The fourth beta for Haiku R1 over a year and a half of hard work to improve Haiku’s hardware support and its overall stability, and to make lots more software ports available for use. Over 400 bugs and enhancement tickets have been resolved for this release.
There’s a lot here to talk about. The improved support for HiDPI looks amazing, and definitely a must-have in today’s world of 4K displays. There’s lots of new and improved drivers, including a new compatibility layer for OpenBSD WiFi drivers, a new NTFS driver, and more. The number of ports has increased by a lot thanks to X11, Gtk+, and even Wayland compatibility – Inkscape, GIMP, GNOME Web, and more. Wine has also been ported to Haiku, using a Haiku-native windowing and input backend. And much, much more.
Pretty good way to start Christmas.
I’ve got a couple of different laptops of different generations to throw this on, and improved WiFI support will definitely help. I guess I got a project for Christmas day, since I won’t be doing much else later in the day.
I was surprised about the OpenBSD WiFi bit. Always thought FreeBSD had somewhat up to date working WiFi.
The majority of FreeBSD’s Wifi drivers came from OpenBSD. FreeBSD’s Wifi stack is a bit further along for 11ac support, but lacking any drivers with releases so far. OpenBSD’s Wifi stack could use a bit more work for 11ac, but there are at least Intel and Broadcom drivers with 11ac support.
If they had 10% of the budget that Gnome/KDE have, we’d have an RC release already with a ton more features including proper multi-user support and much better HW support.
Multi-user support is very much an R2 goal. This is due largely to BeOS being a single-user OS. However, under the BeOS skin, the basic underlying kernel and subsystems support UNIX users and file permissions (and can actually be quite effective even as current). It would not require a huge amount of work to built upon this for a wider multi-user environment.
However… the computing landscape is hugely different now to how it was in the 90’s. Computing resources are much more powerful, and much cheaper. Whereas in the 90’s, multi-user workstations, at work or at home, were the norm, nowadays everyone has their own workstation. There’s simply less need for multi-user support today than there probably ever has been.
R2 is pretty much a permanent hypothetical that will never happen in the sense of lets set new goals. Because they are already completing new goals that were never part of R1’s original plans.
Haiku is a rolling release at this point. And slowly all the needs for there to ever be an R2 are being removed. By the time there is an R2 it will just be the next release of what was already good.
What’s the point though? Once you start porting Linux software and package managers to your system, to end users your OS is basically just Linux with worse driver support and more problems.
Been playing with Beta 4 today, and I am impressed. Boots good, it’s stable and the GTK Browser working thanks to the Wayland layer allows browsing the web smoothly. Inkscape and GIMP seem to work OK to. So does LibreOffice. Haiku is definitely getting closer and closer to becoming an OS that can be used on a daily basis. Good job!
I honestly feel that if any FOSS desktop operating system stands a chance against MacOS and Windows, it’s Haiku. Linux and the general UNIX landscape is too varied and inconsistent to ever have a chance of reaching the mainstream. Sometimes too much choice is a bad thing. Haiku, however, has largely avoided the issues of forking and distros, and is centralised for the most part. This gives API, ABI, and interface consistency, which is pretty much required for any sort of large-scale distribution and use.
In what universe does Haiku have any chance at all?
Arbitrary qualitative metrics like “consistency” can’t make up for the fact that this OS is decades behind Windows and/or MacOS in terms of technologies never mind software support. Which in tech terms is an eternity.
It is impressive that the project has gotten as far as it has, with the minimal resources that have been invested.
But Haiuku has exactly zero chance of getting any traction outside of its hardcore fan base. And I don’t think any of its developers are surprised by that, as they are just interested in keeping a viable BeOS clone going, and I assume they have no expectations of it being a mainstream OS ever.
And FWIW when it comes to linux reaching the mainstream, I’d say Android is as mainstream as it gets.
Citation needed. Outside of advanced 3D graphics APIs, (though i believe they are in the works), what exactly is “decades behind” other OSes?
Every operating system suffers this problem initially. Haiku is getting round this, for the time being, with QT ports and a fairly decent WINE port. And don’t give me that whole “but non-native APIs stop native development” nonsense. The same argument can be given to FreeBSD with it’s Linux compatibility subsystem, or Linux when paired with WINE.
Just because it’s not mainstream yet, doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future. Android was very much in the same boat on it’s release. Don’t forget that for a long time, it didn’t have the financial backing or marketing might of Google behind it.
Sure, it’s Linux, but it’s very much NOT GNU/Linux. Android and GNU are two completely different userlands.
Sooo, where are your citations bud?
BTW, Google bought Android a year and change after it was started. That’s not a “long time.”
BeOS/Haiku have been in development for literally decades. If you think it’s going to be a mainstream OS anytime now, I have some beach front real state in Utah you may be interested in.
I’d take you up on that, but i don’t like Mormons, and the Great Salt Lake is a bit too close to Salt Lake City for my liking….
Might be worth picking a state without a honking great lake in it next time 😉
For 99.999% of users, Haiku offers nothing compelling enough for desktop customers to switch. All I see is a re-creation of an obscure, 27-year old OS that never gained popularity even when it was considered “advanced”. What does Haiku’s future look like beyond 1.0? Who is the visionary that is leading the R2 push? When will R2 arrive? At the current pace, I would be surprised if it arrived by 2030 if at all. The glass elevator page is filled with broken links. BeOS had compelling competitive advantages 27 years ago, but what does Haiku offer over Windows or OSX? What will R2 offer that Windows or OSX doesn’t offer? Right now, it seems like the vision for R2 is based off of feature requests for functionality that already exists on other platforms. R2 needs to offer something extremely compelling to desktop customers (not developers) that Microsoft and Apple can’t replicate easily or quickly.
What about XNU/Darwin? Didn’t NeXT/Apple just scoop that up for commercial use? Haiku is under an MIT license, right? Good luck preventing forks and distros if it reaches even a minimal level of popularity.
Look, I was a huge BeOS fan decades ago, and I was quite interested in OBOS 20 years ago (TWENTY!!!). I have a ton of respect for the developers continuing the work on Haiku, but I agree with javiercer01. BeOS was a glimpse into the future; Haiku is a glimpse into the past.
gtada,
Funny, I feel the same way about windows 🙂 Seriously, I was into it 20 years ago, but IMHO it’s glory days are past and it’s riding on momentum rather than anything that really stands out.
Haiku actually bombs out on consistency since they broke the shit out of old software during the package managment update and have backwards ass file system paths because of this.
When is the official release planned for?
When it’s done
I don’t think the official R1 means anything. It may never be achieved, as the later ICQ versions never achieved release, constantly being distributed as “beta versions” (of which Beta 2003 was the most adopted). However, Haiku is already very stable and usable as a daily driver, I use it as my main OS for more than 3 years already, and it works amazingly good; the two things I really miss are the multiple display support (which is now work-in-progress) and VPN to connect to my workplace. For me, switching from Beta to Release won’t change much.
FWIW, you can always whip up a standalone VPN using a Raspberry Pi or other SBC (assuming of course you can find one in stock; the Libre Board is a good cheap replacement for a Pi these days). Your Internet router may even have it built in. Either solution allows you to use a VPN with any device on your network instead of relying on a on-device software solution. This is how I have our work VPN set up as we have two physical locations that need to connect to each other over the WAN, plus a couple of employees who want to log in on weekends to catch up before the Monday rush.
If you don’t want to roll your own hardware, you can also use a cloud VPS provider like Vultr to have a remote VPN solution. It’s pretty much like using one of the “big” VPN providers except you have more control over it, and as long as you trust the server provider (and I’ve never had any issues with Vultr or Digital Ocean) and you use proper encryption in and out, you should be safe.
Granted, it all comes down to what your workplace allows and trusts. I’m the sysadmin at my workplace so I set it up myself.
Morgan,
One of our clients migrated to a “cloud” VPN provider, but I frankly wasn’t impressed. The whole whole point of outsourcing is supposed to mean one can do away with providing inhouse support, but as external contractors, the cloud provider deferred support to our mutual customer who deferred support to the cloud provider they were outsourcing to. In short, nobody was taking responsibility for providing support.
Yes, it helps to have someone on the inside who cares, haha.
I deal with a lot of different IT departments for work and support for users of alternative operating systems is hit or miss. Unfortunately some are very hostile to FOSS users. It really sucks but the company you work for can have a big impact on whether you can be effective using alternative operating systems at home (assuming you ever need to do work from home).
Indeed, when I was first hired and given the reins to the network, my boss said “I don’t care what tools or OS you use as long as you can do your job effectively” and I took him at his word. I have machines at work running Void Linux, OpenBSD, OpenWRT, Debian, and Slackware. Each has a purpose and each is easier to maintain than our two Windows servers and all of our Windows 10/11 workstations. Windows 11 in particular is annoying for our shipping clerks because it tends to “forget” our label printers every few weeks. At least I can remote in and fix it, but it’s such a hassle; Windows 11, like 10 when it was first released, is full of hardware related bugs that will probably be ironed out just in time for Windows 12 to come out and start the process over again.
That’s one of the main things I miss about the BeOS, either your hardware worked or it didn’t, and when it worked it worked great, often better than it did in Windows.
I am posting this from the new Web browser on Haiku Beta 4 in a VM. This is a serious improvement over WebPositive. Excellent work by the Haiku team!
Have you tried the Firefox Sync integration? For me, running Beta 4 on real hardware (Dell Optiplex 7040) Web crashes when I try to load the Sync dialog. I’m curious if it’s a hardware thing or just a bug with the Web port.
And yes, Web is pretty nice otherwise! Not quite as fast to render some pages as WebPositive, but overall better compatibility with modern websites.
I installed it on my laptop, works great, all hardware supported. I really wish we could control the on screen DPI more but I just resized the fonts and Gnome Web is amazing!