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It depends on how much you rely on web apps and modern internet technologies. I find most of my web browsing habits can be accomplished with any browser, even elinks. I gave up on almost anything and went back to simple text based tools for most stuff. It works well, so it is possible.

Us techies/geeks have very different ways of interacting with our computers than other people, so we surely don't need Mac OSX to make good use of our stuff. In fact, xmonad, opera, mplayer, rtorrent and alpine is all I need and I don't regret going the simple way. It's wonderfully simple once you get the hold of it, not matter what others think.

So I think, even when Haiku is not yet ready, it is possible to do something with it.

Give it time, Eugenia. I'm confident that within 4 years, Haiku will reach the maturity/usability of popular Linux distros, and after that, it will definately be the 3rd most popular desktop OS. All it takes is a little bit of time.

Yes, it will take another decade until it has the polish of Windows/MacOSX. Most of us here on OSNews can live with the rough/sharp edges of these young OS's. We're enjoying it right now, and we look forward to watching it mature and grow.

i fear you're being over confident (by a large margin)
but hell, that would be nice

And Linux will be another 4 years ahead.

Linux in 4 years will still be using the "bazaar" model for most of it's userland. So it will still be an unpolished incoherent OS with little attention to detail. That has no hope of getting ever fixed.
Also at the current rate, in 4 years Linux will require a 50 core CPU with 50 Gigs of RAM to be able to run decently as a desktop. So that's why even waiting 20 years for Haiku is preferable.

Hmmm. Partisan much?

So you seem to be arguing that in 4 years, Haiku will *not* be using the bazaar model. Which corporation do you expect to take Haiku proprietary? And via what legal loophole?

Linux currently runs on everything from a watch to a bevy of smart phones to a supercomputer. What leads you to believe that in only 4 years it will require the supercomputer?

And wouldn't "unpolished incoherent OS with little attention to detail" better fit Vista than Linux (the Gimp notwithstanding)? Like, say,
http://www.marcorolandi.com/imgs/just4fun.jpg?

I've nothing against Haiku - looks promising if still a bit immature - but you don't have to hate Linux to like Haiku. IDIC, dude.

It isn't the Linux kernel that is the problem. It's the "Linux" userspace.

Developers aren't taking any care with RAM requirements. They hardly ever test with serious amounts of data (Nobody has 500,000 emails in their IMAP. That would be crazy!). They don't stop to think about performance issues with 4,200 RPM laptop drives (We will have our file picker seek all over the disk to read an icon for each file in the directory! Oh, we never tested that with 10,000 files...) And they never examine the disk seek behavior of their application on a cold cache start (Oh, Firefox can read every little xul and css and jar file one at a time to start up...Windows Vista will preload all that for us!)

Etc.

Really? Could be, I suppose. I have 14,044 emails via IMAP at the moment without a problem, but I could just be lucky. Or maybe I receive unusually small emails?

Now, 10,000 files in one directory? That's pathological! :-) I created one just to test and opened it on both XP (2 seconds) and Mint with Gnome (35 seconds), so our experiences jive there.

However, Firefox launches *far* faster on Linux than IE7 on XP, even comparing my Linux Starling netbook to my D630 XP notebook. It's more stable, too. And it handles tabs much, much better - on XP, IE7 takes 6-7 seconds before a new tab is available to use (the tab says "Connecting..." until then, and IE7 is frozen), while Firefox opens a new tab as fast as I can type on every Linux machine I've used. But again, perhaps my Linux is better configured than yours. Or perhaps my XP machine (last 3 XP machines, actually ) is badly configured?

I suppose YMMV is the watchword of the day. Overall, though, I find that I'm far more productive on Linux than on XP. We'll see about 7 when it's released next week. :-)

That makes me feel better about the performance of Whisper at least.

"And Linux will be another 4 years ahead."

linux is just a kernel. There's still no standard linux OS yet

Yeah, technically, but the word is treated by the majority of people as the desktop experience, or the OS entirely.

When they advertise Linux on PCs at the shops they don't mean the kernel on its own.

We might as well argue whether a tractor is better than a motorcycle, because Linux and Haiku have about that much in common.

"Your motorcycle sucks because it can't haul out tree stumps as well as my John Deere."
"Oh yeah? Well your tractor has horrible acceleration!"

See how absurd that sounds?

That's not a very good analogy. Is Linux the tractor or the motorcycle?

Actually, I thought it was the tank.

Because...?



The tractor - Linux is a heavyweight, industrial-strength OS. Haiku, by contrast, is meant to be small, fast, simple, and focused mainly on desktops.

Pretty vague statements I think...

Most of my internet uses are indeed supported by Haiku's BezillaBrowser.

The major missing feature is Flash support... which I'm guess you probably rely on pretty heavily?

FF2 does also lack speed and better Javascript/HTML5 support that we expect from newer browsers. Google Wave for example, doesn't quite work in Haiku

I also run Haiku ~75% of the time I fire up my AOA150. I've been using the experimental wifi driver, with my router currently unsecured (I essentially live in the middle of nowhere, so this isn't a huge deal for me). I can chat on IRC, surf the web, read emails, and work on some porting projects. This is pretty much the bulk of my evening computer usage anyway, so I'd say it's pretty close to being my primary OS as well

I spend much of my time in a terminal, so the browser issue isn't such a big deal for me either. As long as I can get to OSnews!

Regarding the unsecured wifi.. if I locked down my router to only allow my Haiku machines MAC address, would that work? Would give a small amount of security at least. How about hiding the SSID also?

Hiding the SSID won't help because the experimental wifi stack doesn't allow you to specify one yet (it just searches for the strongest unsecured network it can find).

As for MAC filtering - that would probably keep the majority of people from utilizing your connection, but keep in mind it 1) doesn't encrypt your traffic (so always make sure to use https and ssh for remote connections you want secured) and 2) can be thwarted by cloning the MAC on another machine (this would require someone to be snooping traffic to determine which MACs are in the area, and cloning them until they find one that seems to work).

I'm like Theo de Raadt, I don't trust wireless encryption, I use would use a VPN.

Yeah, at the moment I'm thinking sending all traffic down an SSH tunnel. How much of what we're talking about is supported in Haiki, I'm not sure.

Not entirely sure what you're asking there...

But Haiku's browser (based on Firefox 2) supports https and Haiku R1/Alpha1 comes with OpenSSH already installed, so you can use ssh/scp from a terminal to your heart's content

I don't think Haiku supports IPSec or ssh tunneling of all traffic at the netstack level yet...

Edited 2009-10-16 17:57 UTC

If it doesn't support WPA1/2 or even WEP this is pretty much a showstopper for any normal person.

If it doesn't support WPA1/2 or even WEP this is pretty much a showstopper for any normal person. "

A non-issue currently - Haiku itself isn't meant for "normal users" at this point, and the wifi support isn't included or enabled by default. Anyone who installs experimental software on an Alpha OS probably isn't a "normal user."

And I highly doubt that the developers plan to release a final/stable version without any encryption support.

What people used to say about mozilla:
"If you are not interested in a browser that actually works adequately and without major slow-downs and crashes, then sure, it's a good deal. But if you are into the Internet age, then Mozilla doesn't cut it. Let's face it and not hide behind our finger for the sake of supporting a browser project. I loved Netscape , I like Mozilla as an idea, and I wish the best for the project. But I would never use it as my main browser. It doesn't do anything that I want to do properly."

Fortunately the mozilla people didn't really care and despite IE dominance and AOL despair (http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html), they pulled off firefox and now it is very popular.

playing devil's advocate, Mozilla was in a slightly different position as it could be installed along side IE without having to reboot or do anything else with the computer.

Which is not to say that it's not a great OS, as i too was blown away by BE R5 at the speed and layout of the UI.Im currently downloading the alpha to, which from screen shots and reviews hints at something which is classed as a beta with other OS's/Software

"playing devil's advocate, Mozilla was in a slightly different position as it could be installed along side IE without having to reboot or do anything else with the computer."

At that time, IE dominance was so strong that there was a real concern that eventually you wouldn't be able to use the web without IE. If mozilla wasn't amazingly successful, it would've been a pointless waste of time. People criticized mozilla all the time. But they didn't give up.

Now we have webkit and gecko and it is very easy for any altOS to have a browser that actually works. Haiku isn't doomed; it just needs more help on bezilla and the webkit browser.

Edited 2009-10-16 17:56 UTC

Have to agree with you on this one. I gave it a shot on my netbook, but it's just not ready for me yet. I could do without the flash, but no flash, in progress wifi, and firefox 2.x combined just didn't cut it. I'm not even fond of using firefox 3.x with JIT for webapps compared to chromium, and 2.x was painful.

It reminds me a bit of kde 4.0. Great framework, but it needs applications to be built on it still. Better network drivers, and a webkit based browser will increase the usability by bounds.

Still not sure about the flash thing though. I mean, giving up hulu? Not a fun idea.

Considering Eugenia has been slagging of Haiku since its inception I wouldn't expect much else from her.

Face it BeOS is dead and out of all the contenders to carry the mantle, Haiku has been the one to deliver the goods. Support of stick with your beloved OS-X or what ever makes you feel good. When it comes to the desktop nothing can deliver variety of apps like Windows can but yet we still see many use alternatives and Haiku is nothing more than one of the alternatives at this stage.

Would you prefer they just roll over an play dead?

Very stupid, uninformed comment/question on my part, but: I'd expect that the Alpha release, and most of the development leading up to it, would be about creating stable-and-working system-level software, with userspace apps to follow. Given that there's (apparently) a fair amount of community enthusiasm, and given that it supports a POSIX compatability system (doesn't it?), I'd be real surprised if user-space third-party apps didn't start appearing pretty quickly, once the core OS stabilizes. I mean, how hard is it to port, say, Vim, Gnash, ffmpeg, or the WebKit or Gecko engines to a new POSIX environment?

Well, POSIX isn't the end-all-be-all of compatibility layers... (and yes, Haiku has a pretty rich POSIX layer, compared to BeOS)

Vim was actually included with Haiku R1/Alpha1.

A Gnash port does exist (and even has a BeZillaBrowser plugin), but has about a dozen dependencies in grand FOSS style (making it a nasty port), and it still needs to be updated for the R1/Alpha1 build of Haiku. I found it rather sluggish in Haiku, however...

Haiku already includes an ffmpeg backend as a media kit plugin for decoding of many audio/video formats.

Haiku's BeZillaBrowser is based on Firefox 2, so contains Gecko, sadly, FF3 and newer requires a port of Cairo which... still remains in a partially-ported state, and nobody seems interested in stepping forward to finish it.

Webkit is ported, and most of the patches are already pushed upstream - there is a project to build a native browser on top of Webkit already, but the progress hasn't been super fast yet.

Any others you'd like to inquire about?

This is a good place to see various ports that have been attempted: http://ports.haiku-files.org/wiki/PortLog#PortLog

I worded my post poorly; what I was trying to say was: "this is the get-the-system-working phase, the add-useful-applications phase will come later, and probably won't be too bad for FOSS software."

I love the Haiku project and used BeOS R5 as my primary system years ago, but Eugenia is correct in the sense that Haiku is NOT ready to be used as a primary desktop. Not yet. Not for me anyway, nor for the vast majority of users. I am glad the OP is enjoying it.

But man oh man do I hope they keep up the good work!

As someone who, until July, has used Zeta (BeOS derivate) as main (and only!) OS at home, I think I have a say in this, and I agree with Tuishimi.

Several basic operations cannot be done. Many Flash sites (there are many, even ones you'll need), many Java sites (internet banking, to name an example) - you can pretty much forget about those to be accessible.

Then let's talk about Office compatibility. DOCX... XLSX... no? Oh. DOC support is minimal. You're not able to even import graphics embedded within the documents. So the only thing you can turn to is Google Docs. It's a life saver!

I also started missing Skype support by the way.

Conclusion: I still love BeOS and would switch to Haiku in a heartbeat if I could run it as my primary OS. I'm currently very happy to not have these limitations anymore under Mac OS X. So I agree with Eugenia and Tuishimi... it is not really possible at this point. I've accepted & lived with the impairments for several years and now they have gotten to a point where they are too difficult to handle, I had to make a switch to a different OS. This is the reality right now.

P.S.: Note that I do *NOT* wish to complain about these impairments. I voluntarily chose to accept the lack of support of some technological advancements and I was okay with it. I still do not regret it and I commend this article's author to have given it a shot.

Ok, what part of Alpha Software don't people get? Of course Haiku ain't ready for mainstream computing yet. I would hope that by Beta stage there is more usability for the OS and some app development along the lines of:

Office app that is Haiku Native like GOBE Productive BUT supports Open Office File Formats (don't want OO just a Haiku Native app that is read/write compatible with PDF support as well).

Soundplay, been a great little audio player for BeOS and shouldn't take much to take across to Haiku.

VideoLAN but a current build

A native browser or Opera 10 which ever.

A Skype like app that is native and allows Skype users to communicate.

That would be great for starters and then moving on apps that really take on the media capabilities that Haiku following in BeOS footsteps, can deliver.

Audio - something like Reaper but Haiku Native

Video - something semi pro to start with handling of multiple audio and video streams edited on the same timeline with chapter marking andd DVD/BlueRay Disc Authoring from the same app. I hate Premier/Encore where you have to move between them. Again, Haiku Native and ready for a step up to x64 when Haiku moves into that sphere. Still given how capable BeOS was back in the day of minuscule ram requirements and I did do video editing on it, x86 would still have plenty to offer.

But back to now, it's Alpha Release 1 software and for that Haiku is pretty darn good.

I beg to differ - I've personally used plain 'ol R5 on my main work computer since mid-2003. In fact this is for a company that mainly focuses on Internet-related services, so I'm a bit puzzled by the "if you are into the Internet age, then Haiku doesn't cut it" claim.



You've chosen some strange ways of expressing those sentiments.

http://www.osnews.com/story/8114



So don't use it, no (reasonable) person will fault you for that. But why crap on someone whose needs it DOES meet?

Well... to be fair, on my AA1, it's 12 seconds from bootman to desktop (bootman being the multi-partition chainloading bootloader that Haiku comes with).

It seems like most of the time is spent waiting for POST

Edited 2009-10-16 00:05 UTC

http://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-tour

you have to click through the install to get to what the desktop looks like

Actually, Thom already positively answered that in his review, and he was even under VESA mode.

FWIW: from playing around with the pre-Alpha and the Alpha release, I've found it to be noticeably faster than R5 on the same hardware.

Sadly, not at the moment

I have several old laptops with PCMCIA card slots also, but the general opinion is that PCMCIA is not all that important at the moment.

On the other hand, I have two different USB wired ethernet adapters that work (one is Pegasus based and has a driver included with Haiku, the other as ASIX based, which requires compiling the usb_asix driver manually from the Haiku repo as it was still buggy when Alpha 1 was done, although a major bug was just fixed in it!) They should work in USB 1.1 ports also, albeit slower

Funny, I thought BeOS never even had an hourglass cursor created for it...

Yes, I believe they had to actually design their own hourglass (it was a clock-style animation) for the app - as such a horrible thing was not part of BeOS. And you only saw the custom cursor when the app was selected, outside of the app all was normal and pointy.