BeOS may be dead, but over a decade after its lamentable demise the open source Haiku project keeps its legacy alive. Haiku is an attempt to build a drop-in, binary compatible replacement for BeOS, as well as extending the defunct OS's functionality and support for modern hardware. At least, that's the short-term goal - eventually, Haiku is intended significantly enhance BeOS while maintaining the same philosophy of simplicity and transparency, and without being weighed down with the legacy code of many other contemporary operating systems. Computerworld Australia recently caught up with Stephan Assmus, who has been a key contributor to the project for seven years for a lengthy chat about BeOS, the current state of Haiku and the project's future plans.
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Member since:2008-08-01
Member since:2008-09-24
It's a shame that it never got serious attention of any large company.
Maybe back in 1999 that was the case, but now I would take a Fluxbox desktop over a BeOS/ Haiku one any day of the week.
The BeOS/Haiku widget set and interface are more cartoonish than Windows XP, and feel more like a mock up than a real UI for a so called media OS.
Member since:2005-12-18
The issue here is not only the look (imho, Haiku indeed looks dated), but their overall architecture: Haiku is more integrated, more standardized and is a overall cleaner design for a desktop OS (not server) than Linux.
Despite dozens of efforts by Linux community to integrate the DE with the core OS, it still fells like a gigantic wrapper on top of a mess, who gives a overall fragility to it.
For a power user who likes total control and has patience to keep track of every single application (and their versions) installed, this is not a issue, they don't need a wrapper. Just a window manager who can put a terminal anywhere in the screen is enough.
But, for a naive but curious and tech-savvy user, who likes to mess with his computer hardware but don't care that much about the OS, he is forced so many times to use a terminal, so he can edit entirely non intuitive configurations, that it gives the feeling that a single mistake can bring the whole world down. (while on Windows, it would mean, more often than less, a box about "where is the driver?".)
Edited 2012-08-08 18:58 UTC
Member since:2006-07-26
Member since:2007-11-11
Really? I think its icons are nicer looking than XP's myself, in fact I used to use icon sets like XPIze when i was on XP just to get rid of those fugly default icons whereas when i ran BeOS back in the day and looking at Haiku now i think it looks quite nice.
Of course the problem with both BeOS and Amiga clones is what made those systems cool was NOT the software, it was the hardware. Back then those OSes were written for the chips which also couldn't really be had on any other machine and that tight connection between hardware and software was what made them multimedia monsters. Back then those machines could do things that other machines simply couldn't touch, serious multitasking, media playback while doing other tasks, it was ahead of its time.
Today frankly any bottom of the line AMD or Intel multicore can do everything you could do then while having so many cycles to spare its just not funny so there really isn't a point in having the OS and hardware tied tightly together like that. the MHz wars left us with such superpowered hardware that even MSFT can't pile enough bloat and bling to slow down even a low end quad and the GPUs that Intel and AMD integrate now can just tear through multimedia.
So while I can see why some would want to play with them, I ran both BeOS and OS/2 Warp back in the day and both kicked the snot out of Win9X and System 7....sigh, maybe we're just spoiled. i know sitting here typing this while transcoding a video and listening to music if you'd have told me then i could do all this without swapping or slowdown I'd have laughed you out the building, now i just take it for granted.
Member since:2006-02-22
It's a shame that it never got serious attention of any large company.
It was a great desktop, stunningly better than Windows 9x. It is a shame that it never became a viable desktop OS mainly due to lack of applications. I still think its a great OS that in some ways compares favourably to any desktop Linux - Windows or whatever.
Member since:2005-11-14
Member since:2006-01-25
That's easy. Two things...
Uncompromising responsiveness. It is a heavily threaded, tightly scheduled, single user OS with a UI that is designed to respond with absolute minimal latency, even when heavily taxed.
Simplicity. When you start digging into the guts of the file system and peel back the initial layers of the OS you find... Nothing. There are few if any layered abstractions. The same goes for the API, the number of moving parts is quite small.
Is either of these things the most important attributes of an OS? Not really, but that is kind of the point. The priorities of BeOS/Haiku are and have always been different from most other Operating Systems.
At an event earlier today, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox - the third model, but confusingly named Xbox One. The big focus was TV, integrated Kinect, and all the other stuff we all expected to be forced down our throats. I think it took them 25 minutes to actually come to what should be the core of the story: gaming. Nothing groundbreaking in the gaming department, except for how Microsoft intends to handle the used games market and borrowing games from friends: pay up, buddy!
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Member since:
2005-12-18
It's quite appalling to think about it, but Haiku, as incomplete and visually aged as it is today, still manages to be a better desktop OS than any Linux distro with a modern DE.
It's a shame that it never got serious attention of any large company.