[HN Gopher] Haiku R1/beta4
___________________________________________________________________
Haiku R1/beta4
Author : waddlesplash
Score : 195 points
Date : 2022-12-23 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.haiku-os.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.haiku-os.org)
| yellowapple wrote:
| It's awesome that Haiku has come a long enough way that it runs
| on my Framework out-of-the-box. Still ain't quite there as a
| daily driver, but it's very close.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| Have you tried the newly-ported GNOME Web browser, mentioned in
| the release notes? It seems that it solves the "web browser
| problem" many users have complained about.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| It is excellent to see a modern browser on Haiku, but one
| thing remains:
|
| If we get a web browser with advert blocking, it will be
| ready for the modern web.
| djsavvy wrote:
| @dang Could the URL be changed to the release notes?
| https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta4/release-notes/
|
| It's a much more filled-out page, and probably what most people
| are clicking through to anyways.
| dang wrote:
| Changed from https://www.haiku-
| os.org/news/2022-12-23_haiku_r1_beta4/. Thanks!
| gigatexal wrote:
| Oh what would have been what could have been had Apple bought Be
| instead of Next. We'd likely not have any iPhones or a 2.5T Apple
| but we could have had some really cool software. BeOS and now
| Haiku will always have a special place in my nerd-head.
|
| consider sponsoring the team here:
| https://github.com/sponsors/haiku
| KMag wrote:
| In school, I quad-booted Debian, Win2k, QNX, and BeOS on my
| desktop.
|
| BeOS was very light weight. Its ethernet driver for 3c509 was
| buggy and crashed often, but being a userspace driver, I just
| got a popup asking permission to restart the driver.
| Conversely, a couple years later I had an OSX laptop, and a
| corrupted backup CD that would kernel panic OSX, Win2k, and
| Linux. (Honestly, ISO 9660 and FAT32 drivers should be migrated
| out of mainstream OS kernels, since kernel latency is very far
| from being the bottleneck when using thunmb drives or CDs.)
|
| On the other hand, BeOS had some questionable uses of metadata.
| After improperly using tar to backup my home directory before a
| reinstall, I lost all of my NetPositive browser bookmarks. I
| didn't realize each bookmark was a zero-sized file with the URL
| actually stored in metadata. My improper backup procedure
| dropped the metadata fork.
|
| Also, there was a kernel bug related to semaphores. I had some
| semaphore code that worked fine under Linux but would kernel
| panic BeOS.
|
| Had Apple purchased Be, we'd likely have a much lighter weight
| OSX, though perhaps with poorer support for multiple users.
|
| I'm still hoping that someday QNX RTP gets open-sourced. A hard
| real-time light weight microkernel OS was fun to play around
| with. In particular, a cache benchmark I ran for a systems
| class showed quite a bit smaller cache footprint for QNX vs.
| Debian. (Though, Debian almost certainly had more daemons
| running, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison of kernel
| cache footprints.)
| jeffbee wrote:
| I find this take somewhat baffling. At the moment that Apple
| bought NeXT, NeXTSTEP had a mature software toolchain, a
| working IPv4 networking stack, and enterprise customers, three
| things that BeOS lacked. BeOS had a primitive software
| toolchain ecosystem based on pre-standard C++. BeOS IP
| networking barely worked and despite everything claimed in
| their advertising it was fully serialized, single-threaded
| networking. BeOS had zero customers.
|
| The only thing that Be did have was one nifty demo, and a
| somewhat innovative file system. Apple must have correctly
| deduced that it would be easy to improve the filesystem,
| because they later did so, with the same author.
|
| Comparing BeOS and NextSTEP in 1997 is like comparing a ham
| sandwich to a piglet and a bag of flour. One of these things
| was a finished product.
| perardi wrote:
| Also, NeXtSTEP could reliably print stuff. Which, given that
| publishing was the niche that arguably kept the Mac alive
| during those years: kinda important!
| PAPPPmAc wrote:
| (Just because I love this argument): Have you used Mid-90s
| OpenStep and BeOS on period hardware? People rose-tinted-
| glasses the hell out of OpenStep (...and the first few OS X
| releases), it's ridiculously sluggish and brittle (in that
| same kind of "I did something to config and rendered it
| unbootable" way as early 2000s Linux). BeOS is shockingly
| performant and flexible on the same hardware.
|
| As much as the original BeOS network stack was mediocre (and
| it was, it wasn't fixed until the BONE design in that final
| Dano leak in 2001) the much-touted NeXT networking stack was
| literally the open source 4.3BSD networking code running
| hosted, with their awful NetInfo system on top, which Apple
| spent the next several years excising. Excising like the
| Adobe license fees cost more than a PC, few major vendors
| (not even Adobe!) willing to port their software to, Display
| PostScript GUI they had to throw out and replace.
|
| I'll grant that they got a really good set of development
| tools they're still essentially using, and Be's were rough
| (and kind of alien, that kind of pervasive threading is
| _still_ hard with decades of work on the tooling).
|
| Apple bought NeXT because the stack looked architecturally
| like a less-bungled version of their own failed Pink/Taligent
| effort, and Steve Jobs had a better relationship with people
| still at Apple than Jean-Louis Gassee.
| shrubble wrote:
| I ran NEXTSTEP 3.2 and I think, 3.3, on both 486 DX2/66 and
| original NeXT hardware. At one job I ran on a 25Mhz Mono
| slab as my daily and only machine. I did Web surfing,
| email, used VarioData for the home-built sales/contact
| system, etc.
|
| There were some pieces that were slow, but overall it was a
| fantastic experience. The "Shelf" was great; I would store
| commonly-used docs there, reference materials etc.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Look I'm not going to bat for NeXTSTEP as a user nirvana,
| but _at the time Apple bought it_ it was hugely advanced
| compared to BeOS, which still had not reached R3. A few
| things that NeXT could do that Be could not do at the time:
| run on an Intel PC, burn CD-Rs, and print.
|
| BeOS R4-the first revision that did useful things users
| actually wanted-came out two years after Apple agreed to
| acquire NeXT. The current BeOS at the moment was "DR8" as
| in "developer release".
| KerrAvon wrote:
| The fundamental thing Apple got out of the NeXT
| acquisition was an adult OS management team. The software
| acquired was totally irrelevant (at the time). What was
| important was new people in charge, who unlike the
| previous Apple management, could actually make decisions.
| The decisions were often bad, but they were decisions!
|
| If Amelio and Hancock had been competent, they would have
| actually set up a management structure internally and
| started focusing on shipping Copland-based software
| instead of shopping externally. Strip it down and get it
| out the door and build on that. It could absolutely have
| been done.
|
| Of course, you wouldn't have the iMac or iPod or iPhone.
| And Apple might not have survived. The world would be
| very different.
|
| (That all said, OpenStep was truly dire in 1997. Yes, it
| could print, although they ended up having to write an
| entirely new graphics stack from scratch anyway. It
| actually took six years from 1997 to turn moribund
| OpenStep into a viable consumer OS (I could not recommend
| anything before Jaguar to end users -- the Finder, among
| other things, was unusable up to that point).
| waddlesplash wrote:
| R3 could actually run on Intel PCs; it was the first
| release to have that option available. The other two you
| are probably right about, I'm not actually an expert in
| BeOS history pre-R5 :)
| steve1977 wrote:
| NeXT even had stuff like WebObjects, which was really ahead
| of its time back then. And AFAIK it still powers some
| services at Apple.
| jeffbee wrote:
| iTunes and App Store seem to both still be backed by
| webobjects services. Stuff like [1] still respond at WO-
| like URLs and still include headers like `x-webobjects-
| whatever` so I surmise these are still production WO apps.
|
| 1: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/
| ws/w...
| diskzero wrote:
| Many Be employees, including myself, ended up at Apple; some
| after a brief time at Eazel and others later on. They had, and
| continue to, make great contributions. As a former Be employee
| and lover of BeOS, I can say that Apple acquiring Be would have
| been a disaster for Apple. I have no ill will to Gil Amelio,
| Ellen Hancock, Steve Glass and the other leadership, but they
| didn't have what it took (other than the NeXT purchase) to pull
| Apple out of crisis.
| angrygoat wrote:
| Circa 1999 one of the popular machines in my uni's computer
| club was the BeBox - it had a solid web browser, it was fast,
| it had the cool CPU usage indicator on the front, and it was
| *nix enough to compile most stuff or to work on assignments in
| ANSI C. And it was just so snappy, it could do more than one
| thing without getting janky.
|
| A real shame that they faded out. I kind of miss those days
| with all the different and varied workstations - Be, SGI, DEC,
| HP, IBM, Sun, ...
| rzzzt wrote:
| I'd like to see the GeekPort reintroduced on non-Pi class
| machines. A bit of digital GPIO, some analog lines, maybe
| SPI...
| guenthert wrote:
| Twenty years ago I might have liked that too, but these
| days I _much_ prefer dedicated machines (MCUs like Arduino,
| P8X32A, R.Pico etc. or "single-board" (or rather "open-
| frame") computers like R.Pi, BBB etc.) for the acoustic
| noise alone (not to speak of power bill and electrical
| safety). USB or Ethernet (preferred for galvanic
| separation) on the PC does just fine to connect to those.
| hakfoo wrote:
| I wonder why there isn't a $20 PCI-E card (or perhaps USB
| dongle) that offers a 40-pin RasPi-style port.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I don't know about the prices but mixed-signal GPIO rigs
| for PCIe and USB are very common. Look at the "LabJack"
| for example. The LabJack U3-HV has almost exact feature
| parity with the geekport.
| hakfoo wrote:
| A quick google puts it at $130, well beyond the price of
| "just buy a Raspberry Pi or similar device, which also
| comes with all the SoC smarts too."
| jeffbee wrote:
| Fair enough. It compares more favorably to an odd port
| inconveniently located on the back of a $5000 (2022
| dollars) tower PC.
| cameroncooper wrote:
| It would be interesting to see what would have happened had
| Apple bought Be instead of Apple, but I think it's pretty clear
| Apple made the "right" move. NeXT had really good software, and
| of course, Steve Jobs (and let's not forget about the rest of
| the NeXT team with people like Avie). Hard to imagine Jean-
| Louis Gassee (or anyone else really) being able to turn the
| company around like Steve did.
| hankman86 wrote:
| Exactly. In acquiring NeXT, Apple bought leadership and
| culture. And we can argue forever if Apple's engineers could
| have shipped the first OSX release earlier or in a better
| state, had they instead acquired Be. But I doubt it. Because
| - again - they bought themselves a high-performance culture,
| which they might not have gotten from Be. Porting BeOS to
| Apple hardware / existing software would have likely required
| an equally Herculean effort.
|
| Oh and they got Steve Jobs of course who made quick work of
| pushing out the old Apple leadership. And good that he did.
| gatosenojados wrote:
| Try it in the browser, new version should be available soon:
| https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=haiku
| makach wrote:
| HaikuOS still going strong
|
| If we like it on our pcs
|
| Install and use it
| alganet wrote:
| I'm eager to test this. HiDPI, modern browser, wine, emacs...
| that's A LOT of useful stuff.
|
| I use lightweight linux VMs to keep different workspaces and
| hobbyspaces separate from my main OS. Depending on how the test
| goes, I feel that Haiku might replace some of those linuxes.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| Yep, this stood out for me as well:
|
| > but now (thanks to Emacs developers!) has a fully-upstreamed,
| polished-to-a-shine native GUI.
|
| This alone is definitely worth giving it a go!
| user3939382 wrote:
| These compatibility layers are huge and are going to skyrocket
| Haiku's strength as a daily driver. I'm really rooting for
| everyone working on it. Keep up the good work guys.
| [deleted]
| jamesdwilson wrote:
| any way to run this bare metal on an m1 mac? can i dual boot it?
| waddlesplash wrote:
| The ARM64 port doesn't yet boot all the way to desktop in QEMU,
| so it certainly won't run bare metal on an M1, unfortunately.
|
| You can certainly dual-boot it on x86 machines, though.
| szastamasta wrote:
| While I totally despise Electron it might be a great moment for
| new OSes and UI toolkits to emerge. In near future it might be
| enough to port Electron and a web browser and your niche OS might
| become actually usable on daily basis.
|
| It's slow and a total memory waste, but web became a new UI
| toolkit that actually solved OS compatibility issues. Who would
| have thought...
| prmoustache wrote:
| Aren't most electron apps available as regular web pages
| anyway?
|
| I mean I tried a number of electron apps and always end up
| using the web version that is always the most up to date and
| are as wll integrated to the desktop thanks to desktops support
| for web notifications.
|
| And in many cases, the web version end up more stable/reliable
| than the electron one. MS Teams is a great example of that.
| hectorm wrote:
| If anyone wants to quickly spin up a Haiku VM I leave here my
| Docker image [1].
|
| It's just a proof of concept but some people are using it for CI
| as well [2].
|
| [1] https://github.com/hectorm/docker-qemu-haiku
|
| [2]
| https://github.com/HaikuArchives/ArtPaint/blob/7f5c49278545e...
| waddlesplash wrote:
| Release notes: https://www.haiku-os.org/get-
| haiku/r1beta4/release-notes/
|
| Downloads: https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta4/
| pb82 wrote:
| Very happy to see boot failure fixes in the release notes.
| Can't wait to give it another try with beta4!
| superboum wrote:
| 3 days ago, I installed Haiku on bare metal: an old PC from
| ~2004. I was not aware that a new version was planned at that
| time, but the upgrade was completely smooth.
|
| My idea when I installed Haiku was to make my own version of the
| "old computer challenge"[1], with an emphasis on using GUI apps.
|
| Similarly to @probono (a FOSS dev), I also found Haiku
| "shockingly good"[2] at being a lightweight, responsive, easy-to-
| use desktop OS.
|
| After some patching, I was even able to compile Tectonic[3], a
| modern LaTeX engine written in Rust, and Quaternion a Matrix
| client supporting E2EE[4]. All that running on a single core
| Athlon 64 and 1.5GB of RAM.
|
| I posted some screenshots in a Mastodon threads if you are
| curious[5] (but my posts are in french sorry :/). And of course
| this comment is posted from Haiku!
|
| [1]: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-07-old-computer-
| challe...
|
| [2]: https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-first-day-with-haiku-
| shocki...
|
| [3]: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/
|
| [4]: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion
|
| [5]: https://mastodon.tedomum.net/@tgoldoin/109554115997967651
| xattt wrote:
| Around 2001, I ran the contemporary BeOS demo on a Pentium MMX
| 200 MHz machine with 32 MB of RAM. Even with those limitations,
| the thing screamed. I believe it was live CD you downloaded and
| burned.
|
| I am absolutely not surprised it works well on Athlon 64.
| rcarmo wrote:
| This is pretty impressive. GTK, WINE, Wayland... As a
| "lightweight" OS, it has a lot of potential for tinkering. I
| can't wait until they get a working ARM version for a Raspberry
| PI or an RK3688 SBC.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| The approaches to X and Wayland compatibility are interesting.
|
| >Instead of running a full X server as XQuartz or other X11
| compatibility packages do on other operating systems, it
| directly handles Xlib API calls and translates them into Haiku
| API calls, instead.
|
| >It is a little more complicated than the one for X11, running
| an "in-process Wayland server" for each application instead of
| translating C API calls directly.
|
| Unfortunately the Wayland part has no blog post similar to the
| X one.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| The ARM port has made a lot of progress since the last release;
| it gets almost all the way to starting the desktop. Similar
| progress was made on ARM64. But that's not very exciting news,
| so it only got an oblique mention in the release notes.
|
| The RISC-V port on the other hand is nearly fully usable even
| on bare metal. I know some people run it on HiFive Unmatched,
| at least...
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >One of the newly available GTK applications is GNOME Web aka.
| Epiphany, which is based on a very recent version of WebKitGTK.
| This provides an unfortunately non-native but largely functional
| web browser for Haiku for the first time in many years, with
| "just works" status for major websites like YouTube and others.
|
| For many people that makes Haiku suitable to run daily.
| chungy wrote:
| I kind of get not using the Be GUI API makes it feel "non-
| native", but it's still a native port of GTK and Epiphany. It's
| not like they've built a Linux ABI emulation layer to run it.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| There's not a Linux ABI emulation layer but it is running on
| top of a Wayland emulation layer, instead of using the Be GUI
| API directly (as the Qt, SDL, and Java Swing ports do.) That
| does make a difference, especially around stuff like keyboard
| handling.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >on top of a Wayland emulation layer
|
| As per release notes, for time being it uses X11 layer
| instead for features and performance.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| Uh ... no? The release notes state it started out using
| the X11 layer, but then switched to using the Wayland
| layer.
|
| I should know: I wrote the X11 layer, contributed to the
| Wayland layer, and wrote most of these release notes. :)
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Yeah, skimmed through them and mixed up the wording. It
| says "port now is built atop [the Wayland compatibility
| layer] for both features and performance reasons",
| remembered it the other way.
| rayiner wrote:
| Really impressive work man. Really great to see Haiku
| alive and kicking. I remember stanning for BeOS on
| Slashdot. Those were the days.
| spyremeown wrote:
| Who is the designer behind Haiku's icons and general "feel"? It
| looks really nice.
| c0balt wrote:
| I can't speak to the specific person(s) however the Haiku inc.
| (The non-profit for Haiku Org stuff) has an FAQ entry about
| them: https://www.haiku-inc.org/trademarks/haiku_icons/
|
| Edit: Fixed typo
| waddlesplash wrote:
| That would be "stippi" aka. Stephan Assmus on both counts, I
| believe. At least the icon style was chosen after a competition
| all the way back in 2006, where stippi's style got the most
| votes [1]. The look & feel of controls was done by him in 2009
| [2], not sure if there was ever an announcement about that (I
| see an old forum thread that may be related, though.)
|
| These days, stippi does not have much time for Haiku, but there
| are a number of developers & community members who have picked
| up where he left off, continuing work on the UI and drawing new
| icons when required.
|
| (Old hands from the BeOS days may remember stippi as the co-
| developer of the shareware "WonderBrush", which now runs on
| Haiku and has been open-sourced [3].)
|
| [1]: https://www.haiku-
| os.org/news/2006-11-03_icon_contest_and_be...
|
| [2]:
| https://github.com/haiku/haiku/commit/2f86ba45579bdc9648b232...
|
| [3]: https://github.com/stippi/WonderBrush-v2/
| brobinson wrote:
| Where do you even see them? I clicked around the website for a
| minute and can't find a freaking screenshot of anything
| anywhere. How frustrating.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| The front-page should probably have more screenshots, yeah.
|
| There's a screenshot tour here: https://www.haiku-
| os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/
|
| And the release notes, linked from the release announcement,
| have screenshots: https://www.haiku-os.org/get-
| haiku/r1beta4/release-notes/
| layer8 wrote:
| The user guide has some: https://www.haiku-
| os.org/docs/userguide/en/gui.html
| hankman86 wrote:
| Beyond the nostalgia: are there any other reasons to keep
| contributing to Haiku? Like critical infrastructure that is
| reliant on BeOS/Haiku. Or anything you can plausibly do best on
| Haiku?
| unixhero wrote:
| It's just a fun OS
| waddlesplash wrote:
| It's an alternative to the fragmented state of the "Linux
| desktop": instead of having dozens of separate projects (GNOME,
| PipeWire, systemd, Wayland, ...) be combined by yet another
| project (a distribution), which is (in my view) a major cause
| of the fragile nature, slow pace of development (it's hard to
| request features if you have to spend minutes to hours figuring
| out where they need to be requested from!), and other problems
| it faces, Haiku is a one-project-governs-all: a single
| development team for the core operating system and userspace
| ("desktop environment"), with an interconnected distribution
| ecosystem.
|
| We can merge a change to Haiku's kernel and drivers, and test
| builds will be available with it on the "nightly" channel
| within hours. We can issue a patch for the system C library
| headers, trigger rebuilds of packages from the ports tree
| against it as soon as CI builds finish. We can send users
| experimental builds of work-in-progress features for testing,
| with very little technical know-how required to install such a
| patch or revert to the previous version if it breaks something.
|
| There are so many huge advantages Haiku has due to how the
| project is structured that the "Linux desktop", whatever
| upsides it does possess, basically cannot ever have by its very
| nature.
| guenthert wrote:
| > instead of having dozens of separate projects (GNOME,
| PipeWire, systemd, Wayland, ...) be combined by yet another
| project (a distribution), which is (in my view) a major cause
| of the fragile nature, slow pace of development (it's hard to
| request features if you have to spend minutes to hours
| figuring out where they need to be requested from!), and
| other problems it faces, Haiku is a one-project-governs-all:
| a single development team for the core operating system and
| userspace ("desktop environment"), with an interconnected
| distribution ecosystem.
|
| So there will never be 3rd party software? Not even a GNU
| Emacs? Surely you're using GNU GCC, aren't you?
| nix23 wrote:
| Have your read the release-notes? Hint emacs. It's about
| the coresystems (network, graphic, sound, storage), the bsd
| systems do that (partially) so is windows and macos.
| guenthert wrote:
| What I tried to convey is that this is an arbitrary line
| to draw. What difference does it make to an user whether
| graphic and network bugs can be reported to the same
| organisation, but bugs in the IDE (I'm thinking of
| IntelliJ here, not Emacs) go somewhere else vs. all bugs
| go to their respective software package's bug tracker?
|
| There was a time when DEC or IBM could act as a single
| point of contact for all your software needs, but we live
| in a much more diverse world now and the all-inclusive
| software offering / SPOC is just not a realistic or
| (IMHO) desirable target anymore.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Mostly for fun. Something kinda helped by that Haiku retains
| some interesting concepts (e.g. built to have small footprint,
| written in C++, object-oriented and concept-oriented API,
| database-like filesystem, replicants, standard scripting
| mechanism, ...) and being enough different from other Unix-like
| systems.
| donatj wrote:
| As a BeOS users in the late 90's / early 2000's - the fact that
| Haiku is still going twenty years since its first inception is
| just incredible to me.
|
| I am continually amazed at how much progress the project
| continues to garner. It really proves there was something magical
| to BeOS.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| It's not just that there was something magical to BeOS, there's
| still something magical to Haiku, especially in the era of the
| "Linux desktop" with its free-for-all fractured ecosystem
| approach to desktop environments. We aren't working on Haiku
| just because it reminds us of the past, but because we think it
| could be the future, too.
| hankman86 wrote:
| This deserves to be expanded on: I very much see the need for
| innovation in OS research. But I just don't see anything in
| BeOS/Haiku that would address any of the big challenges for
| operating systems. Which in my mind include the following:
|
| Can we get away from the "leaky bucket" security paradigm
| where despite all of the best efforts and gradual
| improvements, prevalent operating systems "keep on giving" in
| terms of exploits that are discovered all the time. Is there
| something akin to what Rust is for programming languages?
|
| Or what about an operating system for AIs? Is the current
| stack of Linux, GPU drivers, and some ML SDK on top an
| adequate answer for emerging AI applications?
|
| Or if you still believe in Blockchain applications, what
| about a native OS for that?
|
| And the list goes on.
|
| All I see in Haiku/BeOS is a pretty, albeit dated user
| interface. Someone educate me what else they bring to the
| table.
| [deleted]
| christophilus wrote:
| It screams on super underpowered hardware. That's a nice
| benefit over just about any modern OS.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| Forgive me but as I can appreciate the effort put into Haiku
| and working on a single user targeted OS, I still can't get
| why the people behind it like to throw darts to Linux from
| time to time. That "era of the Linux desktop" phrase is
| something even we Linux desktop users themselves will laugh
| at, as there is not such thing.
|
| Praising the positives of your work at the expense of the
| criticism of other's work won't do you any favours.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| I think you are reading a little too much into it. Linux
| people throw darts at Haiku ("why would you ever use this
| and not Linux?" etc.) so it seems only fair we throw a few
| back. Many of us have desktop Linux installs, and some of
| us even have patches (or even have contributed significant
| amounts of work) in various Linux ecosystem projects.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| > "why would you ever use this and not Linux?"
|
| That seems to be a legitimate question, not a dart nor a
| criticism by any means.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| Sometimes it is, and you can see elsewhere I've given
| real answers to that question.
|
| But sometimes my criticisms of Linux are because, well,
| they are a real and genuine motivation for why I gave up
| on desktop Linux and devoted even more time to Haiku.
| It's not as if my criticisms are anything new, there's
| pages upon pages where Linux users and developers say
| similar things. I "throw such darts" here to make it
| clear how Haiku stands in contrast.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Isn't adding X11 and Wayland and Wine getting you the same
| free-for-all toolkit and app mix in the end?
| waddlesplash wrote:
| Free-for-all in terms of toolkit and application mix, yes,
| but that's actually the "lesser" problem of the Linux
| desktop. Ideally we would have all-native applications, but
| not even macOS can really manage that.
|
| The X11 and Wayland compatibility layers are very different
| than XQuartz macOS or the Wayland-based WSL GUI are, they
| are much more tightly integrated into Haiku. While you are
| still going to notice some seams here and there, overall
| the experience is much more like a "full port" than most
| other OSes have on this point.
|
| More to the point, all ported applications are still
| running on top of Haiku's kernel, Haiku's window manager /
| display server, Haiku's media services, Haiku's init
| system, Haiku's package manager, etc. On Linux, all those
| things come from separate projects, and some of them can
| even be swapped out within a Linux distribution, never mind
| between distributions. Not so on Haiku.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Many of the apps are designed to the conventions of the
| various desktop environments on Linux (or Windows, in
| case of Wine), and feel most at home in one of them.
| Without additional effort to e.g. implement D-Bus and XDG
| portals, having a Qt or GTK app run will mean those apps
| open File Open/Save dialogs that are not the native Haiku
| ones. In the end it will be a fractured feel as well.
|
| I hear what you're saying and I do understand the point
| you're trying to make. However, I think it's interesting
| to point out just how app-centric systems have become,
| with many apps even shipping essentially their own unique
| HIG and look and feel.
|
| If you look at Haiku's competitors, 10 years ago they
| were all much more editorialized with a strong sense of
| what a proper, native app for them should look like. And
| despite all having more such native apps than Haiku has
| now, the trends have - at least for the time being -
| pulled away from that. If Haiku gets more popular it'll
| similarly become subject to simply running the most
| popular software.
| rayiner wrote:
| That's a good observation. In many ways your approach is
| like Carbon on MacOS, or the bajillion UI toolkits that
| exist on top of the same display driver, clipboard, etc.,
| infrastructure in Windows.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I've spoken to some of the developers. There's a community of
| admiration and integrity that is really solid. You get the
| strong feeling that they enjoy each other and that's what
| drives them. It was obvious to me why it was still going after
| talking to a few people.
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