The second beta for Haiku R1 marks twenty months of hard work to improve Haiku’s hardware support and its overall stability. Since Beta 1, there have been 101 contributors with over 2800 code commits in total. More than 900 bugs and enhancement tickets have been resolved for this release.
There’s so many improvements in this new release that it’s hard to pick favourites. Since many Haiku users basically use the operating system on a rolling release basis through online updates, it’s easy to lose track of what’s new between beta and 2.
I have a VM for Haiku that I regularly update and use, and it’s remarkable just how stable and fast Haiku has become over the years.
I’m so nostalgic looking at Haiku. I remember the BeOS R4/R5 days. Man, that was cool back then.
Me too. I only used BeOS R4 on x86 for a short time but I clearly remember how fast and clean and responsive the OS was compared to what I had available at that time…
It’s truly a pity how, decades after, I still crave for it…
Me too, I ran mine out of Zip disk. It ran so well on a Packard Bell Pentium 100 and 72 MB of RAM.
I used to run BeOS using an Abit BP-6 motherboard, which was a dual Celeron board. The board was a bit of a challenge under Windows 98 because of IRQ challenges, but BeOS ran without a problem.
Ditto.
The BP6 was my first dual mobo (used a hack because Celeron was not supposed to work in multi cpu configs).
Beos really flew, while Linux was still subject to giant kernel lock.
What could have been…
I still have my Abit BP6. Still runs fine. It ran WINNT4 when purchased in 1999 fine. WIN2K fine. Then Linux fine. It now runs OpenMediaVault x86 with 8 head 3ware, Raid 5 for backups. Not sure what you mean by giant kernel lock. The biggest issue I had was capacitors failing causing instability and kernel alerts.
I built my first PC in high school using that motherboard and ran BeOS and Win2000 on it. It was so fast at the time; the dual 500Mhz Celerons were faster than my 900Mhz P3 laptop. The only problem was the computer would sometimes just freeze randomly once or twice a week (in both BeOS and Windows); I never figured out why. It had an ATI All-in-Wonder video card; I always suspected that was the culprit, but who knows.
Same here. In 2000 I had built a Pentium II system around an Intel Desktop Board and bits and pieces scrounged from everywhere. BeOS R5 was my main desktop OS for over a year on that machine, and it remains to this day my best experience using a computer in any capacity. I reluctantly gave it up after the P II board died and I built a new P4 system that wouldn’t boot BeOS.
Beta 2 is a complete disaster:
Rocks’n’Diamonds doesn’t work anymore! 🙁
Are you using x86 or x64?
hrev54304 x86_64
hrev54304 isn’t R1/beta2, it’s a nightly build. As of right now R1/beta2 revision is hrev54154+111.
I just tested installing Rocks’n’Diamonds from the repo with beta2 and it seems to work OK.
How is it broken in your nightly install?
I tested with hrev54304 on my dev machine and it is indeed broken, but I think that’s because the nightly didn’t include the same set of packages as the release build. mesa_swpipe seems to be missing.
Installing mesa_swpipe on the nightly build should fix your problem I believe. It makes Rocks’n’Diamonds work for me.
The game did not correctly detect the own working directory when starting from the symlink. Direct launch from the game folder works fine, but the launch from the Destbar menu was broken. Fixed.
Rocks&Diamonds fixed. Update packages and try again.
Confirming latest Rocks&Diamonds package is working. 🙂
Thanks for the fast fix!
Now Beta 2 is the best ;D
It could’ve been a contender , makes me sad.
It still can be.
There’s no other open-source OS that has the polish or consistency, along with the usability and stability, of Haiku OS.
Linux, we all know, is still a joke on the desktop today. It’s inconsistent, suffers from incompatibilities between kernel versions and distros, and the GUI is the most incongruent mess there is on a desktop OS.
ReactOS is as stable as a house of cards
BSD distros suffer largely the same issues as Linux distros.
AROS is still too niche.
The only open-source desktop OS that even has the remotest chance of success seems to be Haiku. It’s a dream to use, the UI is so consistent, even between native and QT apps, it’s solid as a rock stability-wise. Driver support is lacking, but decent. Even app support is getting much better, with most software you’d need available in the shiny new HaikuDepot package manager. I just wish hardware manufacturers would pick it up and support it.
Haiku just needs a decent sized user-base now. Once it has that, the ball can start rolling for more software, and therefore more users.
The123king,
I don’t feel linux is nearly as bad as you say it is on the desktop, however I won’t challenge your opinion. But what exactly do you mean with incompatibilities between kernel versions and distros? I’ve found the opposite to be true. I can (and have) taken the kernel from my distro and used it to run other distros. Most people would never try to run a different kernel, this is such an oddly specific complaint that it makes me wonder what problem you were experiencing?
Maybe you’re complaining about out linux’s lack of a stable ABI? That does create problems for out tree drivers.
I like Haiku, I really do. I even contributed money to it and plan to do it in the future.
I have nothing but immense respect to the small development team for building a full OS with near zero resources.
*However*, as someone that more-or-less built a business that built around Linux both on desktops and servers, your attempt to compare Linux desktop to Haiku is amusing (let alone factually incorrect) at best.
Lets compare the two, shall we?
1. Browsers: Linux: All major browsers are fully supported. Haiku: No major browsers. NetPositive may (or may not) work. (And again, all the respect to the single developer that managed to get WebKit ported to Haiku).
* Hardware support: Linux: More-or-less works out of the box. Haiku: Very limited support.
* Hardware accelerated UI:[/b] Linux: Full. Haiku: Software only.
* Gaming: Linux: Steam, wine, full 3D support. Haiku: 3D software only, ported games only.
* Office: LibreOffice, Google docs and Office 365 fully supported. Can run MSOffice quite reliably via wine. Haiku: LibreOffice ported, more-or-less works. NetPositive doesn’t officially support Google Docs / Office 365.
… I can continue for a day or two.
Now, as I said above, I like Haiku and enjoy playing with it. But for now, Linux is miles ahead when it comes to using it as a daily drive as a desktop / development machine.
gilboa,
I imagine that the majority of linux users are in a similar boat. We don’t necessarily use it because it’s the better os, but we are heavily invested in linux and it’s software. Changing platforms requires a great deal of time/energy/money and the truth is it’s just easier to stay with what you’ve got even if it means overlooking some of the flaws.
It’s always possible, I made the switch from windows to linux, but realistically it took a long time and linux is probably one of the best supported FOSS platforms.
Alfman,
While we are Fedora / CentOS based, I have a small number of Windows machines (including workstations) and even have OSX machines (which I use when testing my code under OSX). More-ever, we have a considerable number of Ubunutu machines on AWS and Azure.
That said, even though I switch OSs quite frequently, I still find Fedora w/ KDE as the best desktop environment (*for me*) and at least in my case, the investment required to move to another Linux (Ubuntu) and/or another OS (Windows) is near zero.
– Gilboa
gilboa,
It’s funny to hear you say that because I’m on Debian/Ubuntu side of things and I feel the same way.
There were so many distros to choose from, I burnt many CDs in the process of trying them out! I liked SUSE a lot. My first exposure was with slackware on floppies. I tried gentoo and wasn’t a fan at the time, but I might appreciate it more now that I’m a linux developer. The reason I’m on debian mostly came down to chance more than a deliberate decision, haha. I was still a windows user at the time and I frequently used knoppix so that’s what I became most familiar with and I stuck with it.
Occassionally I’ll encounter centos/fedora systems for work, but things are different enough to be slighly annoying while not really providing a compelling reason to switch other than just to be different. If I had started on a redhat branch I’d be saying the same thing about debian 🙂
Awesome build. It works beautifully!
HiDPI scaling based on the font size in points? Who comes up with this idiocy?
“The DTP point is defined as 1⁄72 of an international inch (1/72 ⋅ 25.4 mm ≈ 0.353 mm)”
— Wikipedia
‘Font sizes are in “points” for which there is not really a precise definition, so we can consider it an arbitrary unit.’
— https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/13087
Patches welcome
but why not use metric as the standard?, as the lenght of an inch varies by country.
for example: a swedish inch 2.96 cm wilst an english is 2.54 cm and afaik there is around 30 other inches
I have never in my whole life as a Swede come across a situation where an inch was considered to be 2.96cm. I know that for a short period a couple of centuries ago we did have an inch measured at 2.96cm but nobody is using that in the real world.
I obviously prefer the metric system but inches have been used in displays and resolutions for ages.
One of the most asinine measurement standard has to be when it comes to lumber.
http://mistupid.com/homeimpr/lumber.htm
I hate it so much when I have to measure “2x4s” etc to see how they’ll actually fit when I’m doing carpentry projects. This may not be immediately obvious to those who aren’t familiar, but two 2×4 != one 4×4. These lumber dimensions do not have a consistent scaling factor!
I understand that originally these dimensions came from the sawmills because of how wood shrinks after drying. But in reality it’s dependent on material and obviously it’s the dimensions of the finished product that matter. The logic behind a standard where “2×4″ is really 1-1/2″ x 3-1/2″ completely breaks down when you switch materials, so they solved this by standardizing on the 1-1/2″ x 3-1/2″ dimensions for planks regardless of material. Recycled composite materials (commonly used for new decks and walkways) are still measured in these fake lumber measurements. Yet if you’re using plywood, an inch really actually does mean an inch. With metal & plastic measurements will be true 1″ == 1”, however if you have a metal fitting (ie often found in roofs), then it reverts back to the fake dimensions to match the lumber scale. These are things we grow up just accepting as they way it is, but I hate this standard, units should not change based on context!
Bah, I just file this alongside all the other bad & inconsistent standards that I am powerless to change.