Haiku’s latest activity report is out, and right off the bat, there’s a big ticket item.
That’s right, after many years of being requested, Haiku finally has support for USB WiFi devices! (Currently only Realtek controllers are supported, but Ralink and others should follow before too long; Realtek/“RTL” chips are generally the most common, however.).
That’s great news. There’s way more in here than just this, of course, so head on over to find out more.
The day of desktop Haiku will arrive first than the day of desktop Linux if they keep that pace.
I mean… its the only Desktop first OS out there (unless you coun’t mostly retro OSes like Aros and MorphOS or wierd ones like Plan 9). As long as they don’t get the itch to redesign the UI to be tablet compatible it could actually work out.
I do dislike the package manager… but everyone and everything has issues you gotta pick your battles (forks Haiku and rebases on pacman /s totally in jest there).
The package manager isn’t necessary. I remember Haiku without pkgman
Agreed, I fired up my old PIII laptop the other day with BeOS 5 on it and Haiku really has diverged quite a bit from its inspiration. A package manager would feel completely out of place on BeOS. Still, I welcome its addition to Haiku as it serves a purpose for those who feel the need for it, and it doesn’t hurt anything being optional yet functional.
I think non managed packages should be first class citizens… and the package manager should be lightweight. If you violate those rules… frankly you’ve ruined the OS.
Package management as they implemented it broke literally every existing zip application for BeOS… as well as existing pkg files. Mainly because the default config folders became read only and they nonsensically added non-packaged folders that have a read write mirror of the read only files etc… which is terribly non-intuitive.
If they had instead used packaged for the opposite purpose (keeping read only copies of the packaged config files) it totally would have integrated well and have been a nice feature. I still think the packagefs used is horribly bloated… Haiku used to use about 64MB ram… its way past that now.
pacman would have been a pretty darn good fit … and also would fit with how Haiku is essentially a rolling release today. And they could have forked stable releases just as easily… but they got a bad case of NIH and foisted a bloat and years of buggy package manager updates on us instead of just reusing a working tool.
What is this obsession with ‘the day/year of desktop Linux’? Huge swathes of the computing population use it as a daily driver without issue. What defines its ‘year’? Or is this just a meme?
As for Haiku, I love it, but it may never be more than a curiosity and that’s a shame.
It’s a running joke. At the beginning of the noughties there was an upswing in positivity in the Linux comunity and the idea was that Microsoft was losing relevance and Linux might take the desktop crown. The Year of the Linux Desktop was born. From that moment on, every time Miscrosoft seemed to falter a bit, the noise was YotLD. It never materialised in any meaningful way and it went from a hopeful slogan to a wistful running joke.
r_a_trip,
Yeah, there was a push for it once many years ago. These days it usage is mostly in straw man arguments or for those trying to make fun of linux. Although I think CapEnt’s usage was more of a parody of that situation.
I’m looking forward to the USB Ralink support coming up; I have a “Panda Wireless” Ralink based USB 802.11n adapter that has been my go-to for devices that either have no built in WiFi (Anbernic RG351P, older Raspberry Pis) or their built in WiFi isn’t supported by some of the more obscure OSes I tinker with.
Morgan,
A lot of IOT devices have WiFi already but often the antennas are pitiful. I’ve got Panda & Atheros adapters. IIRC the Panda adapter was sold as an addon for a linux SBC. I wanted one that supported promiscuous mode in linux for network monitoring. Everything I have is 802.11N. Any recommendations for a 802.11AC adapter that supports capturing via monitor mode?
I just use a regular WIFI access point but it’s missing VLAN, which I have for the wired network. I’d like to attach specific device to specific VLANs. Maybe have multiple networks on the same AP attached to different VLANs, I don’t have equipment that can do that at the moment though.