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Haiku Operating System
- beatgammit 14y agoThis has been discussed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123941 Is there anything new or notable about the project these days? I haven't kept up on the news.
- jff 14y agoNo, it's just karma whoring because the previous submission finally passed the age threshold.
- aeontech 14y agoThat is unkind - just because you have read about Haiku before, does not mean everyone else has. Filter bubble much?
- pestaa 14y agoLet's not pretend there is a different incentive to submit a URL that has not changed in the last 365 days other than karma points. Though I certainly appreciate being reminded of excellent projects, this submission feels way too automatic.
- aeontech 14y agoI've enjoyed the discussion above, so I think it was a worthy submission. I guess I don't really understand why people are bothered by someone getting those priceless karma points even if it is a repost.
- jarek 14y agoDo we draw a line? Is there a knowledge baseline expected on HN, or would a submission of the Wikipedia article on bubble sort be fair game? I mean, I've seen links to two generals' problem on Wikipedia getting voted up.
- aeontech 14y agoI just remind myself when I see something that I already know that it's completely new to ten thousand other people. Relevant xkcd, as usual :) http://xkcd.com/1053/ http://xkcd.com/1053/
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jordan0day 14y agoWhile I never used BeOS, and haven't tried Haiku either, I can't help but hope that something not Unix-based* gains some popularity sometime. At lot of the "innovation" happening in desktop OS's today seems incremental. In fact, I'd argue that there's a bit of a monoculture among the various Unix-derivatives that discourages radical changes, for compatibility reasons (which is reasonable). Though I don't think the various Linux distros and BSDs have all that much of a competitive effect on one another, anyway. Or have we reached a point where OS's aren't that interesting any more? * - Other than Windows, that is.
- Millennium 14y agoBeOS had some extremely interesting concepts, and I'd love to see Haiku gain some traction. I'm not sure whether or not to call it Unix-based, though. It certainly isn't based on any known Unix code-wise: it's not even written in C. But it does retain a Unix-like command line, and you can even get much of the GNU toolset for it.
- gecko 14y agoHaiku also, far more than BeOS ever did, follows POSIX. Porting Unix applications to Haiku is actually fairly easy these days.
- pjmlp 14y agoPOSIX UNIX applications == CLI, not much more.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ZenoArrow 14y ago"I'm not sure whether or not to call it Unix-based" Quoting the first comment..."something not Unix-based".
- ZenoArrow 14y ago
- klrr 14y agoCompared to Unix, is Haiku built with modularity and simplicity in mind?
- fusiongyro 14y agoHaiku is built on object-oriented principles, so the question is really whether you consider C++ as used in the project to be modular and simple. The API is pretty clever, mostly built on implicit threading and message passing. I consider it a pretty decent API, so I would say yes. The existence of replicants is a pretty compelling demonstration of the flexibility it affords: any view can be marked as "replicable" and then copied onto the desktop or any other replicant target. Now, because data is exchanged almost exclusively using BMessages and everything is C++, if you're using C++ it's highly modular. If your definition of modularity and simplicity implies Unix processes passing plain text between them using pipes, you probably won't find it all that inspiring. My knowledge is all vintage BeOS R4 so I don't know whether Haiku is more multilingual today; I'd guess probably so, but if not, that would be a detriment since I'm not overly fond of C++ and wouldn't consider it "simple."
- asiekierka 14y agoIt's not multilingual at all, unless you use the GTK ports or stick to console.
- fusiongyro 14y agoThat's a shame. With swig it ought to have been easy to support other languages, but maybe it's too hard to port.
- chubot 14y agoI wouldn't consider SWIG the foundation of multi-language support; it seems more like a legacy wart that you don't want to port to a new OS. Especially with C++. AFAIK it's an ad hoc C++ parser written in Perl! They can do better by ditching the legacy.
- jlebrech 14y agoI've been monitoring this for years, what's changed recently? I'd be looking for some web development options, ruby, python, console, vim, before i use it a on a daily basis.
- gecko 14y agoRecently: x64 support, Bluetooth support, WiFi improvements, and a package manager and porting tools. In answer to your questions: Python definitely works just fine on it, as do Vim and the terminal emulator. I have no idea about Ruby, but I'd be surprised if it didn't work. That said, what'll bite you is the lack of browser support. There are actually good browsers, mind, but you don't have your usual Firefox/Chrome duopoly fully available. There's also no virtualization support. While I don't know what your web dev workflow looks like, mine needs at least something along the lines of LXC/FreeBSD jails for me to actually get stuff done.
- trotsky 14y agoI am always in awe of these guys just for the sheer dedication. This is what, 12 years? And at least as far as I've seen they've been consistently active through it or at least it's never seemed dead. Yet they're still a good chunk away from an initial release milestone. I remember some folks used to rave about BeOS that's seldom been matched, but daaamn it had to have really been something to keep people going 12 years and several more to ship. I wonder who owns the intellectual property rights these days, or if there is something unsolvable about the licensed components. I know Jean-Louis Gassée is a notorious asshole at times, but it really seems like somebody should just give the code to these guys. It's not like they're ever going to market it again.
- asiekierka 14y agoThey don't really need the code at this point anymore. They have as much BeOS compatibility as they'd get nowadays... now they're focusing on driver compatibility, porting more recent software to it and finally moving to GCC4 rather than BeOS's GCC2.95, IIRC. Also, more architectures.
- ZenoArrow 14y agoAFAIK, the intellectual property rights are owned by a Japanese company called Access. The IP isn't needed anymore. There's only one key feature holding back the first beta release, and that's a stable set of package management tools. Every other key component is in place.
- pifflesnort 14y agoIt's absolutely bizarre that the developers have adopted the Linux idea of package management, including shared library dependency hell that requires maintaining the dependency graph in lockstep. You only need a traditional UNIX package manager if you have traditional UNIX packages -- splatting files all over the file system, providing unstable ABI/API, etc. The OS is basically ready to release now, and instead of focusing on polish, they're bringing over one of the worst features of Linux. You'd think they'd at least borrow from the modern app store idea of "packages". They're actually implementing package management as a paid project. I'm seriously annoyed that my donation to Haiku is being spent on that, rather than on things that would actually matter to existing desktop users coming from Mac OS X. It seems that Haiku has floundered, largely due to the take-over of Linux-centric developers after the original project leader (Michael Phipps) left in 2009. Michael kept the project very focused on BeOS R1, and now it's all over the map and pulling in the very ideas from Linux that BeOS and MacOS were built in opposition to.
- workbench 14y agoSo glad to see this in development still. Linux still leaves a lot to be desired until X11 dies in a fire.
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- felipebueno 14y agoI like Haiku OS very much :)... Last year, I tried using it as my primary OS for a couple of weeks but it didn't work very well. It's not productive enough (for me) yet. But I will certainly try it again in the near future because I like very much switching my OS every now and then. And I definitely recommend it for any advanced user to try it out. =)
- abraininavat 14y agoSo all you've told us is it didn't work very well. Is there anything else you liked about it?
- Serow225 14y agoI remember being completely blown away back in the 90s when I installed BeOS on a Pentium - on Windows 9X the machine struggled to play a single RealPlayer video, whereas under BeOS I could run 30 or 40 videos simultaneously with each window bouncing around automatically - and the sound had zero glitches(must have been some kind of demo?) Also you could put up to 6 live videos on the faces of a rotating cube, which was even more amazing at the time.
- keithnoizu 14y agoMy wow moment with BeOS came when ripping a cd under the os. The process took forever on any program I tried on windows. On beos the entire cd was burned in the time it would take to process a single track on windows. It was an impressive little OS. It's shame it did not manage to go mainstream.
- Serow225 14y agoYes! I totally forgot that. Burning CDs did rip on BeOS.
- msluyter 14y agoSort of tangential, but I'd be interested in seeing an OS based on Go, where Go::Go-OS as C::Unix. (And you could call it "Goose".) Given Go's awesome features, I would imagine it could be pretty interesting.
- amock 14y agoWhat could you get from an OS written in Go that an OS written in C doesn't already provide? If you were writing a new OS then it might be easier to write it mostly in Go, but I don't think there is any kind of fundamental difference like there is between Linux and Squeak or a Lisp Machine.
- cgh 14y agoPerhaps a system api that is more amenable to concurrency? That's probably the biggest fundamental break from the C model of doing things.
- ericbb 14y agoIf /usr/include were dropped and /usr/lib only contained Go packages, then you'd have an ecosystem where library namespaces are handled in a scalable way--that's a pretty big deal. You'd be working in a statically linked environment rather than a dynamically linked environment--another major change. Garbage collection for everything in user space. Potentially, the removal of select/poll? Drastic increase in memory safety (buffer overruns, etc). Based on the package naming, dependency management, and concurrency, it might even be argued that a Go user space is a bigger fundamental change than a Smalltalk or Lisp user space. Btw, one probably wouldn't write a kernel in Go so I take the parent to be speculating about a system where new OS features were provided by integrating them first into a Go standard library rather than by integrating them into the C standard libraries.
- amock 14y agoMost of these things don't sound like they need OS support. Just writing Go libraries and using Go alongside the existing system can provide a statically linked environment, no need for the application write to use select/poll or worry about memory safety, and garbage collection. It doesn't have to be "Go all the way down" since you won't be modifying your environment at runtime.
- MrJagil 14y agoI just want to say, this is such an amazing HN thread. No snark, no one trying to feel superior. Just pure excitement over something that (at this point) is no where near having a serious impact. Just the joy of pre-smartphone nerdery. Best of all, an incredible amount of information. I know nothing of this low-level system stuff, yet i cant stop reading.
- Skoofoo 14y agoI was initially skeptical and thought this would be another pet open source project without direction, a viable target market, or good design sense, but after checking this out I was proved very wrong on all counts. This is amazing. The people behind this seem to really know what they're doing. The operating system's interface design and that of its default applications are better than anything offered on Linux [0]. I'm also really impressed with the fact that there is One True environment and toolkit which is integrated into the OS, which, compared to the Linux desktop, should decrease development time while increasing the consistency and overall quality of the user experience. And it has bash! I thought Linux Mint with Cinnamon was great, but I'm strongly considering dropping it and using this as my primary OS. [0] https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-tour https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-tour
- reefab 14y agoI'm totally hoping that they'll finish their port to the Raspberry Pi. It would be a great match.