This week I continued work on moving Beta1 forward, fixing some important and less important bugs. To make things clear about what to expect in the upcoming weeks, I will spend more time on Beta1 tasks, but I’ll also continue working on WebKit. However, my work there will focus on fixing bugs, rather than adding new features.
Haiku gives some insights into recent progress towards the first beta release. Definitely worth a read if you want to keep up with how far along they are.
Beyond the hobbiest tinkerers (which I imagine are the majority of the haiku users) is there anyone here using it as their day to day operating system?
I’m fairly happy with spartan environments (cwm) and find that I generally am more productive when I use them. Or on re-examination, I’m preferential to keystroke controlled environments. For instance, I have had perfectly productive days sitting in front of my sun blade 100 whacking away at a terminal. Point is, distraction free environments are very good for me and my brain.
I’d expect that haiku would work very well for me. Has anyone here used it to actually work? What was missing for you?
I think my requirements are something like:
– Mailer
– Terminal
– SSH
– c Compiler / POSIX Compat
– Browser
– vi(m) editor so I don’t need to reprogram my brain
– Spreadsheet software
– Printing
– USB Mass Storage
– Video/Audio player
– Systemd and Dancing girls above the taskbar
Everything but the last thing is available.
I ran it natively on a netbook and everything just worked (even wifi) … except for power management.
Edited 2014-11-21 00:50 UTC
Using Haiku as my day-to-day desktop OS is on my bucket list, so I’m doing regular exercise and checkups so that I live long
That said, with Haiku moving into beta phase from what seemed like perpetual alpha, things are looking brighter.
A disclaimer though, my desire to use Haiku largely stems from my affection for BeOS which has stuck with me.
From a purely objective/technical standpoint, it’s a bit hard for me to advocate Haiku to anyone today beyond the fact that it is an OS built directly for desktop use, from the ground up, and of course if you just like to tinker with interesting alternate operating systems
It has (by comparison with most other desktop OS’es) very poor software and hardware support, it has a pretty nice API for it’s age, but hardly something developers of today would be impressed with, of course once past the Haiku R1 release, the developers will no longer be tightly bound to offer compability with 15 year old BeOS binaries and thus be able to overhaul the API’s, including using modern C++standards.
Basically it remains very much a ‘diamond in the rough’ .
My own needs are somewhat like yours, I have some creative software I would need like Inkscape, Blender (would need 3d acceleration to be practical beyond just rendering), a modern featured browser (there’s great work being done here on the native WebPositive but it’s a big task), then there are other lesser things that I would like but are not ‘dealbreakers’, such as me gotten used to tiling window management and would like to have that on Haiku as well (stack and tile is not the same) .
Most of the things there are covered from the top off my head, e-mail, terminal (bash), vim, ssh, GCC / Clang/LLVM, posix, no idea of spreadsheet / printing capabilities, USB mass storage saw work this summer with a libusb port but I’m not sure of the status of that, MediaPlayer comes with the OS and uses ffmpeg as backend, systemd will instead incorporate Haiku as a daemon
, no dancing girls I’m afraid, there used to be a snow effect you could enable across the whole screen but I believe they took it out recently.
Great Reply!
I’ve got an running(maybe) p4 system sitting on a shelf which I suppose is going to have an adventure this weekend. Either that or I will do some overdue bookkeeping…
I shamefully have to admit that I haven’t been running Haiku on bare metal for atleast a year or so since I replaced the harddrive it was installed on, twice the shame since my excuse of Haiku not having an easy way of upgrading is no longer true as it has package management nowadays.
Weekends are for procastrination, installing and playing around with Haiku fits the bill, bookkeeping, not at all !
Haiku has been my main OS for the last couple of years.
It keep tracks of a large number of files better than any other OS I have tried. And I have a lot of files. Plus it does not mess-up special characters in the file names like Windows does.
It plays all my videos.
It displays all my PDFs including the pay slips that needed a password to open.
Basic text editing is a snap.
I write and spell-check my fan-fics in Haiku, but I do admit to using Word for grammar-checking.
I just this week started to need to use a spread-sheet, so I can’t tell yet if Haiku’s SUM-IT will meet my needs for a while.
Mainly, I use the web browser all the time and write code for my own needs.
My only problems with Haiku-OS is the IDE, Paladin needs lots more work. Also YouTube sometimes works and sometimes does not. Every other website that I use works fine.
What Office suite is typically used these days with Haiku? I haven’t had it installed in years, due to the lack of an adequate Word processor / spreadsheet.
There is a java-based ThinkFree Office. Works fine in Haiku.
I’d completely forgotten that Haiku existed. The page still shows the latest alpha release was from 2 years ago.
Not to be too negative about this, but that would make me think the project is dead, or perhaps has at most 2 developers.
http://marc.info/?l=haiku-commits&r=1&w=2
So not dead.
Or check out:
https://download.haiku-os.org/nightly-images/x86_gcc2_hybrid/
and
http://download.haiku-os.org/nightly-images/x86_64/
Not dead but… “I helped miqlas get Homeworld running on Haiku. This appears to be a rather nice game from 1999…” WTF? They are wasting their time fixing games from 1999!!!
I would question if one can’t see the progress then what is the difference from being dead? At this rate they will be out of beta in 2020…
Edited 2014-11-21 02:44 UTC
The main difference is they have a full time developer now. Mostly working on the WebKit port but this has caused a lot of the rest of haiku to mature.
There hasn’t been much point in making another alpha since the last one… if you needed something newer you’d just have to run a nightly. So they didn’t waste their time putting out what amounts to an updated tech demo…. when the nightlies work well enough for that.
They certainly wouldn’t be considering beta without the work being done by Adrien (pulkomandy).
Homeworld is one of the greatest games ever created. I suppose that is the main reason they chose that, I would certainly play through it a few times again.
Well, they’re recreating an operating system from 2000.
What has that got to do with anything? The Linux guys are recreating something from the 1950’s but no-one is complaining!
No, they’re not.
And it’s got this to do with anything: Haiku is designed for binary compatibility with a very dated OS. Insofar as software is written specifically for BeOS, it will be very old. A game from 1999 would be typical. (I’ve since checked the Wikipedia for this particular game, and it’s open source, so my point wouldn’t be relevant.)
Well yes, I think everyone in this thread knows exactly what Haiku is and how old BeOS is. The BeOS 5 compatibility rule ends with the release of version 1 though, it has already been broken in certain circumstances according to the article. It will be interesting to see where it goes.
I’m still not complaining about a port of Homeworld though, pretty awesome I think!
uh, Unix was developed in 196-70 time frame, not the 50s. Linux has so far surpassed proprietary Unix (other than OS X) at this point that it can’t be compared.
Semantics as usual, plus the usual Linux crowd jumping in to defend their god! The point still stands. I use Linux myself, it doesn’t matter how old something is as long as it gets the job done.
Well, I use linux, I also use Windows. I like them both. I am not part of “the linux crowd”, if anything, I’d say I’m an MS fanboy, but I tend to use the best tool for the job.
Either way, the 1950s is not the 1970s, and the computing power to run any unix, did not exist in the 50s. or most of the 60s. I fail to see how 20 years of computing history is just “semantics”
Wouldn’t it been easier to admit that your example was *grossly* inaccurate instead of throwing up a tantrum like a 4 y/o?
– Gilboa
Boy, Linux is much older than I thought
I know, by the time i noticed the typo i couldn’t edit anymore. *hangs head in shame*
Unix lives on hype from the drugged 70s. Atleast BeOS represented more developed paradigms. By looking at trends, the best paradigm would simply be “low-jitter”. Which probably could be brought down to microsecond figures. Some already did this early, some realtime OSs, and computers programmed directly to hardware.
How much BeOS or Haiku does this, I do not know. But Unix/Linux still has for instance part of X depending on HZ, for instance. Which is a very outdated paradigm in a desktop/multimedia environment. “Responsiveness” ofcourse highly related to low-jitter i/o.
And Microsoft will probably come around at some point. Killing any enthusiast effort, so forget about that.
Get a job at MS instead devs.
Edited 2014-11-25 12:20 UTC
what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I’ve ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response was there anything that could even be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul
Quoted from Billy Madison.
Edited 2014-11-25 14:49 UTC
No man, in 2000 there not was needed the wifi, and stack and tile , and other skills you seems dont really know yet…. is not a system from 2000 but al the software from beos are fro 2000 but not all the software for haiku os…. we have java now, vlc, html5, stack and tile,and cortex, pleas this is the most modern Os and nobody knows…
Haiku os now can play Html5 video and is very stable, there is java, and a great amount of modern programs… it is not dead, they loss many cause before was so radical in decissions but it seem they are changed this now and is very interesting Os. The only software it dont have and i really need so much is blender.
Hopefully software like Blender and such will appear in the near future. I’m certainly looking forward to a release 1, hopefully more coders will get involved or return after this event.
One can always be hopeful. I need my BeOS fix.
Blender… http://haikuware.com/directory/view-details/multimedia/graphics/3d-…
That is a very old and outdated version of Blender. Not really usable as the application has changed so much in the past few years. I personally use Blender as well, and it’s usually what keeps me from using an alternate OS for an extended period of time.
I don’t think people realize how far from usable this OS is, beta or not. The only guy working fulltime on this is hacking away on webkit most of the time. That doesn’t stop the browser from crashing daily, and the performance is abysmal compared to a webkit browser on the same machine, running another OS. And if there’s a lot of network traffic, the non-nic drivers are punished hard because the kernel design is flawed (this often crops up as mouse getting locked for several seconds, or the usb stack jittering out…) Not to mention the never-ending lack of drivers/gpu support.
Looks like a fun project, but Haiku 1.0 won’t be useful, and it’s not near completion at all.
Me grumpy? No. I’ve supported Haiku since the beginning, even financially, but the total lack of focus and inability to get something stable out the door really get to me, since they still keep talking about “sales” material on the mailing list. It’s a joke.
Maybe not usable for your needs, but clearly usable for lots of other people including myself.
Also if you are get lots of crashes I suggest you get your hardware checked out. Using Haiku-OS for my own stuff and I am not seeing any crashes on my new and old computers unless I am doing experiments with the driver code I am developing,
What version of Haiku have you tried? Personally I am using Hrev48312,
Check out:
https://download.haiku-os.org/nightly-images/x86_gcc2_hybrid/
and
http://download.haiku-os.org/nightly-images/x86_64/
for the latest versions.