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Haiku's Window Manager
Professor Cool Linux writes "From IsComputerOn: Adi, over at DarkWyrm's page, has posted a progress status of Haiku's window manager, and the good news is that it's almost complete. They have, for example, support for normal, floating app/subset/all and model app/subset/all windows, as well as workspace support. All that's left are smaller things like not allowing windows to be moved or resized and focus follow mouse (among a few others) remain to be implemented still. But along with the status report, Adi was kind enough to post a plethora of screenshots, showing many examples of how the window manager is working. Full report and the screenshots."
I played with BeOS in 99. Admittedly not extensively. But I did give the free edition a whirl. Sure there was cool stuff there to see, but your assumption that I never actually used it is pretty arrogant, don't you think?
I was rooting for Be back in the day, too. I thought the BeBox was one amazingly cool little machine. And if the management at Be hadn't been so borish, they might have been bought out by Apple in the end. Too bad they didn't take the deal that was offered them at the time.
The whole point is, both in my dissing Haiku and in the Be fanboy's dream world, we're always talking in hypotheticals. What if things turned out differently, etc. Or, to quote you "One day ... there will be a fully open source BeOS. That's when it gets really interesting."
"The real value of this post is showing how far the haiku project has come" What you left out was "...in recreating a 5 year old OS in a world where desktop technology has come a long long way in the meantime." Again, where are the Expose/Kompose features? You sneer at drop shadows, but they're more than just eye candy. They help the user determine which windows are on top of which others.
Things like this really do great on my nerves. People really should wake up and smell reality. Even if Zeta/Haiku turns into a usable OS, where's the support? Software? Will my obscure PCI cards work? I'd only ever play with Haiku on a spare box made of odds and ends anyway. Precisely the sort of things that won't be supported. Sadly, isn't it?
Sure, you can point to this or that piece of software that's available, but what's missing is choice. It's not enough for me that Mozilla might exist for a platform, I want Opera, and a KHTML-based browser. Call me picky or even scatterbrained but I like to use one app one day and another the next. I might use Mail.app today and Thunderbird or Evolution tomorrow. This sort of variety is completely lacking in Be.
If you want to spend your time with one of the efforts to ressurrect Be, I won't stop you, but don't claim that Haiku version 1.0 is genuine news that belongs on /.