The months, they don’t stop coming, so here’s another progress report for Haiku, our beloved successor to BeOS, the best operating system ever made. This past month the team’s added basic support for SMP on ARM64 (enough to use it in QEMU), the MIME sniffer’s internals have been overhauled for some serious performance gains, and a long list of smaller, but no less important or impactful, changes. Beta 6 still seems to be a ways off due to a number of unfixed bugs and an upcoming WebPositive release, but my usual spiel applies: you don’t need to wait for a beta to test Haiku. It’s stable enough as it is, and a nightly release will do you just fine, including updating to newer nightlies and application releases.
This past month also saw which projects Haiku’s GSoC people will be working on. Two projects will focus on improving Haiku’s Bluetooth stack, including adding HFP profile support and support for HID devices, as well as general Bluetooth improvements across the board. The third and final project will focus on improving and expanding Haiku’s Devices application to turn it into a real management utility along the lines of those available on many other modern operating systems.
Would you like to elaborate on that point Thom?
No.
He doesn’t need to.
I always say that OS fandom is pointless because they’re all shit, in their own unique ways. I however have found that Haiku is probably the least shit of any OS i’ve used.
As long as it can be useful. Cannot say I found most hobby OSes useful for my normal workflow.
Haiku is perfectly daily-driveable. It respects your screen real estate. It is snappy. It gets out of the way. It has all the applications required for most workflows. There are two reasons I don’t daily-drive it:
1. everything-as-root (is it still the case?), even though the main scaffolding for supporting multiple users seem to already be there.
2. Encrypted storage. my main workstation is currently a laptop. I can’t risk all my data being out in the wild in case it is stoled/lost.