As some may have noticed, my UEFI branch got merged in November, purely by accident too! However, until now, we still haven’t been able to boot to the desktop. Whilst still in development, the addition of a simple framebuffer driver and a crucial fix by Henry has enabled Haiku to now boot all the way to the desktop using QEMU.
In today’s world, an important milestone.
I adore Haiku. I mean, it’s got less app support, it’s less feature rich than the UNIX based/inspired operating systems I use on a daily basis, but there’s just something about it. An exciting sense of joy and wonder that I haven’t felt since I was a teenage girl playing around with my first (terrible) Linux distro, Mandrake, of something new and different.
I ran BeOS fulltime in the R5 PE days.
Back then, there was still a good ecosystem around it.
You could find the software needed to do almost anything on bebits.
It really was a great OS. I miss using it … a lot.
Haiku is really good as well.
I’ve used it natively on a netbook, and it recognized all the hardware. Even the wifi! I was very impressed with that. It also ran quite fast on this machine, despite it being a netbook.
But the ecosystem is just gone …
Maybe there will be enough interest again some day to have some devs work on useful applications again … who knows.
It still blows my mind that BeOS 5.0 Pro runs faster on the two P-III systems I have (Dell tower and laptop) than Windows 10 and Linux on my fairly modern by comparison Core 2 Quad workstation. Granted, there are almost no modern apps for BeOS, but Haiku is just as fast as BeOS, and has potential for a great app ecosystem.
Beyond that, BeOS/Haiku still have what I consider to be the best UI of any OS. Elementary OS’ Pantheon, as great as it is, isn’t quite there for me yet.
The UI is very good.
Minimalist, clear and easy to hit elements with good outlines. Excellent visibility. The icons are fantastic (which is why they get ripped off by lots of people).
And the slideable window titles. So cool. So easy to make a stack out of several windows and switch between them.
Oh man … i’m getting the warm and fuzzies.
As you said, performance was always excellent.
BFS was amazing and fast.
The best hardware detection in the business at the time. Things just worked.
I feel like an old man “back in my day”-ing hard right now. But BeOS really was the dog’s proverbials.
Haiku is not as fast as BeOS… Just try running it on a PII or Transmeta Crusoe. Sure it runs… but not fast and you’ll need more ran that BeOS needed as well.
Well I’m basing my assessment on a P-III Coppermine, since that’s the lowest spec machine I have. The Haiku Project recommends a P-III as the baseline as well, for performance reasons.
Basically what I’m saying is, Haiku and BeOS perform about the same on anything from a P-III up, based on my testing.
BeOS was also one of the OSes I played around with as a teen
Probably why I have a lot of nostalgic love for the system. I even considered buying a second hand BeBox in my early 20s when I was collecting a few of the more obscure retro systems. Never managed, but oh well, still have my lovely RiscPC! RISC OS being something I was exposed to as a little girl in school, what with every British school getting those computers, and also an OS I have a great fondness for. Not quite as great as my fondness for BeOS/Haiku though, despite more exposure at a younger age. I almost feel a filthy traitor for saying that, as it was Acorn Computers’ amazing BBC BASIC that taught me programming… Sophie Wilson did an amazing job creating that language. Wow, I’m getting so off-topic with all these nostalgia tangents…
This isn’t off-topic for OSnews
In fact, quite a few years ago, most discussions here were like this.
I cut my teeth on a schneider cpc64 (which was really a rebranded amstrad), and later a c64, for which i managed to score a geos cartridge.
Those machines were quite old when i got them, but we didn’t have any money for these things. They were hand-me-downs, so much like you, i’ve started out in basic.
I got into linux (on a 486) in 96 or so. I was quite young. Just a kid.
Good times
Good times indeed! I think I’m a bit older than the two of you, my first PC was a TI-99/4A at five years old, a year after it was released. My father, an engineer, gave me the choice of that or a bicycle, and I chose the computer, much to his pleasure. After that I had a Radio Shack TRS-80 CoCo2, and an Apple IIc. I didn’t have another computer until 1995 when my then estranged father gave me a Texas Instruments TM-4000M laptop as a high school graduation present. That machine rekindled my interest in personal computing and allowed me to explore outside the realm of DOS/Windows on x86 for the first time.
Cool!
Friend of mine had a TI99, and he had the rare speech synthesizer for it.
He had space invaders on cartdrige along with a few other games.
Mostly i remember that machine being very well built.
And it was pretty.
I was born in 1968. I was around to see it ALL. Pinball machines giveaway to Asteroids at our local 7-11. The original 6-switch 2600VCS. Every computer from the Apple II, Vic-20, IBM PCjr, etc.
Computers that ran a GUI in 192K of ROM, with 1Mbyte of RAM. Can’t do THAT nowadays, no matter WHAT you try! 😀
Similarly my family was very poor and I got a hand-me-down BBC Micro as my first computer… the thing was two years older than me! But I’m glad I did, those 8 bit micros were great for learning programming on. As much as modern computers are awesome, modern OSes don’t expose kids to such immediately accessible programming in quite the same way. What little kid thinks of installing IDEs, or python, or whatever? I am however glad that at least in the UK, schools now teach programming, instead of the ridiculously inadequate “how to use Microsoft Works and a little bit of Publisher” IT teaching I received. I got a “U” in my IT GCSE, partly because a teacher deleted my coursework, and partly because I just had little motivation for such a tedious and dull curriculum. After my coursework was deleted, I was like “screw it”. My biggest achievement in that class was creating a boot floppy that on each boot would toggle the ridiculously insecure Win 3.1 app whitelisting “security” program they had installed… which I only created because they didn’t bother whitelisting such basics as “Notepad”, “Calculator”, or “Help”. “Solitaire”, however, was whitelisted. (For anyone curious, the “security” program didn’t disable pressing F5 to get to a DOS prompt and was loaded by a WIN.INI entry, so my boot floppy just created a second WIN.INI without it and swapped between the two on each boot.)
Edited 2016-12-19 19:43 UTC
Our computer science education was a joke.
Text editing in wordperfect and learning to use win 3.1
Thank god for that, it sure helped me in my carreer haha
Well I gotta say, while the curriculum was of no use, the fact the school computers were so absurdly restricted so as to force me to break their security with that boot floppy was a lovely little lesson in finding and exploiting security flaws. Developing my workaround forced me to use some half decent lateral thinking skills for a young teen. By far not the most elegant solution of course, but I’m still proud of that particular accomplishment
Exactly. Please get back to discussing Trump and Putin asap.
Considering how hard it was for Windows to boot safely on a lot of hardware until recently, I’m glad they’re this far along. Heck… MacOS still uses a weird EFI booting mechanism, which frankly scares me every time I boot it on verbose mode or look at the efi partition.
…can someone confirms whether it UEFI boots on bare metal OK on a number of systems. I’m not a VM fan when avoidable. defeats half the purpose (half the time)
There seems to be a renewed push on the Haiku Developer ML about getting a Beta release out the door. Who knows what that means in terms of actual calendar time, but most of the pieces seem to be in place. This would mean a feature / API freeze for the long-awaited R1, and a new branch for future development, which would free them up to use newer compiler versions, etc. for R2 (and beyond).
We’re branching R1 Jan 31st, 2017… hopefully.
I.T. class in the UK in the 90’s was basically “How to use the Microsoft Office package on Windows”.
Haiku is great – it might never become as popular as some other desktop OSs, but that would be due to being in the right place at the wrong time, ironically, just like BeOS was, rather than anything about the OS itself.
Edited 2016-12-20 08:26 UTC