Submitted by “Ultimately, Haiku represents a different way of viewing your personal computer. If you think that software shouldn’t be riddled with bugs and incompatibilities and inefficiencies, if you hate being forced to swap out your hardware and software every few years because ‘upgrades’ have rendered them obsolete, and if you find that the idea of using an operating system that’s fast, responsive, and simple is refreshingly novel and appealing, then maybe, just maybe, Haiku is for you.” What fascinates me the most is that Haiku’s not working on a tablet version. How delightfully quaint.
Haiku isn’t riddled with bugs and incompatibilities?
I guess it’s time to take a look at it again.
They try to pimp this OS by presenting other OS’s as being slow and unstable/’riddled with bugs’, which seems like a straw man argument to me. Personally, as a Windows 7 user, I have 0 issues with speed or stability. And it runs fine on a 5yo Athlon 64 dual core CPU, so not like I’m constantly having to upgrade the hardware to keep up. I’m sure Haiku will run faster, but I don’t recall ever having had Windows 7 crash, so I doubt it would be more stable. Of course, Windows 7 isn’t stable under ALL circumstances, but if you throw some cheap-ass hardware with badly written drivers and all kinds of crapware running at startup, I’m not really sure any OS could handle that kind of madness.
So, what exactly will I be able to do with Haiku that I can’t do with Windows? And I mean stuff I might actually want to do. I suppose it’s kinda neat if I can play 4 videos at the same time as playing Quake, while having 30 different apps running in the background without the OS stuttering at all, but c’mon… let’s talk real-world scenarios here. I bet it would be cool for audio/video production, but unless some industrial strength DAWs and video editors get ported to it, it won’t be much use in that regard.
Edited 2012-04-27 22:19 UTC
Nothing. But, I used to prefer the BeOS a few years ago because it could do 95% of what I needed far better than other operating systems. Haiku is approaching that point (my needs changed).
Haiku is much faster, to the point that the sub-second delays on other OSes become infuriating. It’s wonderful to hit Enter to launch a word processor and just continue typing since it launched instantly.
The simplicity of the OS is also underrated. Windows and Linux have bizarre behaviors because they are nearly biological in complexity, which increases the potential for problems and reduces one’s ability to understand and fix them. Being able to have an actual notion of what your computer is doing turns the computer from the frustrating voodoo box to a simple hand tool. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, I blame myself and alter my actions because I understand what happened. If Windows crashes I get frustrated at it because I usually don’t have a clue what went wrong.
I use the best OS for the job. While I could write a shell script in Windows, I’d usually use Linux for that. It’s probably possible to get hardware accelerated video playback with my favorite post-processing filters in Linux, but it’s much easier in Windows. OTOH, for the simple tasks that Windows, Linux, and Haiku can do, I prefer the latter due to its elegance. Your use differs from mine so YMMV.
You actually notice sub second delays? What are you, the amazing Spiderman? I mean if you want to argue that X is faster than Y then sure, even though i have never used haiku (although I did use BeOS for awhile, whatever the RC version was they released right before going under) then sure I might buy that, but saying you can actually notice sub second delays? at that level how would one even know the delay was caused by the OS and not by something in the hardware or a badly optimized driver?
The problem with caring about raw speed anymore is frankly even the low end X86 units are so insanely overpowered it isn’t even funny. I mean YouTube is covered with videos of guys playing games like Crysis on an E350 which is what you find in $350 netbooks now, so its kind of hard to get really excited by such feats in haiku when RAM is so cheap you can practically find it in Cracker jacks and multicores are the norm.
Funny that TFA makes a crack about tablets when that is EXACTLY the kind of market Haiku should be targeting. people don’t expect app compatibility between devices there like they do X86 desktops and laptops and if haiku is as lean when multitasking as the original beOS then that would probably be a really sweet tablet.
Humans can detect incredibly minute delays – particularly if they have muscle memory trained – there delays as little as 10ms can cause a slightly sensation of a disconnect, though that is at the very extreme (such as an audio sync problem, where the brain senses a slight disconnect).
When it comes to UI responsiveness, BeOS could open a menu in about 50ms when Windows was taking 250-300ms, this is a very large discrepancy in performance.
It also helped that BeOS native apps were small and clean, and thus would launch so fast that you could practically disregard the delay entirely.
And all that on lowly pentiums/II…
–The loon
Yeah, we’ll see what happens to ‘small and lean’ and apps popping up instantly if/when they start porting apps like Photoshop to it
hehe
BTW: I tried clicking on menus in several apps in Windows, as well as the Start menu. I don’t know how long it took for them to appear, but I could not perceive any kind of delay.
You’ve obviously never used our university PC’s
Edited 2012-04-28 11:31 UTC
EDIT: oops… wrong placee
Edited 2012-04-28 15:35 UTC
This may sound surprising to you, but for intensive GUI interaction, a second of latency is simply huge.
To see what it is like, take some kind of watch, start counting seconds in your head, then try to imagine what would happen if scrolling in your web browser took so much time to respond (you turn the mouse wheel, then one second later something starts to move on the screen). Targeting something precisely would turn out to be either impossible or extremely slow.
As part of the development of a new low-latency audio codec, Monty from Xiph has shown that people are not even able to sing a song which they know by heart in a synchronous fashion if they have to overcome a 250ms communication delay ( http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/celt/demo.html ).
Myself, I always disable GUI animations on my computers and cellphones when I can, because after you have lived without these 100-200ms of unneeded latency for a few months there is no going back. Everything just feels slow when I leave them on.
And the worst here is that modern computer hardware is more than powerful enough to work at 20ms latencies and below. It is ill-designed system software that is holding it back.
Edited 2012-04-28 11:39 UTC
It’s a better designed operating system, almost entirely free of the MS-DOS and PC-AT legacy plague. I’m sure your Windows 7 installation is fast enough, but if you tried it, you’d be flabbergasted at just how incredibly responsive Haiku is. Whole different league. It boots in around 10 seconds on my four year old Atom-based netbook, everything just pops up as soon as you click on it — it’s really remarkable.
It’s a better designed operating system; that doesn’t mean it has better applications. This is still alpha-stage software and porting applications from GNU/Linux or Windows or Mac OS is not straightforward.
So the answer is: there’s literally nothing right now you can do with Haiku that you can’t do with Windows, except marvel at the sheer accomplishment.
Listen, I loved BeOS and love Haiku as well. But, you have to be honest in your critisims of other operating systems. Throwing around things like “free of MS_DOS PC-AT legacy plague” Is just plain dishonest. There isn’t any DOS legacy left in windows 7. If there is, what is it and why does it present a problem?
I think you are just commenting about the speed and responsiveness of the gui. Cool. Just leave it at that :” Hakui has a more responsive Gui”. Don’t blame it on DOS or pc-at, thats just absurd. Otherwise we could likewise say that Windows is better because it doesn’t have that legacy at& t hobbit design plague.
I would think that the last that legacy was removed as windows was brought into a 64 bit architecture. I loved BeOS too back in the day.. but it is the one stuck in legacy mode now being 32 bit in a 64 bit world. 64 bit mode had a much bigger speed boost for X86 users over PowerPC because x86 had few registers. Haiku could probably get 20% faster with clean 64-bit code.
Sure there is:
Con, aux and a lot of other strings are reserved names in Win32, you can’t (easily) use them. Try creating a file named con.txt for example.
That’s a DOS legacy even though NT in itself doesn’t care about such things (and using native NT system calls is the way one can create/delete files with those names).
That is not a DOS legacy.
That is a compatibility with the early microcomputers architecture.
Those names were also valid in CP/M and AmigaDOS.
In a way is like saying that /dev and /proc are legacy in UNIX.
—
Paulo
You make a great point, but please leave /proc out of this, it’s not from Unix. It was ported to Linux from Plan9.
Ok, but HOW THE HECK DOES THAT IMPACT PERFORMANCE?
Actually I think there are things I cannot do, still. I need to use a VPN that runs very specific cisco software… I am pretty sure it won’t run on BeOS yet. I wish it would but…
Ah well. I do so miss my BeOS…
There is no MSDOS in Windows NT, never has been. Windows 7 is the latest version of NT (Windows 8 is not RTM yet). OS X also has never been accused of being related to MSDOS, and neither has Linux or BSD.
The only real remnant of the AT era left in a modern PC is the BIOS, and new PCs are moving away from that.
Really, your whole post is just nonsense, let Haiku stand up on it’s own, without BS such as this. I mean really, come on.
its own*
I got one thing to say to you, grow up.
It’s entirely free of MS-DOS. Just like any other modern operating system today, except FreeDOS.
It runs on PC, doesnt it? It supports IDE devices, right? Then it’s not free of the PC-AT plague.
Not really, I used BeOS so I know how responsive it is. On the other hand, DOS-SHELL was pretty responsive too..
There are more parameters to better design than raw speed.
Edited 2012-04-29 03:05 UTC
“free of the […] PC-AT legacy plague” – it is Haiku that runs only on IA-32, while NT on… a few more architectures (NT didn’t even start on x86)
And yeah, Haiku is damn responsive in doing so little as it does (that minimal approach might be what is desired of course, but lets be honest here…)
Lucky you. The other billion or so users – not so much.
You wouldn’t watch a movie while playing quake (that would be ridiculous) so much as you might move to much more intelligent NPC’s, enemies, or maybe much higher fidelity rendering, if you had a significantly more efficient operating system/rendering pipeline. You are constrained by the physical limits of your hardware. The O/S is a tax on that. Like taxes, some of what you pay comes back to you in better services. A certain amount is just lost as waste because the O/S is not efficient.
I’m stunned sometimes by how bad Windows can be. Not all the time, but sometimes. Not just comparing it to BeOS, but other operating systems. With dual booting machines I’ve sometimes scratched my head in wonder as to why something (like running multiple streams of video back in the NT 4 days) could work so well in one O/S but Windows just kind of screws the pooch. It’s not everything, but I think there are some areas where Windows just kind of sucks. And it’s not 250ms vs 198ms. It’s 5 minutes vs 5 seconds. They say that the 8 kernel has been cleaned up to get its memory footprint down, so hopefully gooder performance in the future.
Of course, there are some things you give up with good design, like long boot times. Like being able to start booting and be able to get up and get a cup of coffee before the system is ready to use. In fact, I sometimes think I could grow the beans, dry them, hump them up from Columbia on a pack mule, toast them, grind them, vacuum pack them, sell them to my Grocery store, go in, buy them back, take them home, brew a pot of coffee…. nope still not done booting.
The Windows kernel is quite good.
The Windows Internals series is a nice eye opener how everything works.
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0790145305930.do
In the early NT days, it was the only fully multi-threaded kernel, before the UNIX systems adopted multi-threading at the kernel level.
Many of the Windows issues that people talk about, are at the application level, not at the kernel. For example, the way explorer behaves when handling lots of files.
The SunOS/Solaris kernel was not only multithreaded but also pre-emptible a year before the 1st release of NT
http://static.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/sa92/eykh…
I’ve heard but not been able to confirm that AIX 3 was also a multithreaded, preemptible kernel.
If true, that predates Win NT 3.1 by several years
Wikipedia seems to disagree
One year before the paper you have linked.
The examples I gave were of production code; a very different beast than a public demo, especially back then.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about NT:
“Windows NT 3.1 is the first release of Microsoft’s Windows NT line of server and business desktop operating systems, and was released to manufacturing on July 27, 1993”
It’s not that Windows is horrible. It’s just that when you keep backwards compatibility for as long as they have you wind up with multiple API’s to do the same thing. You wind up saddled with decisions that made sense when the limits of technology lead you to certain tradeoffs, but new tradeoffs may make more sense in the present.
I can watch a 1080p youtube video while playing WoW at 40fps in high settings on my 4 years old core2duo HP laptop running windows 7 with an external hdmi monitor.
Windows 7 has its performance problem, but managing/sharing resources isn’t one of these problem.
Wake me up when Haiku can do half of what I need to be done on a computer.
when value proposition for the OS is a blatant strawman.
It’s unique. Linux, for instance, is based around a core—called a kernel—that was originally designed for use in servers.
Actually the reverse is true. It was designed to run on PCs then later ported to bigger iron.
But the main focus, contributions and design decisions focused on server performance (insert here the famous XKCD strip about 4096 cores and flash video). “Originally” may be factually wrong by overlooking the first few years of linux, but is mostly right.
Whereas BeOS, and thus Haiku, has some design decisions desktop oriented.
No, it’s not close to being true. The article stated Linux started out as a server kernel, which isn’t true. A few years later doesn’t count as “starting out”.
Your kind of splitting hairs. It doesn’t really matter what it started out as. It matters what a majority of the contributions have been.
I don’t think that term “splitting hairs” means what you want it to mean in this case, if you have to move the goal posts like that to make the point stand.
Regardless, the fact remains that since Linux got mainstream acceptance (and before Android came around), the primary use, and hence the majority if contributions, have been server orientated.
BeOS and Haiku have never been targetted at the server market, so they don’t share the same “server optimisations” that Linux has, but instead they have many more “desktop optimisations” than Linux does.
Quite untrue. What does matter? Actual performance at a given task.
In a way it is true, because the goal of Linux was to have a UNIX clone, which is a server operating system.
Really UNIX started as a programmer’s operating system.
When it was written, computers were too expensive to dedicate to one person, so UNIX was made multi-user and time-sharing so programmers could share a machine.
Later that made it a good OS for servers too.
I would say that all time-sharing systems in the early days of computing were what we know today as server systems.
There were no personal computers on those days.
Well… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers#The_begi… (or not mentioned in that wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_9800_series_desktop_computers ; or http://www.wang2200.org/ but that’s 1973 so pushing it)
I’d say at least the Datapoint 2200 can be safely counted as personal computer, and it’s from “those days” – contemporary to UNIX beginnings.
It doesn’t really matter, does it? In the end no-one cares what the development focus was X number of years ago, what we care about is what the OS can do *right now*.
Hi,
No.
Linux is based around a kernel that was originally designed for servers (back in the late 1960’s by AT&T employees at Bell Labs).
In a similar way, Haiku is based around a kernel that was originally designed for desktop systems (in the early 1990’s by Be Inc).
– Brendan
Hang on a minute. If you’re talking kernels, both Linux and Haiku are POSIX systems. POSIX is codified UNIX. By your argument, both Linux and Haiku are “based around a kernel that was originally designed for servers”.
While Haiku does support POSIX, it is not a “POSIX system”, and not a *NIX. POSIX is simply an addition, not the base for it.
After all, Windows supports POSIX too, if you want it. Does that make it a “POSIX system” as well?
Correct me if I’m totally wrong here, but POSIX on Haiku is a first-class, and in many cases the only, API[1]. The Haiku kernel does not have Haiku-native equivalent of open() or read(), as a very simple example.
No, and you’re making my point for me here. Linux is no more “based around a kernel that was originally designed for servers” than Haiku is.
[1]: kernel API. You can, of course, build non-POSIX APIs on top of it, which is obviously exactly what OSes like Haiku do, but the POSIX API is still at the bottom of the abstraction.
Hi,
Ok, you’re wrong. The primary/native API used by Haiku is the same API that was used for BeOS. This API is described here: http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/index.html
Notice that it looks nothing like POSIX.
I’m not sure how well integrated their POSIX API actually is; but I also doubt it matters. Haiku/BeOS is different (lots of message passing and multiple threads) and applications designed for POSIX (that don’t use message passing, etc) will always be a poor fit regardless of how well implemented the POSIX API is.
Unfortunately, for a new OS there’s always a “chicken and egg” problem – it’s hard to attract developers when there’s no applications and hard to get applications without developers. I’d assume that the only reason they bothered with POSIX at all was to break this “chicken and egg” problem (by making it easy to port “better than nothing” applications from elsewhere).
– Brendan
POSIX is a second-class citizen to the Be API, and as such, most of the POSIX API that Haiku supports is just “bolted” on top of Haiku to provide a certain level of compatability with non-native code. In fact, a lot of the POSIX compatability has only been implemented in the last few years for this exact reason.
BeOS, although it had a certain degree of POSIX compatability, was nothing compared to what Haiku has gained in the last few years
I knew that was going to be the answer.
The Be API is NOT the kernel API. It is a user space library which sits on top of the kernel API. Using the Be API on Haiku is the same as using Qt on Linux. Neither invalidates the fact that the kernel API is POSIX.
I just grabbed the Haiku source (It’s available via git) and here is a sample of some of the thread functions available from the kernel:
extern thread_id spawn_thread(thread_func, const char *name, int32 priority,
void *data);
extern status_t kill_thread(thread_id thread);
extern status_t resume_thread(thread_id thread);
extern status_t suspend_thread(thread_id thread);
Do those look like POSIX?
The Haiku file interfaces do use open, close, fcntl. The socket interface does use socket, bind, listen.
But that doesn’t make it POSIX.
I thought that POSIX defined a userland API…
In any case, Haiku has native pthread support, and it is indeed a first class citizen, not some “bolted on” crap like was done in BeOS.
http://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/tree/headers/posix
Certain POSIX APIs like fork() and exec(), have special kernel behaviour expectations. You cannot have them just as userland.
Anyway as I already mentioned, only if a system is POSIX certified, you can be sure that it really has proper POSIX support.
POSIX/Single Unix Specification defines an API, but makes no reference to “kernel” or “user”, or indeed even to “syscalls”. How the API implemented is implementation specific.
The presence of non-POSIX API’s does not negate the POSIX parts. Linux has a bunch of non-POSIX calls, too.
Um, yes it does. Or at least, it makes the API close enough to POSIX that it’s entirely appropriate to describe Haiku as “a POSIX system”.
Any operating system that is able to pass the POSIX certification tests, regardless in what form is a POSIX system.
Windows POSIX subsystem (Interix), althought not certified, is compatible with POSIX.1-1990.
Well, maybe, but give the changes in computer power since the 60s, heck, even the 90s, does it make any difference?
It’s the future of yesterday’s computing!
Serially, I liked BEOS, and have installed Haiku in a VM. I think it would make a great netbook! Cheerios!
On my HP Mini 210 the recent nightly builds perform very well, and the only unsupported hardware is sound, WiFi and some advanced functions of the clickpad. If I was a programmer I would work on all three issues, but instead I’m going to try to find a more compatible netbook. If that doesn’t pan out I’ll just wait for the issues to be fixed before running it full time. For now it’s side by side with MeeGo.
I have an Asus 1000HE NetBook, maybe I’ll give it a go.
It runs fantastically on my Acer Aspire One AOA150 netbook (with working sound + wifi)
Okay, I know this may sound petty to some, but…..
The big thing that always griped at me about BeOS was that the whole API was implemented with C++ objects. I’ve disliked C++ ever since I was first exposed to it, and have been actively avoiding it (with much success) for many years. I just find it hard to imagine happiness on a system that requires C++ for any serious native application development.
That sentence sounded like a record scratching… but I’m gonna guess you are to young to know what records are.
Haiku is not the only one.
– Symbian (Fully C++)
– MacOS X (IOKit driver subsystem)
– Windows (WinRT, COM and User Space Drivers)
Until a language appears that can match C++ set of programming paradigms, coupled with the performance its compilers achieve, C++ will be kept be being used for native programming.
C++ is the only native language able to beat FORTRAN performance, thanks to template meta-programming.
C cannot do it due to aliasing issues, for example.
As a multimedia OS, it is only faire that Haiku makes use of the number one language used for game development.
I was pretty happy writing Python desktop applications.
That’s exactly what linus was trying to do: build a giant operating system that would be for huge mainframe servers like his 386 ;/
Edited 2012-04-28 02:27 UTC
You made me chuckle!
I am the one who submitted this article to OSNews. I found yesterday when I was looking into the status of Haiku after a long time not following the project. What actually caught my eye and thought made it newsworthy was the statement:
…and this month we expect to release the fourth and final alpha. After that we’ll move to the beta stage, which we hope to get out by the end of the year, followed by the first official release, known as R1, in early 2013.
I did not know R1 was so close to release, and that was a pleasant surprise.
I’d be surprised too… frankly, that sounds a bit optimistic to me.
Let’s see then how efficient, small, coherent, and bug-free it really is.
It would be useful today if people actually developed applications for it.
People would be developing application if it was useful today
Which is not going to happen, because nobody is going to develop for a system which is fifteen years late and is not even out of alpha yet.
Alpha for Haiku means “it could eat your pet, not everything is implemented, but it’s stable enough for daily use.” Not “this can’t even show a window without crashing”
Easy to say, but that’s not what people think when they see an “alpha” tag on something.
I’ve used BeOS and various versions of it a few years ago and it was still small, fast and efficient. Bug-free, probably not, but it did run as fast as Haiku does. And contrary to popular opinion, it was able to run more than demos of teapots and 10 videos at once: I could browse the web, listen to music, process documents, spreadsheets, presentations, play games, chat, even develop on it. And it supported all my hardware.
Good article, not so good criticism of Linux.
The issue with Linux is not whether the kernel is focused on server or desktop, the kernel is quite good for desktop (though it could be better), I doubt that Haiku’s kernel is better here.
No the issue is with the upper layers to build a desktop OS: GUI, toolkits, applications etc which tend to suck on Linux mainly because of endless “big bang” reinventions, NIH syndrome and lack of payed developers to do the boring stuff (such as keeping compatibility).
Haiku is currently a bit protected from this as they are trying to reproduce an existing OS, now once they manage to do this, when they’ll try to improve the API making new ones, the NIH risk will be much greater of course.
Quite simply they don’t have the developer resources to work on a tablet version yet.
You have to walk before you can run. I do think Haiku should be on tablets in the future though.
I used to be excited for BeOS. It was a promise to get my PC off of Windows, and in my head at least, make it more Mac like. But unfortunately between 2001 and now, I’ve grown up, got a job, so I just bought a Mac instead.
I do applaud what these people have done with Haiku.
Linus Torvalds started Linux as his simple Unix-like clone he could run on his 386. I don’t think “server” was his original intention.
The “How delightfully quaint.” comment at the end of the news item is… strange.
Edited 2012-04-28 16:08 UTC
I couldn’t decide it was sarcasm or not.
Indeed.. and its not like BeOS had never had a tablet version either.
I think its just the fact that nobody wants to do it at the moment.
Edited 2012-04-28 18:44 UTC
Yeah, That bit hit a nerve for some reason.
Not everyone needs or wants a tablet UI :p
I think people are missing the point here, Haiku is trying to rebuild an old OS called BeOS that was truly amazing back then, it was so amazing that even for today standards is not obsolete. BeOS code was sold and archived , what Haiku is trying to do is huge and the have almost achieved it. It is still in Alpha near Beta so it must have bugs.
No, no one is missing the point. Everyone on OSNews just like to argue.
And if the topic were about flowers they would somehow wrap in their competitive battles regarding OS X, Linux and Windows.
LOL. I’d vote you up, but I commented already and OSN has that ridiculous limitation on voting…
On Haiku’s speed : Haiku is basically a rewrite of BeOS, which is an operating system conceived in the early nineties. Install any other OS of that era on modern hardware, such as Windows NT or OS/2, and it will fly too.
On Haiku’s stability : The notion that Haiku is bugless its simply laughable. Anyone saying its not riddled with bugs obviously hasn’t used it. The software is still in alpha stage, which means things can and will break most of the time. Try to do anything noteworthy in Haiku and the system poops itself and/or trashes its own install.
On Haiku not working on a tablet version : You can attribute this one to Jean-Louis gassee since Be never had a tablet version either. Its not in the projects scope. And rightfully so, since they better spend their time in getting their first beta out of the door.
Are we on the brink of the dawn of Haiku? I’d hate to burst the bubble here, but, we aren’t. Haiku stems from an era of personal desktop machines with local storage and is thus twenty years late in the market. It has some value to certain people (mostly former Be enthousiasts) but the slow development pace in the open source space is a writing on the wall : If a project takes more than a decade to produce even a beta, there probably isn’t much interest in it from the developer community and, perhaps, its existence doesn’t really have much potential of being game changing. After all, you’re a computer enthousiast, why bother with Haiku when you have platforms with vast application ecosystems like Windows, Linux and Mac?
That is debatable… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIA
Haiku is a rewrite of BeOS, but they have made enough changes to it to get it on par with modern operating systems. They just resisted the temptation to put every possible feature in it and have it run in the background all the time. And remember, just because it is based on old design (so is Linux), doesn’t make it bad. And not having wobbly windows doesn’t somehow make it any less modern.
I think the goal of the project is to be bug-free as much as possible.
Uptimes, I didn’t run it much on bare metal, but I’ve had good uptimes with Haiku in VMs. Could you cite some examples?
Because computer enthusiasts might be bored with the soon to be locked-in Windows, iOS, excuse me, Mac OS, and the constantly-changing-we-do-tablet-UIs-but-we-cant-run-on-any-tablet Linux. For me, Haiku is something different, an OS that aims to work for me instead of against me. An OS that has interesting concepts nobody else implemented so far like Data Translators, which mean my 10-year old app can support new formats without any code changes.
It all boils down to the fact that these people like working on Haiku, and we should celebrate that. In the past there were lots of OSes. Now we’re stuck with three crappy OSes, two of which are from money-hungry corporations that want to lock you in. The fact that OSes like AROS and Haiku still exist makes me happy as a computer enthusiast.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate Haiku a lot for the work they’ve put in all these years and getting to Alpha. When BeOS came out, it was a hurricane of fresh air compared to my System 7 install. I fondly remember this wicked app which let you program 3D objects which interacted with sound, and a lot of other cool stuff.
The problem with BeOS was, it just never really got out of the concept stage. BeOS mainly was Gaussees attempt to provide Apple with a modern OS, something which could not be done internally due to politics.
I keep hearing a lot of this “when we all get tired of lock in” and “when i want a computer which is open and free” but really, if thats what users wanted, Linux would have blown everything else out of the water 15 years ago. It hasn’t. Why? Because the definition of freedom from a techie differs of that of a computer user. A user want his computer to work. Period. Geeks might want their computer to be open, for every geek there are 1000 users. And they think tinkering is a waste of time. Any notion that a tinker OS of any kind will replace the main OSes on the desktop is simply delirious and frankly, only leads to unnecessary disappointments of anyone involved in these projects.
I’m sure Haiku has nice things under the bonnet that no other OS has. The question is, does it make enough sense macroscopically to warrant a major migration in the desktop space? I can already tell you they don’t – without even having to look at them.
There is simply no dual operandum in writing code – “bug free” vs “normal code”. Bugs happen unintentionally, and even the best coders write them. Rigorous testing, proper QA teams, and a large installed user base is what provides a stable product.
Yeah, Haiku will most likely be a niche OS. The hope is it will be popular enough in the open source community that useful software will be written / ported to it. It won’t take over Windows, but maybe it will show people there can be a free desktop OS that is not *nix. Haiku has more of a chance than, say, AROS, anyway.
What a novel idea – releasing software with as few bugs as possible. Why has nobody else thought of that before?
People thought the article was talking about how Haiku is currently bug free, which of course is not the case. What I think the article meant was that the goal is to be bug free on release. Just like any other project, indeed
Edited 2012-04-30 00:47 UTC
I’m glad to see the Haiku folks getting recognition in a mag like IEEE Spectrum. To know the BeOS is to love the BeOS. I only recently got rid of my red, white and blue BeOS books recently. Every once in a while, rummaging through old CD’s, I find the MetroWerks and BeOS 4 CD’s. Compared to programming Windows GUI’s, or Mac OS toolbox, the BeOS was surprisingly programmer friendly and elegant. On a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro, I could get multiple video streams running at the same time, a feat that the same hardware could not do booting into Windows NT. I could run multiple Open GL windows, smoothly animating spinning teapots when Windows was choking on two GL windows. Anything involving media was psychotically fast on the same hardware that was made for a mediocre windows experience.
I have yet to find another O/S with that level of grokability and elegance.
The development on haiku is quite easy, logical and straight forward. It has somehow the disadvantage that sometimes the api misses some features and some gui-controls/elements that are somehow a standard in other toolkits are missing.
Why haiku is still not very interesting for 3rd party developers, is perhaps because haiku doesnt have more users.
On the other side, the ones that are real haiku fans, are ready to donate and support haiku. The amount of donations that have been done in the last years is really impressive, if you take in account that it’s still a small community.
What haiku still needs, is a new improved gui, that gives you the impression of a more modern OS. Even some better windows decorators would help. Because haiku is indeed much better than you might think after a first look and seing the old-fashion beos gui.
Window Compositing, and hw acc. is in the works, that gives me hope that soon we can have a more modern gui.
At the moment there a still a lot of things to do, but after haiku R1 is release, i’m pretty sure, that it will become more and more clear to people that haiku is a real alternative to linux.
I think now it’s important and a priority that haiku goes already this year in beta phase.
Despite being a huge Haiku fanboy (former Beos fanboy, as I suppose many of us are) I have to say that some of the salesman lingo in this article made me cringe.
At the same time I think we need to cut the author some slack, Ryan Levengood is a developer who has contributed to Haiku (like the native browser) and as such is likely even less objective than sideline fanboys like me.
As for the native api/posix debate, Haiku aims to be posix compatible (that’s not to say it’s ever going to be fully posix compatible). This is important since unless Haiku really takes off which seems improbable, it will have to rely heavily on ported software, and lots of open source software today needs posix support.
As for the native API, it’s showing it’s age. There’s been an awful lot of things happening in C++ back from when the Be api was defined not to mention in overall api design I’m sure, recently one of the core developers Ingo Molnar brought up the suggestion of replacing the native Be api with QT (not sure how I feel about that).
So why should anyone care about Haiku, is it faster than say Linux? No, atleast not when I did benchmarks of my own code (which admittedly was quite some time ago), but it is more responsive under load.
Note, responsive means that I notice very little to no impact (lag) when for instance copying large files in the background, something which always happens in Linux unless I do ionice or run a patched kernel. In reality the file copies are obviously slightly slower (there’s no magic thing they do in order to increase responsiveness, you basically choose responsiveness over throughput) but that doesn’t matter since this is a desktop OS and on the desktop I’ve always felt that nothing trumps responsiveness.
But the biggest draw for me has always been how it’s a operating system built as a whole, from kernel to gui, to sound. It’s a complete desktop system from top to bottom where nothing feels ‘tacked’ on.
Sadly I have to admit I seldom boot into my native Haiku partition these days, and the times per month I boot it up in the VM are indeed getting fewer. The problem is as often that of software, Haiku is simply starved. This in turn is due to a problem of attracting developers/porters.
Will Haiku ever hit the critical mass needed for it to gain a healthy software ecosystem with ports of key software like Firefox/Chrome, LibreOffice, Blender, Inkscape, Gimp etc (and possibly even some strong native software) ?
Impossible to say, but as long as the devs keep chugging along, making Haiku better with every day and with new developers joining in there’s hope. And with things like Summer of Code and the community raising funds for time-based full-time employment of developers I’d say there’s plenty life in there yet!
Wow, longwinded, sorry!