There’s a new Haiku monthly activity report, and this one’s a true doozy. Let’s start with the biggest news.
The most notable development in November was the introduction of a port of the Go programming language, version 1.18. This is still a few years old (from 2022; the current is Go 1.25), but it’s far newer than the previous Go port to Haiku (1.4 from 2014); and unlike the previous port which was never in the package repositories, this one is now already available there (for x86_64 at least) and can be installed via
↫ Haiku activity reportpkgman.
As the project notes, they’re still a few versions behind, but at least it’s a lot more modern of an implementation than they had before. Now that it’s in the repositories for Haiku, it might also attract more people to work on the port, potentially bringing even newer versions to the BeOS-inspired operating system. Welcome as it may be, this new Go port isn’t the only big ticket item this month.
Haiku can now gracefully recover from an app_server crash, something it used to be able to do a long time ago, but which was broken for a long time. The app_server is Haiku’s display server and window manager, so the ability to restart it at runtime after a crash, and have it reconnect with still-running applications, is incredibly welcome. As far as I can tell, all modern operating systems can do this by now, so it’s great to have this functionality restored in Haiku.
Of course, aside from these two big improvements, there’s the usual load of fixes and changes in applications, drivers, and other components of the operating system.
Thanks for the clickbait headline, now I am disappointed this news item wasn’t about the board game >_<
It is a bit funny that the extremely C++-oriented Haiku is getting a port of Go, a language famously inspired by antipathy towards C++.
Thank you for the ongoing Haiku coverage, Thom. I am stunned by Haiku’s steady progress. I am now running it on an old(ish) ThinkPad T480s, and it is a lovely pairing.
Haiku is quite usable day-to-day for so many things now. As an old BeOS user, it is far more usable and capable for general purpose computing than BeOS ever managed to be. I am in awe of the devs and love following the project’s progress.
Decades after BeOS, it remains the most elegant single-user computer experience out there. It’s so refreshing to have something this complete and usable that isn’t mac, Windows, or Linux.
This is just to support this opinion. 1 year ago I tested ReactOS and Haiku on a T440s, I was expecting a similar ‘alpha’ experience, but Haiku was far more mature. Other than some small issues, Haiku could be easily a daily driver computer.
No kidding! Also, how is it possible that the LibreOffice port (that I am astonished even exists) feels more native on Haiku than on any other platform?
If anyone here hasn’t checked out Haiku lately, it has great wifi support and excellent ports of most Linux end-user apps. The ports are so good that most feel more native on Haiku than they do on Linux.
WebPositive is also quite usable now, and there are several Firefox and Thunderbird-derived ports, so email and browsing are both great now.
Last I checked, KDE had a protocol for accomplishing it under Wayland and patches for various other toolkits, but the GNOME people weren’t accepting the GTK ones because they were of the opinion that a proper compositor shouldn’t need that kind of crash recovery.
GTK lacking that facility, my nVidia+KDE desktop glitching out and requiring a kwin –replace (which might crash the desktop session) after a couple of weeks if I leave compositing on, and my having not found a suitable replacement for Inkscape (and possibly GIMP. I still need to evaluate Krita for my workflow) are a big reason I’m still on X11. (My AMD onboard can’t drive three monitors and I can’t afford two dGPUs so I can have a dedicated CUDA card.)