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They do have software....
https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/...

Haiku's support of Nvidia cards is rudimentary (no graphics acceleration) and begins at NV4. However, I'm sure Riva 128 can do standard VESA graphics, so it should work fine. Bioforge requires no hardware accelerated graphics, so VESA isn't a problem.

Soundblaster 16 is supported.

But for realz, if you want to play Bioforge, you should just run it using DOSBox.

It's open source and thus, by definition, supports whatever you want it to. Same thing we said when Linux came out.

https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/...

Looks like anything FreeBSD can do, Haiku can, with a little tweaking. So if your hw has FreeBSD drivers, you can mod them to Haiku. Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty, it's really no worse than writing mods for Minecraft.

Haiku has had Stack and Tile for nearly a decade now.

Yes BSD and Haiku https://www.haiku-os.org/ are looking great.

Or BSD?
Or Haiku Project https://www.haiku-os.org/

1+ for https://www.haiku-os.org/ for an OS and file system thats not MS.

Format drive and install one of the following operating systems:

• BeOS
• Syllable
• AROS
• Plan 9
• Minix
• FreeDOS
• DR-DOS
• OpenVMS x86 port is coming!
• Visopsys
• SqueakNOS
• Haiku
• Kolibri
• ReactOS
• Tizen
• SkyOS
• MorphOS
• MenuetOS
• CP/M 86
• Multics, also see Multicians
• Erlang as an Operating System

There have been a large number of more or less obscure operating systems and not all have been ported to x86. Unfortunately the architecture has become a de facto standard even though it's not the best architecture or the most efficient but instead a patchwork of solutions to retain backwards compatibility. We have lost many interesting architectures over the years that would have deserved a better fate to the Intel bandwagon.

If you need to transcribe the actual error details, accuracy matters.

Most humans are terrible at transcribing what they read directly to text (especially if it's full of numbers and symbols).

In the case of Haiku (the operating system), the QR Code in the kernel debugger includes more information about the error (not just the error name), so it makes it easier to transcribe what the user sees on the screen to text which can be used to file a bug report.

https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/...

Nothing as far as a distro (or desktop environment) with 3D VR or AI comes to mind but there is innovation in OS going on. Not many have attempted to answer the OP, so here's my list. Others mentioned Qubes, Urbit, and Mirage.io, which reminded me of Nix OS and HaLVM.

Both innovative and seems daily-driver ready:
1. Qubes OS - https://www.qubes-os.org/ - Linux distro that runs a Xen hypervisor to contain every app (including Windows ones) away from the desktop environment
2. Haiku OS - https://www.haiku-os.org/ - Tiny (under 200MB installed), Non-Linux that is binary-compatible with BeOS, nice understated GUI that is bland but usable
3. ReactOS - http://reactos.org/ - Win32 compatible open source OS, very active development scene working toward full NT kernel ABI compatibility. Seems stable enough to be a daily driver but hardware support is lacking
4. PC-BSD & freeBSD 10 - http://www.pcbsd.org/ http://www.freebsd.org/ - PC-BSD is a desktop distro of freeBSD 10 built for user-friendliness with automatic ZFS snapshoting and a nice graphical package manager, freeBSD 10 has a completely new package manager (pkg-ng replaces the 'pkg' binary)
5. Nix OS - https://nixos.org/ - Linux distro with innovative package manager promising atomic upgrades & rollback.

Innovative server-exclusive (ie no GUI):
5. SmartOS - https://smartos.org/ - Solaris + KVM + Docker w/ full Dtrace support. Claims ZFS as an innovation? Joyent is running a cloud of it
6. CoreOS - https://coreos.com/ - Linux distro exclusively for large Docker deployments. developing a suite of Go tools for datacenter management.

Innovative, but not ready for desktop use:
7. Redox OS - http://www.redox-os.org/ - OS written in Rust (rust-lang), which guarantees a lot of memory-safety, screenshots of desktop in 'News' section
8. Contiki OS - http://www.contiki-os.org/ - Linux distro for IoT embedded devices that claims an innovative network stack
9. Urbit - http://urbit.org/docs/user/int... - *nix distro with exclusively web-based userland, invite-only at the moment, doesn't seem like it will have a UI but that each user is the dev of their own interface
10. Mirage.io - http://mirage.io/ - Develop each app and compile into a single-purpose kernel to be run on some hypervisor
11. HaLVM - https://github.com/GaloisInc/H... - The Haskell Ligthweight Virtual Machine - which runs just the GHC on Xen, another 'build uni-purpose VMs' system

Is Edge going to be portable to non Windows operating systems like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS X, HP-UX, OpenServer X, Haiku OS, AIX, Android and Firefox OS?

You must feel so smart listing all those UNIX operating systems. You know so many!

Is Edge going to be portable to non Windows operating systems like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS X, HP-UX, OpenServer X, Haiku OS, AIX, Android and Firefox OS?

The irony is that BeOS was designed specifically to take advantage of modern computer hardware of the day and cared nothing for binary compatibility with other OSes, and today Haiku is clinging to an ancient compiler and a dead x86 architecture... in the name of compatibility with BeOS apps, no less. BeOS itself moved from Hobbit to PowerPC to Intel x86 with little care for compatibility.

What made BeOS exciting 20 years ago was it promised to give users better multimedia support and responsiveness. Other OSes have caught up with the innovations and surpassed them. (Multithreading, multiprocessing, multitasking, journaling file systems, etc.) Some users liked the GUI and lauded it as a clean and a great interface. I hated the yellow tabs. Still, that's just personal preference -- Mac OS X has a clean and polished interface that suits that purpose today. In fact, the death knell of BeOS was when Apple declined to purchase BeOS and bought NeXTSTEP instead... because it was superior and led to today's OS X.

Point being that BeOS offered new, cutting edge features and better functionality on the same hardware than other OSes at the time. It seems that Haiku is the last of the BeOS clones and it's not progressing at a rate that will ever offer users significant benefits over modern OSes today.

What does Haiku have to offer? I mean - when it's finally released in a few decades or centuries at this rate and our ancestors get to enjoy it on their x86 or even AMD64 emulators?

There's a nice bit of fluff at : https://www.haiku-os.org/about , but that doesn't really answer the question. The key strength compared to Linux seems to be that a single team is developing and integrating everything with a common goal. Why couldn't that same team (or one as dedicated) simply fork a Linux distribution and all software it uses to customize and integrate towards the same common goal?

Seems a waste to re-invent the wheel creating new drivers and struggling to build on the Haiku platform for backwards compatibility without any clear, solid, user-recognizable benefit.

I get that it's interesting as a project and great practice for coders, and I truly wish Haiku well in its continued development... I just don't see the point if the development will never release outside of Beta with support for modern hardware. If Linux still struggles to get decent drivers, I can't imagine Haiku ever getting proper support.

Haiku seems like another stagnant AmigaOS, Syllable Desktop, or other relic. ReactOS at least has some benefit to Linux and potentially former Windows users by furthering WINE development even if it never makes it out of alpha (going on 17 years now btw.)

I'm not encouraged when I see "x86 GCC 2".

x86?! Jesus Christ, that platform was obsolete back in 2005! We've had x86-64 for well over a decade now, and it has been the standard even for shitty consumer-grade hardware for just about as long.

GCC 2?! That's even worse than x86! My God, the latest release of GCC 2 was on March 16, 2001! GCC 2.0 was first released on February 22, 1992! Even GCC 3, which has long been considered obsolete, saw its latest release almost a decade ago, on March 06, 2006. GCC 5 was released earlier this year.

I know you'll give "compatibility" as the justification for why it's still targeting a long-obsolete platform, and using a long-obsolete compiler system. But that's just a failed excuse at this point.

If Haiku is to be a relevant operating system in 2015, then it needs to get its shit together. It needs to target the CPU architecture that has been in use for the past decade. It needs to use a compiler system released this century. This "x86 GCC 2" bullshit needs to end. We need to see "x86-64 GCC 5" or even "x86-64 LLVM/Clang".

Well, fine, take the 4.4 version: http://download.haiku-os.org/n... or the 64-bit 4.4 version: http://download.haiku-os.org/n... They just won't be able to run BeOS binaries, as the ABI changed from gcc 2 to gcc 4. I'm sure 5.0 binaries will come eventually, but gcc 5 is relatively new, so it will take some time, as new gcc releases have and cause tons of bugs.

I'm not encouraged when I see "x86 GCC 2".

x86?! Jesus Christ, that platform was obsolete back in 2005! We've had x86-64 for well over a decade now, and it has been the standard even for shitty consumer-grade hardware for just about as long.

GCC 2?! That's even worse than x86! My God, the latest release of GCC 2 was on March 16, 2001! GCC 2.0 was first released on February 22, 1992! Even GCC 3, which has long been considered obsolete, saw its latest release almost a decade ago, on March 06, 2006. GCC 5 was released earlier this year.

I know you'll give "compatibility" as the justification for why it's still targeting a long-obsolete platform, and using a long-obsolete compiler system. But that's just a failed excuse at this point.

If Haiku is to be a relevant operating system in 2015, then it needs to get its shit together. It needs to target the CPU architecture that has been in use for the past decade. It needs to use a compiler system released this century. This "x86 GCC 2" bullshit needs to end. We need to see "x86-64 GCC 5" or even "x86-64 LLVM/Clang".

Well, fine, take the 4.4 version: http://download.haiku-os.org/n... or the 64-bit 4.4 version: http://download.haiku-os.org/n... They just won't be able to run BeOS binaries, as the ABI changed from gcc 2 to gcc 4. I'm sure 5.0 binaries will come eventually, but gcc 5 is relatively new, so it will take some time, as new gcc releases have and cause tons of bugs.

Sounds like an older build.. download the Anyboot image: http://download.haiku-os.org/n...

Where is BeOS now?

Check this out:
http://haiku-os.org/

Progress is very slow, but it's still going. Don't bother with the Alpha 4 download, try one of the nightly snapshots instead.

The Haiku OS has had a great vector icon format for a long time. https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/...

And this is the fundamental point of the BSD license. It's not an unknown fact that early versions of Windows used BSD networking code. Nor is an unknown fact that FreeBSD is used as the basis of the PS3 and PS4 OSes. Neither of the companies (to my knowledge) contributed code back, but that doesn't mean what they did with that code wasn't a great thing. BSD licensing might be open to "exploitation" by commercial companies, but the fact that it exists at all gives commercial companies an easy stepping stone into building an in-house OS on top of it, without all the legal hoo-ha when using Linux. In fact, i'm genuinely suprised someone like Google hasn't redistributed Haiku as a commercial operating system given its liberal licensing.

Your idea was "stolen" nearly 2 years ago mate.

Linux was beaten as the first by a long shot. Haiku has had this for 1 3/4 years.

Why not bring back BeOS?

Because nobody ever used BeOS. Not that it wasn't a nice system, it was just that nobody ever used it.

Why not bring back BeOS?

FreeBSD probably isn't useful to you every day. Maybe some of your net traffic will go through a FreeBSD box, but that box could be replaced by just about anything really. However, I'm not trying to say that FreeBSD is useless or irrelevant - what I want to say is that FreeBSD has some excellent out-of-band uses.

I think people should consider the value of the educational, developmental, experimental and competitive opportunities that FreeBSD provides. We need projects and communities which have low hanging fruit for beginners and we need projects that are ready to give different approaches to problems a go - so that the rest of us on whatever OS can learn from it regardless of the success of the implementation.

The same goes for my favourite alternative OS - Haiku which also contains some bits and pieces from FreeBSD for networking/wireless IIRC. (BTW, it has package management now and a lot of improvements to the native browser, and more.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
"BeOS was optimized for digital media work and was written to take advantage of modern hardware facilities such as symmetric multiprocessing by utilizing modular I/O bandwidth, pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and a 64-bit journaling file system known as BFS. The BeOS GUI was developed on the principles of clarity and a clean, uncluttered design.

The API was written in C++ for ease of programming. It has partial POSIX compatibility and access to a command-line interface through Bash, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system."

There's a reimplementation, Haiku
https://www.haiku-os.org/

Was?

http://haiku-os.org/

On top of using the archaic and slow Mach and having failed on attempts to move past that, HURD's an hybrid system, not a pure microkernel system. They're running their drivers in kernelspace.

Ironically, there's a free hybrid system much younger than the HURD which already has USB and AHCI: https://www.haiku-os.org/

To get a feel of how nasty Mach is, I recommend grabbing the slides from this talk:
https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/event/microkernel_overhead.html

Here's three actually free interesting microkernel and multiserver systems with a pure microkernel architecture (drivers are isolated) which are actively developed and have reached major milestones recently:
Genode: http://genode.org/
HelenOS: http://www.helenos.org/
Minix3: http://www.minix3.org/

Any of them three is more interesting than the HURD. Moreover, they mostly have support for AHCI and USB and run on more than just 32bit x86.

I'm guessing the exodus of users scared the hell out of them. What's the point of a "superior" desktop experience that nobody will use?

Europe's biggest claim to Linux is Linus Torvalds being a Finn, but he has moved to California in ~1996, and is now a US citizen. (I too am a naturalized US citizen, having been born in the USSR.)

The history of UNIX is rooted in AT&T research, and later corporate America, and simultaneously Berkeley, MIT (and I don't just mean that silly GNU hippie), and many other US universities. Top contributors to Linux are American corps! Many contributions also came from English-speaking countries that are culturally closer to US than the US-bashing continental Europeans. Open source projects get contributions from all over the world, but you'll find very few important FLOSS projects where European contributors dominate over North American ones.

So, if you want to make it a contest...

North America has Microsoft (still 83% of Web clients), oldest and most popular UNIXen (BSD's, MacOS X, Oracle's sunset, RedHat, etc), Commodore / AmigaOS, EMC / VMware, BeOS / Haiku, Plan9 from New Jersey, old IBM / HP / DR / Honeywell / Apple / Novell OS'es, etc, etc, etc.

Europe has Nokia, Amoeba, a few obscure UNIX-like systems (MINIX, my dear native U-NAS (Soviet BSD fork), etc), and of course Atari. (Did SAP or Ericsson ever make any noteworthy OS'es? Did I miss anything?)

The contrast is obvious.

The point is that USA (and other national champions of Economic Freedom, most of which speak English and are merely small satellites [topic.ref.pun] orbiting around USA) presently constitute the world's leading civilization, and the bulk of Europe is secondary in its aggregate merit, benefiting from diffusional ("trickle down") benefits of USA's achievements. There's nothing wrong with that, and USA has always acted benevolently toward the Europeans, but when you engage in America-bashing you are in contradiction of solid inescapable facts.

--libman

I adored BeOS back in the day. Although I've long since taken refuge with Mac OS X, I'd love to build a box specifically to run Haiku on native hardware. While Haiku is usable in a VM, it loses the snappiness that only bare metal can bring.

I'd love to relegate my Mac for work-only, and build a Haiku box for fun/the rest of life/as a hobby/to hack on/to help the Haiku Project. There's more than enough software out there to get by on, and new stuff hits all the time. I'm just sick of being stuck in a VM!

I wish I could confidently go and buy a motherboard, a CPU and RAM, a graphics card, put it together, and know Haiku will work with them. I don't mind what, I'm happy to build from scratch, but the Haiku Project is totally vague about what hardware works. It's taken a third-party - Haikuware - to put together a hardware database, but it's an out-of-date mess and wildly inaccurate (so many video cards are listed as supported, until you dive a little deeper and see they're all just VESA. That's not really 'support').

So, yes, I wish I could build a Haiku box and know it would work. Otherwise, I love the project and how far it's come!

I adored BeOS back in the day. Although I've long since taken refuge with Mac OS X, I'd love to build a box specifically to run Haiku on native hardware. While Haiku is usable in a VM, it loses the snappiness that only bare metal can bring.

I'd love to relegate my Mac for work-only, and build a Haiku box for fun/the rest of life/as a hobby/to hack on/to help the Haiku Project. There's more than enough software out there to get by on, and new stuff hits all the time. I'm just sick of being stuck in a VM!

I wish I could confidently go and buy a motherboard, a CPU and RAM, a graphics card, put it together, and know Haiku will work with them. I don't mind what, I'm happy to build from scratch, but the Haiku Project is totally vague about what hardware works. It's taken a third-party - Haikuware - to put together a hardware database, but it's an out-of-date mess and wildly inaccurate (so many video cards are listed as supported, until you dive a little deeper and see they're all just VESA. That's not really 'support').

So, yes, I wish I could build a Haiku box and know it would work. Otherwise, I love the project and how far it's come!

Don't forget that Haiku/BeOS are *single user* operating systems. There are no file permissions.

That all by itself makes it a joke, honestly.

It does have file permissions, and there are utilities to set them. My understanding is that it is single user in the way the original Windows was, i.e. one user logged on at a time and all processes running as either user or system. However if a different user logs on you can protect files from them.

Disclaimer: my understanding may be wrong, it comes from a brief look at BeOs some years back.

Have you tried HaikuOS by any chance? BeOS reborn.

And continues as Haiku.

http://haiku-os.org/

I don't use a splash screen, but my own project - OpalCalc - takes about 700ms to open (used to be over a second), and while this sounds minuscule and hardly anyone complains, it does feel 'awkward' to open compared to say notepad, or the standard Windows calculator when you want to do a quick calc. (Getting the load time under 300ms soon though I hope).

Somewhat related, a while back, I wrote an article about latency in desktop apps (as well as the OS's GUI generally). Here are some quick stats for Ubuntu 10.10 versus Windows 7:
http://www.skytopia.com/project/articles/lag/latency.html#desktop

Haiku is very good in this regard.

However, don't forget the downside of this system - software updates are a pain with each vendor adding their own software update daemon that nags you about updates. Or (for better or worse) no update system at all.

Very true... In principle, this is something that Windows Update should take over, but it'd take some time for the community to fully get behind that.

Tied to this is simply the way in which the directory structure is set up and files are organized. I found this blog post interesting reading, and like the sound of how gobo-linux does things.

Wouldn't a Haiku user be running Haiku?

It is being ported, but :

"There are still some hangups to getting the first bootstrap build
going. It would be really helpful if someone could figure out the
issues between haiku and gcc such that gcc could be built with the
java support, so we could use it for bootstrapping."

There's a Gnash port too, though personally I think they'd be better off focussing on a good HTML5 capable browser, Flash is a dead man walking.

There has been some ARM porting work done but as you say they are working with limited resources. I think if a company were to want to develop a new tablet OS from scratch, they could do worse than basing it on Haiku which is released under the very permissive MIT license. Hell, if Apple could cut OSX down to tablet size it could surely be done with the much leaner Haiku.

There is some support for skinning, as one of the devs explains here. But the whole project is very much focussed on getting the R1 done, which is as close to the original BeOS, which is an 90's OS even though it was ahead of its time in many ways, as they can get. There are discussions on where to after that in the glass elevator project though.

There is some support for skinning, as one of the devs explains here. But the whole project is very much focussed on getting the R1 done, which is as close to the original BeOS, which is an 90's OS even though it was ahead of its time in many ways, as they can get. There are discussions on where to after that in the glass elevator project though.

The Hurd has one thing going for it. It's [a] design [that] called for putting as much functionality as possible into client-server interfaces. This made it run horrifically slow. However, now that we're in the multicore era... It might actually be a path forward. Fortunately, BeOS went the same direction, and it's not quite dead yet.

Yeah. If only HURD could take advantage of those newfangled processor technologies like SMP...

The Hurd has one thing going for it. It's design called for putting as much functionality as possible into client-server interfaces. This made it run horrifically slow. However, now that we're in the multicore era... It might actually be a path forward. Fortunately, BeOS went the same direction, and it's not quite dead yet.

Hurd was a Victim of Good Enough.
Linux turned out to be good enough for most people. People want to be part of something important and want to matter so they tend to work on projects that are popular. Some of it is ego and some of it I fear is that people don't want to feel like they are wasting their effort.
There a lot of projects that really are very interesting that just don't get the publicity or help they need.
Like
The Haiku Project http://www.haiku-os.org/
Free VMS http://www.freevms.net/
AROS http://aros.sourceforge.net/
Dragonfly BSD http://www.dragonflybsd.org/
And Minix 3 http://www.minix3.org/
I really like the ideas behind Minix3 It could be a very interesting project if it gets enough support.

http://haiku-os.org/
https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku

http://haiku-os.org/
https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku

You should check out Haiku (the open source BeOS clone) they are pretty focused on multitasking and the playing multiple videos at once demo is part of their shtick.

Definitely! Drag and drop saving was fantastic. I brought it up over at the Haiku (BeOS Clone) forums suggestion box and there was some interesting discussion about it: http://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/very_overlooked_yet_powerful_usability_feature_drag_and_drop_file_saving

I also miss BBC Basic, great for children who want to start programming. With Windows there's nothing like that built in, asides from maybe Powershell but I've not tried it extensively.

How is that relevant? Nobody uses C++ for OS kernels.

That's not quite true. But close.

Gooooo Haiku Goooooo! http://haiku-os.org/