
To understand what the BeOS and
Haiku operating systems are, we first must remember that BeOS was developed with the multimedia user in mind. BeOS wanted to be what OS X has become today: an easy to use, attractive operating system. However, BeOS was a niche OS, destined for the media-hungry user. The percentage of
audio and video applications available for Haiku is greater than the one in Linux, OS X or Windows, and the inner workings of the operating system were created in such a way, that the same multimedia passionate would find it easy to work with the user interface and files. Each application can interfere with other applications of its kind. A WAVE file selection can be dragged from a sound editor and onto the desktop, to create an audio file. Audio applications can interfere with each other via the Haiku Media Kit -- the corespondent of a Linux sound server. Applications like
Cortex are a perfect example of how BeOS and Haiku deal with multimedia files: you can have more than one soundcard and use each one of those soundcards independently or separately. You can link one soundcard to the Audio Mixer, start a drum machine application and link that software to the Audio Mixer. If you want to output whatever you create with the audio application, all you have to do is drag the microphone and link it to the application's icon in Cortex.
Member since:
2006-01-10
The BeFS is the biggest point I don't like on BeOS/Haiku.
In that filesystem there can be files with different sizes and every file can have unlimited numbers of attributes. And every attribute can have a unlimited size.
For example the program "peoples". It saves the addresses only as attributes of empty files. I can input in it a complete telephone-book, but when my disk-space come to an end, I search for the biggest files to delete them and not for the smallest one.
"StyledPad" mixed that: Write only text-files and the styling as attributes.
Also imagine computer-viruses and so on, which extends every file with lots of big nonsense-attributes. Or viruses, which writes itself as attribute to files, etc.
And what is the advantage of it? There are not much kernel-developer on Haiku and Linux. Will an OOP-API mean, that more kernel-developer will come? Is it so more secure? Or have it advantages for the user?
Linux have more driver then Haiku and exists additional in 64bit.
I think both is very important. For example graphic-card driver and so on. If Haiku don't close in. then it can not be faster then Linux. Video-playing, 3D-games and so on are driver things. There it don't help, that Haiku have a nice API.