10 ms·
Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024
- blue1 3y agoEmacs runs in haiku OS. So most of my requirements are satisfied.
- givemeethekeys 3y agoHaiku looked amazing and beautiful in 2009 when I first learned about it. Today it looks dated like Windows 95.
- mtillman 3y agoDisagree strongly. I find its appearance 10X more visually appealing than any modern UI (win/mac/kde/etc). They’re all incredibly wasteful of space and chunky. Also, designers ruined OSX by making it flat and joyless.
- alpaca128 3y agoThey not just waste space but at the same time break some of the UI. Recently it took me half a minute to drag a window into view on Mac OS because aside from a few pixels every single part of the window "title bar" was actually some button or widget. I wish mainstream operating systems implemented DWM's shortcuts for window dragging/resizing, those are amazing: holding the key and left mouse button makes the window draggable anywhere, and right mouse button instantly resizes the window so the bottom right corner is at the mouse cursor position. And I hate auto-hiding, narrow scrollbars so much. Scrollbars have exactly two purposes: show the scroll progress and allow faster scrolling than with the wheel/gesture. Both are effectively prevented by it going invisible. There was a time when I found the Windows 98 UI a bit "old", but honestly in the long run it aged better than almost everything that came after.
- mepian 3y agoI wish modern operating systems looked like Windows 95, I think this was the one time Microsoft got their user experience right, except for the things that were forced on them by backward compatibility concerns, e.g. "in-band" filename extensions that were awkwardly hidden by later versions of Windows.
- latexr 3y agoHaven’t tried either, but there’s https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 and https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/
- zozbot234 3y agohttps://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 has a theme for GTK+4 with classic widgets, they work quite well w/ the new "responsive" mobile-friendly apps. Unfortunately you'll need to replace your GTK+ user config outright to use it because the new version has no support for themes.
- Apocryphon 3y agoThat’s to a certain advantage though. There’s a nostalgic pining for simpler cleaner OS aesthetics. See the vaporwave and Frutiger Aero trends, and the interest in SerenityOS.
- anthk 3y agoAero was not simpler or cleaner. Ditto with KDE3 with Keramik. Usable and with clear widgets? Yes, but not simpler. Simpler, clean and usable were Mac OS 7-8, Windows 95-2k, or BeOS. Also, lots of vaporwave confuses the 80's and 90's, often made from people which either they weren't there or they were too young. To me the years from1996 and 2004 share lots of traits, (being Mac OSX almost the pinaccle of late 90's technologism and optimistic futurism), and early 90's were culturally almost an extension of the late 80's. Both in trends, music, movies... things began to change with Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, and so on.
- Apocryphon 3y agoTo me, the appeal of Frutiger Aero is more in the proto-solarpunk marketing (skyscrapers surrounded by verdant fields under sunny blue skies, dolphins leaping) than the actual UI. Though hard to hate on the Wii Shop Channel. Bluecurve from Red Hat is a nice bridge between the '90s and late '00s era, as far as design languages go.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoI could not disagree more about Windows 95 looking "dated". It's one the clearest, simplest, and easiest to parse UIs I've ever seen. Buttons look like buttons. Scroll bars are thick and clear. Draggable objects are obvious. It's a huge shame that we've gone only backwards since then, IMHO.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoSometimes I wonder what kids will consider a 'button' since their first few years will be touch screens, magic corner trackpads, and no-show clickers in MightyMice. Do TV remotes even have physical buttons any more?
- Avshalom 3y agoLast Christmas, one of the most popular toys we sold was Pop-Its, which is nothing more that a plastic sheet of buttons. I am not worried that the kids will grow up not understanding the concept of a button. https://www.target.com/s/pop+it+fidget+toy https://www.target.com/s/pop+it+fidget+toy
- trealira 3y agoTV remotes do still have buttons. Also, there are still on/off buttons and volume buttons on phones. Video game controllers still use buttons. Car radios and car A/C and heaters still use physical buttons.
- theandrewbailey 3y ago> Car radios and car A/C and heaters still use physical buttons. Depends on the car's year, make, and model. It could be touchscreen only.
- trealira 3y agoThat's fair. I haven't yet seen a car with only a touchscreen and nothing else, but I wouldn't be surprised by the existence of such a car. I don't actively keep up with new cars.
- waddlesplash 3y agoThere's a "flat" decorator which makes things look more 'modern', if that's what you want: https://github.com/unarix/haiku_darkstyle#darkflat https://github.com/unarix/haiku_darkstyle#darkflat (Available in the Depot; install "haiku_extras" package.)
- Underphil 3y agoLoved BeOS, and love HaikuOS. But a "daily driver" it is most certainly not. Don't be fooled.
- mtillman 3y agoHaving contributed to the project, I still agree. In my mind it’s perfect for retirees who don’t need zoom or mobile syncing. The browser is quite good imo as is the email client. I really like that it’s (by default) a single user environment-ideal for an old laptop.
- al_borland 3y agoI have to imagine the Venn diagram of retirees and people who are interested in trying more obscure operating systems, has only a sliver of overlap. Though I may end up in that camp one day. I did quite a bit of that between graduating from college and getting my first job.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoRetirees built every long lasting technology we use everyday, and even invented some too. ;-)
- al_borland 3y agoThose pioneers make up the sliver of the Venn diagram.
- trealira 3y agoThe majority of them probably aren't interested in trying BeOS as a daily driver, either. More likely they'd use Windows, MacOS, or Linux. Maybe a BSD.
- kjellsbells 3y agoI know that the industry is littered with the skeletons of "kitchen PC for Grandma" that lets a senior connect to the grandkids, set a timer for those apple pies, and do some light surfing, and that it will never work on the slurry-filled Internet that Grandma's kids actually built in their day jobs - but with each passing enshittification of the home user PC experience, the siren song of a simple single user OS that is reliable, fast and secure grows louder.
- ianai 3y agoAt some point/place I heard it was going to have a ribbon type thing flow down menus. This would help follow stuff in deep drill downs. Really wish someone had done it. https://store.kde.org/s/Opendesktop/p/1080563/ https://store.kde.org/s/Opendesktop/p/1080563/ Personally, I think this OS has promise if it could get more modernization. It’d be nice to have another OSS GUI with some leanings into UI/UX. Edit-modernizations like cross compatibility with linux, would be my guess. Think linux subsystem with gui support? Wonder what else… Edit2-maybe throw in some modern stuff like swift (the apple language), zfs/bcachefs, and definitely a way to leverage already extant drivers.
- jonhohle 3y agoBeFS is its own awesome thing. Sure, ZFS integrity and portability is nice, but the speed and metadata of BeFS is great.
- ianai 3y agoSure, but adding metadata to zfs would probably be easier than modernizing BeFS. Just in general as FSes are very worthy of being a project unto themselves. Thinking of low lying fruit to get maximum value easily. BeFS doesn’t have to go anywhere either.
- jonhohle 3y agoDominic Giampaolo (the author of BeFS) did essentially that with Spotlight (also the author of Spotlight) on HFS & APFS (also the author of APFS).
- zie 3y agoI tried to use it as my mail client, I loaded it up and configured it, but it wasn't working. I did some very basic troubleshooting but couldn't find anything wrong and after a few web searches couldn't figure out how to find relevant logs to see what was broken. I gave up and moved on.
- chrsw 3y agoIn terms of foundations and principles Haiku OS is more of a coherent platform that anything on the Linux desktop attests to be at the moment. In terms practicality, hardware support and a size of software ecosystem it is still very minor compared to Linux, which I find unfortunate.
- nightowl_games 3y agoThese two things are linked.
- chrsw 3y agoThis statement got me thinking. How do you mean? I wonder if you're thinking what I'm thinking.
- nightowl_games 3y agoA solo developer or a small team can create a very focused, consistent product. But once the masses of people are drawn to it, both as customers and as contributors, maintaining a hold on it as a visionary is difficult. Id argue that squeezing too hard to maintain that hold can strangle the project. A perfect idealized initial design and initial vision can drive consistency further along the timeline, but this is an ideal. We create something, then we give it to the world to be consumed. Haiku is still in its cocoon. It is unclear what would happen to it should it achieve the focus of the hivemind. It is unclear if the development team would even like that.
- snvzz 3y agoWith a recent, working port of Wine, there's no shortage of software to run on it.
- pjmlp 3y agoAll desktop OSes are, as they are thought as a whole stack, not jigsaw puzzles. That is what made Android/Linux and ChromeOS/Linux attractive to the masses, they offer the structure, for users and application developers, that GNU/Linux has never managed to structure across the endless list of flavours on Distrowatch. I really enjoyed using BeOS 5 during its heyday.
- tombert 3y agoI remember hearing about Haiku about a decade ago, and I played with it in a virtual machine, and it seemed neat, but I'm not 100% sure why it buys you over anything else. This could just have been the virtual machine, but it didn't feel any faster than any other OS really, and the UI was fine, but kind of unremarkable to me. I'm not saying all this to crap on the project; is there actually an advantage to using Haiku in 2024 over, say, Linux?
- christkv 3y agoAn os that nobody is writing zero day exploits for ?
- tombert 3y agoYeah, and everyone is looking for the next "distraction-free!" setup, so I suppose it might accomplish that to some extent as well.
- ianai 3y agoIt boots really fast. And the UI on some linux DEs feels laggy at times. This shouldn’t have the decades of cruft making the GUI lag.
- Conscat 3y agoIn 2023, Haiku got Emacs and Vulkan support that makes it much more attractive to me than in the past. But I still feel very reluctant to use something without the industry support that Linux has.
- benley 3y agoDoes that mean they have some accelerated video drivers now? Last I checked (maybe a year ago) there were none at all.
- waddlesplash 3y ago(Haiku developer here.) There is one hardware accelerated driver, for Radeon Southern Islands; but it's third-party, out-of-tree, and not particularly simple to set up and get running. So, not really.
- benley 3y agoThanks for the response. Is there much hope for this to change at some point? I would love to eventually use Haiku on actual hardware, and the lack of video acceleration is the main thing that discourages me from giving it a go.
- waddlesplash 3y agoWell, there's nothing preventing it from happening if that's what you mean. It's just a difficult thing to do, and requires effort (and expertise.) I might take a crack at porting the KMS/DRM drivers from Linux eventually, but it's not near the top of my TODO list.
- tobinfricke 3y agoIs it possible to run Haiku somehow on a Mac Mini M1, or does it require underlying Intel architecture?
- xcv123 3y agox86/x64 only https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta4/ https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta4/
- tobinfricke 3y agoIs there some kind of x86 emulator that will do the trick?
- drooopy 3y agoTry UTM mac.getutm.app/
- sillywalk 3y ago"Installing Haiku on Apple silicon Using UTM" https://codingitwrong.com/2023/08/05/installing-haiku-on-apple-silicon-using-utm.html https://codingitwrong.com/2023/08/05/installing-haiku-on-app...
- 29athrowaway 3y agoWhen I tried Haiku 3 years ago, it hanged regularly.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoOnce you start gluing various ported Linux applications onto these alternative OSes, they start to lose their distinctiveness and raison d'être. If you are using Qt/KDE apps, anyways, what does Haiku really bring to the table other than a smaller footprint? I never programmed for BeOS back in the day, but my understanding was that half the advantage of it was its consistent clean ground-up API for building multimedia applications. I'm not sure how well that has aged, tho...
- waddlesplash 3y agoHaiku's "raison d'être" is to be a fully-fledged desktop operating system for general use. So, if there aren't native applications to fulfill daily tasks, then Linux ones tend to get ported. Anyway, as for the question "why Haiku, if it's just ported Linux apps?" well, because Haiku is a much more cohesive system than any Linux distro. Even if every app you are running on it is from Linux (besides Tracker and Deskbar), the entire system underneath those applications remains tightly integrated.
- estebarb 3y agoAround 2000 a fully functional BeOS Personal edition was included in a PC Magazine CD. It was fun to try other operating system (I didn't even had to create a partition, something hard to do considering our PC had just 8GB of DD). It was much faster than Windows 98, although didn't have much applications.
- indigodaddy 3y agoHow well would this run on a 22” 2017ish iMac?
- valeg 3y agocpp was a poor choice for the system but Haiku is cute. The dev team should figure out 2D/3D acceleration and this thing will fly. 64 bit edition has finally abandoned BeOS compatibility and looks really promising as a quick tiny hobbyist OS.
- snvzz 3y agocpp is probably inherited from beos.
- dang 3y agoRelated: Haiku Activity and Contract Report, October 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38273608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38273608 - Nov 2023 (12 comments) Progress on running Haiku OS on VisionFive 2 RISC-V dev board - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35843775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35843775 - May 2023 (20 comments) Haiku's (Kernel) Condition Variables API: Design and Implementation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35690656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35690656 - April 2023 (16 comments) Haiku package management - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34879304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34879304 - Feb 2023 (52 comments) Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34338487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34338487 - Jan 2023 (38 comments) Haiku R1/beta4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34109349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34109349 - Dec 2022 (139 comments) Lots more listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111732...
- 6R1M0R4CL3 3y agoI loved BeOS. In the 90's it was my main OS including at work. When Be announced that BeOS will be gone, and Be too... I went to Linux. And never looked back. Started with a RedHat Linux 5, tried Debian, but could not get Debian to work with the dial-up modem, so went RedHat 5, then 6 and all those that followed until Fedora went out.