ID3 tags from MP3's were entered into this and queryable. The standard email client stored emails as individual files and just queried the file system. I believe the address book did the same for people. The tabs of the individual windows stack together across apps! There were just so many little wonderful fit-and-finish things like that you don't get these days. - https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/GUI.html#stack-tile https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/GUI.html#stack-ti... I feel like most desktop OS's strive for parity with eachother. BeOS was trying to be better.
      - com2kid 5y ago
        > Do people have love deep in their hearts for Windows Windows 2000, yes. Amazing OS, insanely fast, and lightweight. With only a handful of background running processes and a couple dozen services it was possible to know exactly what was running on your computer at any time. On at least one occasion I was able to detect malware on my machine by noticing unexpected background network traffic via the light on my network hub blinking when it shouldn't have been. Windows XP will go down in history as the OS that an entire generation is nostalgic for, but Windows 2000 was its fiddly, hard to setup, but rock solid once running, older brother.
- ori_b 5y ago
  They're pleasant to work in. -- posted from netsurf on 9front.
- diskzero 5y ago
  I may contribute to Haiku, now that they are putting full-time resources into place. Why would I do this? It is more than nostalgia or fun, although that is part of it. I believe that diversity is vital to keeping the technological landscape healthy. Most people are happy to go with the status quo, fewer are willing to work to make positive changes and even less are willing to fund their efforts. Will something come of Haiku because of this? Directly or indirectly, yes. Someone will be working on a vision that may differ from that of Apple/Microsoft/linux, etc. This will have a ripple effect as either Haiku succeeds, or those who work on it take their viewpoints and knowledge to other companies and efforts. Either way, this sort of diversity helps out in keeping the technological ecosystem from becoming more and more of a monoculture.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  > I'd love to try Haiku or BSD one day soon. What motivates people to invest in these very niche systems? My interest in FreeBSD began about 12 years ago, when a friend of mine told me about the BSD operating systems and he said that the one he was using was very secure (OpenBSD) and that it had good documentation and that these BSD operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and others) are each developed "as a whole", as opposed to Linux which I had recently begun seriously using but which is developed as a bunch of separate much more loosely-tied projects and then bundled together in the form of various distros. I installed FreeBSD and liked it a lot. I just felt at home, somehow. And for a good while I was running FreeBSD also on my desktop and my laptop. Fast-forward to present day. On my laptop I run macOS. On my servers I run FreeBSD. My MacBook Pro M1 laptop is my daily driver. I have a desktop that I run Linux on but I rarely boot it because mostly I have no reason to. Almost everything I do I can do with my MacBook Pro M1 and with my servers that run FreeBSD. But even though I like FreeBSD so much, I feel and fear that Linux keeps advancing in much bigger strides than FreeBSD, because of the many many more people contributing to Linux compared to how many people are developing FreeBSD. I really want to get into eBPF on Linux soon and explore that. It seems like it could help me gain both insights into the execution of the software that I develop, even more than is possible with DTrace maybe. And I want to explore what can be done on Linux using kTLS and eBPF together. And I am curious to find out more about things like what they talk about at https://pchaigno.github.io/ebpf/2020/11/04/hxdp-efficient-software-packet-processing-on-fpga-nics.html https://pchaigno.github.io/ebpf/2020/11/04/hxdp-efficient-so... And all of those things have me thinking a lot about whether the positives of using FreeBSD (jails, OpenZFS in base, a system that is developed as a whole, etc) actually justify staying with FreeBSD. Or if I should ditch FreeBSD and focus my energy on Linux instead of on FreeBSD.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Are there any particularly UX-focused BSD distros, similar to Mint, Zorin, or Elementary for Linux? Would GhostBSD be the one?
- peterkos 5y ago
  Maybe to get a more considered word in about features you need? I can't really think of anything specific os-wise, but I'm thinking, if you rely on some cool cross-app functionality (e.g., macOS drag-icon-from-toolbar-to-move-corresponding-file) you can have a good shot at contributing to/owning that feature on a small OS project vs. something like Fedora which would require a lot more buy-in
- em-bee 5y ago
  I like the idea of more operating systems to pick from well this would be one motivation really. personally, i like the ability to break with conventions and do things differently. especially on the user interface level. like hurd or plan 9, haiku has some unique aspects. now i just need to find a machine to actually run it.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    I keep wishing that I could run Haiku on a Raspberry Pi 4, just so I could have a little sandboxed machine to play with.
- iamevn 5y ago
  A while ago (2011ish maybe?) I had a hand-me-down laptop whose processor speed was measured in MHz (it even had a floppy drive!). The previous owners had windows XP on it but that didn't really run well. I tried various Linux distros/desktop environments/window managers and found that even running a barebones AwesomeWM setup was sluggish. I decided to give Haiku a shot and was surprised by how smooth it felt. I'm pretty sure the only sluggishness I had when opening applications or booting up was because the hard drive was very slow. I don't know how they did it but somehow it worked wonderfully on this really weak laptop. (Unfortunately I couldn't get the floppy drive working, idr why but some driver issue blocked me.) Since then I've kept an eye on it and plan on going back to it with some more powerful and better supported hardware to really get to play around with stuff like the interesting filesystem and get some things I use all the time ported over. Would love to switch over from mainly using Linux to having a Linux home server, and using Haiku as a daily driver and sshing in for Linuxy stuff.
  - waddlesplash 5y ago
    One of the other Haiku developers had this [1] response to an inquiry about why Haiku is so fast: > The system is not all that well optimized, uses a 15 year old compiler which does not uses any modern CPU features, and by default, the kernel is built in debug mode which makes it much slower than it could be. > How do other operating systems still manage to feel slower? I have no idea. (Those kernel debug options are no joke, they are a massive slowdown. The ones for the TCP stack alone take network throughput down to 1/5 of what it is without it; the ones for SMP, the virtual memory manager, lock facilities, etc. combined make the system visibly less snappy. We disable these on beta builds, but they are enabled on nightlies, and back in 2011 they were on by default.) [1]: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/why-is-haiku-so-fast/6317 https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/why-is-haiku-so-fast/6317
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      Is the difference algorithmic/architectural?
      - 5y ago
chaircher 5y ago
haiku has hired an existing contributor who will work full time
- dddw 5y ago
  At first I thought, weird comment, then I thought: Ah! Weird title!
- omarhaneef 5y ago
  The trend is quite clear: Any mention of Haiku Creates a cascade
- Mertax 5y ago
  Ya the original title isn’t a haiku, right? This appears to be a 6-7-5 pattern Haiku and is more concise
  - lostphilosopher 5y ago
    Haiku tangent: I'm no Haiku master, but as I understand it a proper Haiku should succinctly convey the experience of a moment in time. That's really the hallmark of a Haiku. Use of "seasonal words" is a traditional, but not breaking requirement. And the 5-7-5 thing is somewhat misleading since the Japanese (rough) equivalent to a "syllable" is shorter than an English syllable such that a 5-7-5 Haiku in English tends to be ~30% longer in time taken to say than a Haiku in Japanese. (This is what I can recall off the top of my head from The Haiku Handbook. Which is much more worth reading than my comment if you're interested in Haiku.)
- vmception 5y ago
  hmmmmm hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm is haiku a two or three syllable word? In Japanese it would be three syllables ha-i-ku and it is also a Japanese concept, so I figure it would matter
  - chaircher 5y ago
    haiku has hired existing contributor who will work full time
LeoPanthera 5y ago
I'm still nostalgic for OS/2. Apparently it still exists in the form of "ArcaOS" but I never hear anything about it.
- clipradiowallet 5y ago
  For what it's worth, a couple of years ago I saw an ATM machine reboot.... and saw the OS/2 splash screen. Wonder if it's popular in that industry, or if it was an older/one-off machine?
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    OS/2 was extremely popular throughout the entire banking industry and ATMs running on OS/2 was almost the norm for a few years.
- cpach 5y ago
  Fascinating. I wonder who their customers are these days.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    The NYC MTA subway terminals, for one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181866
cpach 5y ago
Very cool! Fun fact: Despite the name, “Haiku, Inc.” is actually a 501(c)(3) non-profit (^_^)
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  What do you mean “despite the name”? Nonprofits, including 501(c)3’s, a very often corporations.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Thanks for explaining. As a foreigner (to you US folks) this was not obvious to me. I always assumed "Inc" meant for profit like "SA(RL)" does in France. Around here non-profits have different legal statutes.
waddlesplash 5y ago
Hello HN, I'm the developer that has been hired. Happy to answer questions! Or you can go make a (tax-deductible) donation to Haiku, Inc. directly to support my contract: https://www.haiku-inc.org/donate/ https://www.haiku-inc.org/donate/
- cpach 5y ago
  Kudos! What are the top three features that you like the most with Haiku?
  - waddlesplash 5y ago
    The single biggest thing for me is the unified system design and implementation. That is, it's not like Linux/BSD desktop environments where the kernel, display server, window manager, desktop shell, file manager, distribution ... are all developed by separate teams in separate code repositories with separate goals, schedules, standards, etc. In Haiku, you can change the UI toolkit, display server, and init system all in a single commit to one repository. This has a massive array of advantages. It means we never go back and forth about where responsibility for a bug lies, only where it should be fixed. It means we can decide to go with or against trends and standards as it makes sense to (our package manager is probably the biggest example of this.) Virtually everything else I like about Haiku stems from this, whether it's the timeless UI, the overall system architecture, or even the code itself (which is a genuine pleasure to just read, not something that one can often say about any project.)
- em-bee 5y ago
  is there a roadmap? there is mention of R1 and R2. what are the goals for R1? any time estimates when R1 will be ready? what's in store for R2? there is discussion of multi user support for R2. what other interesting goals are there?
  - dleslie 5y ago
    The roadmap is actively updated here: https://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap https://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap
khazhoux 5y ago
Let me fix this for them: --- Haiku has hired existing contributor to join us full time
- moron4hire 5y ago
  The strict syllable count of the haiku poem is actually a myth. The haiku format is more about feelings in a moment, expressed as a snapshot. --- Heat waves, drawing to a close On the horizon, a form appears haikuOS.employees++;
  - spindle 5y ago
    This is my favourite hackernews comment for ages. I think though that it would be more accurate to say that there are now two haiku formats - the Japanese one, and the English one which was originally a misunderstanding of the Japanese one but which now has a life of its own, for better or for worse.
    - moron4hire 5y ago
      I get it, but the "English version" you speak of is so often just one thought in seventeen syllables split into three lines at otherwise arbitrary points. There's no meaningful construction beyond fitting the thought into 17 syllables. If one is going to do the 5/7/5 style, make them actual phrases, rather than disjoint groups of words that only make sense in the whole.
      - spindle 5y ago
        In my experience, that's right, the English version usually sucks. :-(
  - khazhoux 5y ago
    Right. It's never made sense to break down a traditional form into the super-clunky 5/7/5 rule. That said, I'm still surprised Haiku, the company, does not seem to employ any haiku.
winrid 5y ago
What's the web browsing experience like on Haiku? Really if it could run a modern browser and IDE I'd try it out. It looks like there's an OpenJDK port - that'd open up a lot of possibilities[0]. https://openjdk.java.net/projects/haiku-port/ https://openjdk.java.net/projects/haiku-port/
- waddlesplash 5y ago
  WebPositive is based on modern WebKit but quite a few features have not yet been enabled (because they depend on platform code that is not implemented) or function not so well. But there is potential for sure. Nothing prohibits porting Chromium or Firefox, they are just huge projects with a massive surface area. (Even WebKit, smaller than both of those, is larger than all of Haiku itself.) So we have put our time into WebKit instead. There is Qt Creator already in the package repositories, and I think someone got Code::Blocks to at least build if not start. I've heard NetBeans used to work, though I'm not sure it still does. Eclipse would require much more work.
  - snazz 5y ago
    The JetBrains IDEs at least start on Haiku (or they did at one point): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18893648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18893648 Not sure how good that experience is but it's very impressive nonetheless.
  - elcritch 5y ago
    If you can build QT5 on Haiku, then it may be possible to get it's embedded version of chromium running. It's largely self contained, but some of the dependencies contain a few finicky code like simd jpeg library or ffmpeg.
    - waddlesplash 5y ago
      People have attempted building QtWebEngine, yes, but it still has a surprising amount of OS-specific code within it. I think it may have gotten so far as displaying webpages but then crashed incessantly. Plus, I'm not sure what browser shells that use QtWebEngine are still actively developed; Falkon looks to be dead...
vondur 5y ago
I like how they announce the new developer only as their username. Pretty cool.
- waddlesplash 5y ago
  Well, I do have a real name, and if you look in the right place you can find it, but >=99.9% of people in the Haiku community and those who have heard of it know me only as "waddlesplash", so why bother announcing with anything else?
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Who needs government ID when you're volunteering for a cool project? 8)
im_down_w_otp 5y ago
I ran BeOS many, many years ago on a PowerComputing Mac-clone and remember it fondly. I had high hopes that when LG acquired WebOS that perhaps some form of BeOS as a general computing platform might resurface. One question I've always had about Haiku is how faithful it is to the underlying implementation and architecture of BeOS, not so much its resultant API compatibility? Because it was the guts of BeOS which seemed to make it so special, not its component interfaces.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  I've always wondered that, too. Since BeOS was never open-sourced, is Haiku more of a spiritual successor than a direct descendent?
- angus-prune 5y ago
  What is the relevence of WebOS? I thought that came from Palm OS, and I wasn't aware of any link to BeOS.
  - im_down_w_otp 5y ago
    Palm acquired the rights to BeOS, some part of it was used as the guts of webOS for their run at the new-wave smartphone market, and then that of course was acquired by LG, which then used webOS to power some number of smart TVs. If I'm remembering correctly.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Funny, then, that even BeOS or a sliver of it lived on in a mobile operating system. See this conversation about how Linux seems to almost overwhelmingly dominate the mobile OS space, with iOS as the most significant exception. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28297544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28297544
- diskzero 5y ago
  The BeOS internal architecture changed a lot from release to release. The kernel, file system, all the kits were constantly undergoing massive change and I don't think there was an ABI until release four. We broke binaries all the time! Most of the code wasn't open sourced, but it leaked and yellowTab released a version using the actual BeOS source code. The entire system compressed down to 90MB and you could ftp all.tgz and build the whole system. Looking at the architecture critically, is it a good idea to have a C++ API and have to deal with fragile base classes? I remember stuffing classes full of placeholders to create space in the vtable for future changes. BeOS was well documented and the BeBook is still nice to read. Looking at the Haiku source, I see that they have all the kits, with the same API. When I look at the source for Looper, the code is a shadowy reflection of the "real" source. It may even be much better! If Haiku feels good to use and program, then I think it is faithful to BeOS. Cyril was constantly improving the kernel, Dominic was constantly improving the filesytem, Benoit was constantly improving the window server, Pavel was constantly improving Tracker, etc. There wasn't really a dogma about what BeOS should be except fast, responsive, forward looking and fun for users and developers.
intricatedetail 5y ago
In many countries a for profit company cannot accept "free" contributions, as this is in breach of minimum wage regulations and volunteering. E.g. here you can only volunteer for charities.
- pakyr 5y ago
  Haiku, Inc. is a nonprofit.[1] [1] https://www.haiku-inc.org/about/ https://www.haiku-inc.org/about/
- em-bee 5y ago
  got an example of case where this caused a problem? i can't imagine how that would work. while i can imagine that a company may not instruct people to work for them for free, wouldn't that also prevent me from making code freely available that a company then just uses? it makes no sense. if that were the case companies would not be able to use any software that is available for free. there can't be many countries where that is actually the case.
Decabytes 5y ago
I would love to go about writing a toy operating system, but I only know Python, and I feel like I would need to learn a lower level programming language (Rust, C++, or C) before I could even start. I wonder if it would be simpler building on top of one of the linux or BSD kernels (I've heard NetBSD's is pretty cool)
- guerrilla 5y ago
  You have a long way to go but at least people have worn the path before you [1] so that it's easier than ever to find out what you need to do and how to do it. 1. https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page

284 points by aarroyoc 5y ago

I like the idea of more operating systems to pick from. I'd love to try Haiku or BSD one day soon. What motivates people to invest in these very niche systems? I'd love to play around with them for fun but is there more to it?

azinman2 5y ago
> What motivates people to invest in these very niche systems? Nostalgia, curiosity, and hobby
hellcow 5y ago
I use OpenBSD because it's a very pragmatic choice for servers. Nearly everything is "off" by default and I can add only the specific things I need, reducing the attack surface. Pledge/unveil makes sandboxing my applications very simple. The pf firewall is much easier to use with confidence than iptables. The manpages are great and the system is small relative to most Linux distros, so you can understand how everything works and fits together -- great for infra. It's well-designed and consistent throughout because the kernel, OS, and all core tools are designed by the same people. As of yet, no conntrack-style edge cases requiring days digging through kernel code. :) This of course involves many trade-offs (losing access to common "modern" tech like containers, slower performance) but for my company the trade-offs were justified.
- clipradiowallet 5y ago
  > The pf firewall is much easier to use with confidence than iptables Tell me more! I cut my teeth on ipchains/iptables back in the early 90's, and feel very familiar with it. That said, I know that doesn't mean it's the best/easiest at all. I've tried to grok Pf once or twice, but never ended up getting very far. I wanted to ask you if you began with Pf, or if you came from something else? More or less, I'm trying to figure out if Pf was difficult for me just because it wasn't my first.
  - cpach 5y ago
    FWIW: No Starch Press has a book about PF. I haven’t read it myself, but it might be worth having a look at. https://mwl.io/archives/2232 https://mwl.io/archives/2232
  - hellcow 5y ago
    I came from iptables and still have the misfortune of needing to use that in my job. :) My favorite feature of pf is the configuration file, which is a human-readable/writable file which sets the state in a consistent way, rather than iptable's preferred mechanism of using a bunch of CLI commands executed in just the right sequence. I want a guaranteed consistent state when I'm configuring firewalls across a fleet, and pf.conf makes that not only easy to achieve, but the default behavior. Just modify the conf file, copy that to all the boxes, reload pf, and your firewalls are all updated and guaranteed to be in the same state, regardless of whatever state they were in before. You can read the pf.conf file from top to bottom to figure out what's going to happen to any packet. All the rules are included right there. I would just read the man page for pf.conf which gives helpful examples (https://man.openbsd.org/pf.conf.5#EXAMPLES https://man.openbsd.org/pf.conf.5#EXAMPLES) as well as this resource: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/config.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/config.html.
- mrtweetyhack 5y ago
  That's one of the things I HATE about Debian. Install a package and it defaults to on at start up.
donatj 5y ago
As someone who used BeOS in the 90's, I think people investing their time in Haiku comes down to love, plain and simple. In the 20 years since, I have not used an OS that has made me as _happy_ to use as BeOS. Early OS X around 10.4-10.5 came closest.
- RamRodification 5y ago
  Doesn't that apply to everyone's OS of choice though? Actually maybe it doesn't... But it's not very helpful unless you can be at least a little bit specific about why it makes you happy.
  - donatj 5y ago
    > Doesn't that apply to everyone's OS of choice though? Do people have love deep in their hearts for Windows or even macOS 11? It's hard to explain these days, but back in the late 90s it was just so far ahead of everything else except maybe NeXT and NeXT was entirely out of reach for 99% of the world. The UI was ridiculously smooth and fast and everything worked together like a well oiled machine. - https://youtu.be/cjriSNgFHsM?t=350 https://youtu.be/cjriSNgFHsM?t=350 Here they play an mp3 and a video that continue to render while you move the windows around, on a 133mhz machine without it even putting up a sweat. Clearly that's nothing today but that was unheard of at the time. Beyond that it had amazing features you still don't see on operating systems today like the file system being an actual queryable database. Common metadata like ID3 tags from MP3's were entered into this and queryable. The standard email client stored emails as individual files and just queried the file system. I believe the address book did the same for people. The tabs of the individual windows stack together across apps! There were just so many little wonderful fit-and-finish things like that you don't get these days. - https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/GUI.html#stack-tile https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/GUI.html#stack-ti... I feel like most desktop OS's strive for parity with eachother. BeOS was trying to be better.
    - com2kid 5y ago
      > Do people have love deep in their hearts for Windows Windows 2000, yes. Amazing OS, insanely fast, and lightweight. With only a handful of background running processes and a couple dozen services it was possible to know exactly what was running on your computer at any time. On at least one occasion I was able to detect malware on my machine by noticing unexpected background network traffic via the light on my network hub blinking when it shouldn't have been. Windows XP will go down in history as the OS that an entire generation is nostalgic for, but Windows 2000 was its fiddly, hard to setup, but rock solid once running, older brother.
ori_b 5y ago
They're pleasant to work in. -- posted from netsurf on 9front.
diskzero 5y ago
I may contribute to Haiku, now that they are putting full-time resources into place. Why would I do this? It is more than nostalgia or fun, although that is part of it. I believe that diversity is vital to keeping the technological landscape healthy. Most people are happy to go with the status quo, fewer are willing to work to make positive changes and even less are willing to fund their efforts. Will something come of Haiku because of this? Directly or indirectly, yes. Someone will be working on a vision that may differ from that of Apple/Microsoft/linux, etc. This will have a ripple effect as either Haiku succeeds, or those who work on it take their viewpoints and knowledge to other companies and efforts. Either way, this sort of diversity helps out in keeping the technological ecosystem from becoming more and more of a monoculture.
codetrotter 5y ago
> I'd love to try Haiku or BSD one day soon. What motivates people to invest in these very niche systems? My interest in FreeBSD began about 12 years ago, when a friend of mine told me about the BSD operating systems and he said that the one he was using was very secure (OpenBSD) and that it had good documentation and that these BSD operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and others) are each developed "as a whole", as opposed to Linux which I had recently begun seriously using but which is developed as a bunch of separate much more loosely-tied projects and then bundled together in the form of various distros. I installed FreeBSD and liked it a lot. I just felt at home, somehow. And for a good while I was running FreeBSD also on my desktop and my laptop. Fast-forward to present day. On my laptop I run macOS. On my servers I run FreeBSD. My MacBook Pro M1 laptop is my daily driver. I have a desktop that I run Linux on but I rarely boot it because mostly I have no reason to. Almost everything I do I can do with my MacBook Pro M1 and with my servers that run FreeBSD. But even though I like FreeBSD so much, I feel and fear that Linux keeps advancing in much bigger strides than FreeBSD, because of the many many more people contributing to Linux compared to how many people are developing FreeBSD. I really want to get into eBPF on Linux soon and explore that. It seems like it could help me gain both insights into the execution of the software that I develop, even more than is possible with DTrace maybe. And I want to explore what can be done on Linux using kTLS and eBPF together. And I am curious to find out more about things like what they talk about at https://pchaigno.github.io/ebpf/2020/11/04/hxdp-efficient-software-packet-processing-on-fpga-nics.html https://pchaigno.github.io/ebpf/2020/11/04/hxdp-efficient-so... And all of those things have me thinking a lot about whether the positives of using FreeBSD (jails, OpenZFS in base, a system that is developed as a whole, etc) actually justify staying with FreeBSD. Or if I should ditch FreeBSD and focus my energy on Linux instead of on FreeBSD.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Are there any particularly UX-focused BSD distros, similar to Mint, Zorin, or Elementary for Linux? Would GhostBSD be the one?
peterkos 5y ago
Maybe to get a more considered word in about features you need? I can't really think of anything specific os-wise, but I'm thinking, if you rely on some cool cross-app functionality (e.g., macOS drag-icon-from-toolbar-to-move-corresponding-file) you can have a good shot at contributing to/owning that feature on a small OS project vs. something like Fedora which would require a lot more buy-in
em-bee 5y ago
I like the idea of more operating systems to pick from well this would be one motivation really. personally, i like the ability to break with conventions and do things differently. especially on the user interface level. like hurd or plan 9, haiku has some unique aspects. now i just need to find a machine to actually run it.
- klyrs 5y ago
  I keep wishing that I could run Haiku on a Raspberry Pi 4, just so I could have a little sandboxed machine to play with.
iamevn 5y ago
A while ago (2011ish maybe?) I had a hand-me-down laptop whose processor speed was measured in MHz (it even had a floppy drive!). The previous owners had windows XP on it but that didn't really run well. I tried various Linux distros/desktop environments/window managers and found that even running a barebones AwesomeWM setup was sluggish. I decided to give Haiku a shot and was surprised by how smooth it felt. I'm pretty sure the only sluggishness I had when opening applications or booting up was because the hard drive was very slow. I don't know how they did it but somehow it worked wonderfully on this really weak laptop. (Unfortunately I couldn't get the floppy drive working, idr why but some driver issue blocked me.) Since then I've kept an eye on it and plan on going back to it with some more powerful and better supported hardware to really get to play around with stuff like the interesting filesystem and get some things I use all the time ported over. Would love to switch over from mainly using Linux to having a Linux home server, and using Haiku as a daily driver and sshing in for Linuxy stuff.
- waddlesplash 5y ago
  One of the other Haiku developers had this [1] response to an inquiry about why Haiku is so fast: > The system is not all that well optimized, uses a 15 year old compiler which does not uses any modern CPU features, and by default, the kernel is built in debug mode which makes it much slower than it could be. > How do other operating systems still manage to feel slower? I have no idea. (Those kernel debug options are no joke, they are a massive slowdown. The ones for the TCP stack alone take network throughput down to 1/5 of what it is without it; the ones for SMP, the virtual memory manager, lock facilities, etc. combined make the system visibly less snappy. We disable these on beta builds, but they are enabled on nightlies, and back in 2011 they were on by default.) [1]: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/why-is-haiku-so-fast/6317 https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/why-is-haiku-so-fast/6317
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    Is the difference algorithmic/architectural?
    - 5y ago

chaircher 5y ago

haiku has hired an existing contributor who will work full time

dddw 5y ago
At first I thought, weird comment, then I thought: Ah! Weird title!
omarhaneef 5y ago
The trend is quite clear: Any mention of Haiku Creates a cascade
Mertax 5y ago
Ya the original title isn’t a haiku, right? This appears to be a 6-7-5 pattern Haiku and is more concise
- lostphilosopher 5y ago
  Haiku tangent: I'm no Haiku master, but as I understand it a proper Haiku should succinctly convey the experience of a moment in time. That's really the hallmark of a Haiku. Use of "seasonal words" is a traditional, but not breaking requirement. And the 5-7-5 thing is somewhat misleading since the Japanese (rough) equivalent to a "syllable" is shorter than an English syllable such that a 5-7-5 Haiku in English tends to be ~30% longer in time taken to say than a Haiku in Japanese. (This is what I can recall off the top of my head from The Haiku Handbook. Which is much more worth reading than my comment if you're interested in Haiku.)
vmception 5y ago
hmmmmm hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm is haiku a two or three syllable word? In Japanese it would be three syllables ha-i-ku and it is also a Japanese concept, so I figure it would matter
- chaircher 5y ago
  haiku has hired existing contributor who will work full time

LeoPanthera 5y ago

I'm still nostalgic for OS/2. Apparently it still exists in the form of "ArcaOS" but I never hear anything about it.

clipradiowallet 5y ago
For what it's worth, a couple of years ago I saw an ATM machine reboot.... and saw the OS/2 splash screen. Wonder if it's popular in that industry, or if it was an older/one-off machine?
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  OS/2 was extremely popular throughout the entire banking industry and ATMs running on OS/2 was almost the norm for a few years.
cpach 5y ago
Fascinating. I wonder who their customers are these days.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  The NYC MTA subway terminals, for one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181866

cpach 5y ago

Very cool! Fun fact: Despite the name, “Haiku, Inc.” is actually a 501(c)(3) non-profit (^_^)

dragonwriter 5y ago
What do you mean “despite the name”? Nonprofits, including 501(c)3’s, a very often corporations.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Thanks for explaining. As a foreigner (to you US folks) this was not obvious to me. I always assumed "Inc" meant for profit like "SA(RL)" does in France. Around here non-profits have different legal statutes.

waddlesplash 5y ago

Hello HN, I'm the developer that has been hired. Happy to answer questions! Or you can go make a (tax-deductible) donation to Haiku, Inc. directly to support my contract: https://www.haiku-inc.org/donate/ https://www.haiku-inc.org/donate/

cpach 5y ago
Kudos! What are the top three features that you like the most with Haiku?
- waddlesplash 5y ago
  The single biggest thing for me is the unified system design and implementation. That is, it's not like Linux/BSD desktop environments where the kernel, display server, window manager, desktop shell, file manager, distribution ... are all developed by separate teams in separate code repositories with separate goals, schedules, standards, etc. In Haiku, you can change the UI toolkit, display server, and init system all in a single commit to one repository. This has a massive array of advantages. It means we never go back and forth about where responsibility for a bug lies, only where it should be fixed. It means we can decide to go with or against trends and standards as it makes sense to (our package manager is probably the biggest example of this.) Virtually everything else I like about Haiku stems from this, whether it's the timeless UI, the overall system architecture, or even the code itself (which is a genuine pleasure to just read, not something that one can often say about any project.)
em-bee 5y ago
is there a roadmap? there is mention of R1 and R2. what are the goals for R1? any time estimates when R1 will be ready? what's in store for R2? there is discussion of multi user support for R2. what other interesting goals are there?
- dleslie 5y ago
  The roadmap is actively updated here: https://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap https://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap

khazhoux 5y ago

Let me fix this for them: --- Haiku has hired existing contributor to join us full time

moron4hire 5y ago
The strict syllable count of the haiku poem is actually a myth. The haiku format is more about feelings in a moment, expressed as a snapshot. --- Heat waves, drawing to a close On the horizon, a form appears haikuOS.employees++;
- spindle 5y ago
  This is my favourite hackernews comment for ages. I think though that it would be more accurate to say that there are now two haiku formats - the Japanese one, and the English one which was originally a misunderstanding of the Japanese one but which now has a life of its own, for better or for worse.
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    I get it, but the "English version" you speak of is so often just one thought in seventeen syllables split into three lines at otherwise arbitrary points. There's no meaningful construction beyond fitting the thought into 17 syllables. If one is going to do the 5/7/5 style, make them actual phrases, rather than disjoint groups of words that only make sense in the whole.
    - spindle 5y ago
      In my experience, that's right, the English version usually sucks. :-(
- khazhoux 5y ago
  Right. It's never made sense to break down a traditional form into the super-clunky 5/7/5 rule. That said, I'm still surprised Haiku, the company, does not seem to employ any haiku.

winrid 5y ago

What's the web browsing experience like on Haiku? Really if it could run a modern browser and IDE I'd try it out. It looks like there's an OpenJDK port - that'd open up a lot of possibilities[0]. https://openjdk.java.net/projects/haiku-port/ https://openjdk.java.net/projects/haiku-port/

waddlesplash 5y ago
WebPositive is based on modern WebKit but quite a few features have not yet been enabled (because they depend on platform code that is not implemented) or function not so well. But there is potential for sure. Nothing prohibits porting Chromium or Firefox, they are just huge projects with a massive surface area. (Even WebKit, smaller than both of those, is larger than all of Haiku itself.) So we have put our time into WebKit instead. There is Qt Creator already in the package repositories, and I think someone got Code::Blocks to at least build if not start. I've heard NetBeans used to work, though I'm not sure it still does. Eclipse would require much more work.
- snazz 5y ago
  The JetBrains IDEs at least start on Haiku (or they did at one point): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18893648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18893648 Not sure how good that experience is but it's very impressive nonetheless.
- elcritch 5y ago
  If you can build QT5 on Haiku, then it may be possible to get it's embedded version of chromium running. It's largely self contained, but some of the dependencies contain a few finicky code like simd jpeg library or ffmpeg.
  - waddlesplash 5y ago
    People have attempted building QtWebEngine, yes, but it still has a surprising amount of OS-specific code within it. I think it may have gotten so far as displaying webpages but then crashed incessantly. Plus, I'm not sure what browser shells that use QtWebEngine are still actively developed; Falkon looks to be dead...

vondur 5y ago

I like how they announce the new developer only as their username. Pretty cool.

waddlesplash 5y ago
Well, I do have a real name, and if you look in the right place you can find it, but >=99.9% of people in the Haiku community and those who have heard of it know me only as "waddlesplash", so why bother announcing with anything else?
southerntofu 5y ago
Who needs government ID when you're volunteering for a cool project? 8)

im_down_w_otp 5y ago

I ran BeOS many, many years ago on a PowerComputing Mac-clone and remember it fondly. I had high hopes that when LG acquired WebOS that perhaps some form of BeOS as a general computing platform might resurface. One question I've always had about Haiku is how faithful it is to the underlying implementation and architecture of BeOS, not so much its resultant API compatibility? Because it was the guts of BeOS which seemed to make it so special, not its component interfaces.

Apocryphon 5y ago
I've always wondered that, too. Since BeOS was never open-sourced, is Haiku more of a spiritual successor than a direct descendent?
angus-prune 5y ago
What is the relevence of WebOS? I thought that came from Palm OS, and I wasn't aware of any link to BeOS.
- im_down_w_otp 5y ago
  Palm acquired the rights to BeOS, some part of it was used as the guts of webOS for their run at the new-wave smartphone market, and then that of course was acquired by LG, which then used webOS to power some number of smart TVs. If I'm remembering correctly.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Funny, then, that even BeOS or a sliver of it lived on in a mobile operating system. See this conversation about how Linux seems to almost overwhelmingly dominate the mobile OS space, with iOS as the most significant exception. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28297544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28297544
diskzero 5y ago
The BeOS internal architecture changed a lot from release to release. The kernel, file system, all the kits were constantly undergoing massive change and I don't think there was an ABI until release four. We broke binaries all the time! Most of the code wasn't open sourced, but it leaked and yellowTab released a version using the actual BeOS source code. The entire system compressed down to 90MB and you could ftp all.tgz and build the whole system. Looking at the architecture critically, is it a good idea to have a C++ API and have to deal with fragile base classes? I remember stuffing classes full of placeholders to create space in the vtable for future changes. BeOS was well documented and the BeBook is still nice to read. Looking at the Haiku source, I see that they have all the kits, with the same API. When I look at the source for Looper, the code is a shadowy reflection of the "real" source. It may even be much better! If Haiku feels good to use and program, then I think it is faithful to BeOS. Cyril was constantly improving the kernel, Dominic was constantly improving the filesytem, Benoit was constantly improving the window server, Pavel was constantly improving Tracker, etc. There wasn't really a dogma about what BeOS should be except fast, responsive, forward looking and fun for users and developers.

intricatedetail 5y ago

In many countries a for profit company cannot accept "free" contributions, as this is in breach of minimum wage regulations and volunteering. E.g. here you can only volunteer for charities.

pakyr 5y ago
Haiku, Inc. is a nonprofit.[1] [1] https://www.haiku-inc.org/about/ https://www.haiku-inc.org/about/
em-bee 5y ago
got an example of case where this caused a problem? i can't imagine how that would work. while i can imagine that a company may not instruct people to work for them for free, wouldn't that also prevent me from making code freely available that a company then just uses? it makes no sense. if that were the case companies would not be able to use any software that is available for free. there can't be many countries where that is actually the case.

Decabytes 5y ago

I would love to go about writing a toy operating system, but I only know Python, and I feel like I would need to learn a lower level programming language (Rust, C++, or C) before I could even start. I wonder if it would be simpler building on top of one of the linux or BSD kernels (I've heard NetBSD's is pretty cool)

guerrilla 5y ago
You have a long way to go but at least people have worn the path before you [1] so that it's easier than ever to find out what you need to do and how to do it. 1. https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page