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BeOS Successor Haiku Keeps the Faith
kokito writes "OSNews managing editor Thom Holwerda reviews Haiku, the open source successor of the Be operating system. According to the review, Haiku faithfully/successfully replicates the BeOS user experience and 'personality,' boasting very short boot times, the same recognizable but modernized GUI using antialiasing for fonts and all vector graphics as well as vector icons, a file system with support for metadata-based queries (OpenBFS) and support for the BeAPI, considered by some the cleanest programming API ever. The project has also recently released a native GCC 4.3.3 tool chain, clearing the way for bringing up-to-date ports of multi-platform apps such as Firefox and VLC, and making it easier to work on Haiku ports in general." (More below.)
"In spite of its pre-alpha status, Haiku seems to be pretty stable. If you would like to give it a try, nightly builds are available from the Haiku Files website, both as raw HDD and VMWare images. Or if you happen to be in the Los Angeles area, you could also take a peek at a Haiku demo during the upcoming Southern California Linux Expo (Feb. 21 & 22), where Haiku will be exhibiting in booth #4."
No, having different OSs isn't about beating Microsoft.
Have some imagination, please.
What's the point of fighting one monoculture with another?
Microsoft's junk wouldn't be so bad if it didn't completely dominate the world. If it had some competition, it might make an effort to interoperate, making everyone's life easier.
Diversity stimulates research, growth, health and progress. Can we please put this "Linux/The Open Source Community needs to unite to beat Microsoft" meme to sleep. It's totally false and unhelpful.
Stick Men
For a site supposedly traditionally supportive of alternative platforms, in practice there's a surprising amount of contempt for any alternative platform that doesn't fall into the cool club of Linux and OS X. I'm not a Haiku user, but if someone is writing an open source OS, good luck to them. Or maybe we should give up, and ridicule anyone who doesn't use Windows?
(I see this with other things - e.g., Internet Explorer is bad, Firefox is good ... but Opera for some reason is also bad. The usual argument of it not being open source doesn't even apply to Haiku, though. By that reasoning, we should be praising Haiku, and criticising OS X!)
Is anyone who starts an open source project flogging a "deadhorse", unless they're already mainstream? What a depressing attitude.
"Deadhorse" doesn't make sense anyway - according to Wikipedia, Haiku is a relatively new OS, only having received significant development in the last few years. Oh, it's a dead horse because it maintains some compatibility with BeOS? Big deal - by that reasoning, we should tag every OS X article "deadhorse", on the grounds that it shares its trademark name with a long dead twenty five year old OS that was never even particularly good at the time.
Not every OS developer has "defeat microsoft" as a goal.
and why it was chosen instead of BeOS.
Moreover, Mac OS X runs nicely on multi-processor machines (Be's major claim to fame).
I'd rather see effort like this poured into GNUstep....
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
It's Haiku, not BeOS. And I wasn't aware there was a limit to the number of operating systems allowed to exist. Is there a limit for any kind of software, or just operating systems?
You know, where Brian tries to separate the People's Front of Judea and the Campaign to Free Galilee.
Except there they had a common cause. In the market, we have this thing known as competition.
We already have several OS alternatives out there, Mac, Linux, BSD. Why throw another in the mix which will never be supported mainstream?
Well, why bother with Mac, Linux or BSD then? Surely, it would be better if everyone just used Windows, right?
I actually went to Haiku's site and poked around a little bit. Aside from the very 90's looking screen shots of a couple of apps - mail, contacts, media prefs., what is actually available to run under Haiku?
The apps are what make an OS usable, really. The OS itself should just get out of the way and let the (hopefully) plethora of apps do their job.
There is an exisiting FF port, 2.1 I think.
modernized GUI using antialiasing for fonts and all vector graphics as well as vector icons
It's great that BeOS is still alive in some form, as it is obviously a great project. But really, don't boast with this sort of stuff anymore. It's 2009. Antialiasing fonts and vector icons might have been impressive in 1996, but now every actively maintained GUI features this.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
As much hype as people wants to put in beos, the fact is that beos is...
-Incomplete, beos always missed important pieces (a reason why its so fast and slim: theres not much to load)
-Some parts have become old. For example, as great as the graphic subsystem was at its time, these days its old compared to the modern 3d-accelerated desktops. Even X.org is better than beos in this field these days.
-Some of the advantages are useless. Why do I care about installing a driver by dragging and dropping files? The desktop systems that really care about users do not need to do anything to get the hardware working, they automate the process as much as possible and do not require doing anything. Installing a driver in Windows is most of the times automatic, and there are rare exceptions where you have to insert a CD when you are asked to do it.
Any modern Linux distro is so much better than beos....
We need to unite against Microsoft, the dominant power.
No, we don't have to do any such thing. Why is it that just because someone develops an alternate OS that it has to be used as a tool to fight against Microsoft? Not everyone who doesn't use Windows is doing so because they are trying to fight against Microsoft. This always comes up whenever someone mentions the many distros of Linux that everyone should unite cause we are supposed to be waging some "epic" battle against Microsoft, but many of us just don't give a shit about your stupid "war". Take your stupid battles somewhere else and leave the rest of us out of it so we can get on with coding.
We need to unite against Microsoft, the dominant power.
I don't really get that kind of thinking. First of all, it's just an operating system, not a war. I dislike Microsoft's business practices as much as the next person, but I'm not going to "unite" against a software company. I use Linux (Slackware, to be specific), but I use it because I like it, not because I want to "fight" Microsoft. I like tinkering and free software allows me to do just that. Even my (Microsoft) Xbox is running XBMC and I couldn't be happier with it.
.iso available yet, or else I'd be giving it a spin right now. If it works and people like to use it, what does it really matter to you?
I'm a little disappointed that this Haiku doesn't have an
I have actually used BeOS a lot, mostly for composing. I have experienced the highest level of responsiveness from an OS with BeOS - this is still unsurpassed. When I talk about responsiveness, I specifically mean it from the point of view of the user. Applications that play some kind of media (be it MIDI, audio or video of any kind) will never, under any circumstance, be interrupted by any other process. If you copy a file while playing a video, it will not skip. The file may not copy as fast at times, or other processes may slow down, but the video will not skip. In addition to this, the user commands, be it with the mouse or with the keyboard, are always taken into consideration. No "hourglass" or other bullshit. I don't know how BeOS was engineered to achieve this, I only know that no other OS I used during and since then, achieved this sort of responsiveness.
I've used Linux a lot, and am definitely a fan of some distros, and I also like OS X quite a bit, but neither are 100% "committed" to my whim. With BeOS, what I want is listened to and executed, and fuck everything else. I guess this means BeOS would be a terrible server OS - but very often I miss exactly this kind of behaviour.
If Haiku manages to achieve the same characteristics, it will be for me, the best desktop operating system in the world. I specifically look for support of modern CPUs, chipsets, graphics cards and soundcards. Perhaps not all of them, or even not most of them, but the ones that will be supported will appear in my house.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Your rant is nice and fine and all but it was Linux not BeOS that had the first 3D video drivers.
iPod is not the only game in town. If you choose to act that way, then your actions have unintended consequences.
This is why we are speaking of BeOS as resurrected abandonware.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I did the same thing with Linux on a 100Mhz 486 with 32M RAM. Not only
was I playing back the mp3's but I was ripping them and converting them
at the same time. Netscape and Star Office were still perfectly usable
on top of that and my music didn't miss a beat.
I don't believe this for a second. Star Office, Netscape, and X itself were all performance-killers on 486s. No way you were playing MP3s and encoding them at the same time.
I'm not sure why you feel the need to lie, but it certainly doesn't make Linux look better.
Oh, and my Linux experience back then wasn't nearly as good as yours--it would skip when I sent or received an IM, saved any kind of document, when browsed to a new web page, or when it decided it needed to do some kind of housekeeping thing in the background. Not every time, but fairly often. It was better than Windows (which basically couldn't be used for anything else if you wanted to hear your music at all) but BeOS was still superior. I wasn't using super-light distros, though, so it may have been that (mostly Debian and Mandrake)
You wouldn't know that from reading Slashdot, though.
Would that be the same Slashdot where we're having a lively (and so far, very reasonable) discussion on the front page about a non-Linux, non-MS OS?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
The philosophy of Linux (server) and Haiku (desktop) dictates different OS design and application. Linux seems kinda shoehorned into the desktop mold, it works but there are things that don't quite fit. Haiku isn't a server OS, it aims for the multimedia desktop. They compliment and work with each other.
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
Who really wants a fair scheduler for a desktop OS? Most desktop users want the scheduler to respond to THEIR wishes at any given time.
Fast boot times are fine if you have a home PC however differences of one to two minutes don't mean all that much in the server market where reliability and uptime are much more important.
I use Fedora 10 on my laptop and boot times are in the order of one minute and login to the KDE or Gnome session managers takes approx 30 seconds (login via command line takes about two seconds). The thing is I rarely log out, switch the machine off or even reboot unless I get a new kernel. Once I have logged in access time via a locked screen is two or three seconds. This equally applies to any member of my family where we have separate accounts but can switch between those accounts rapidly.
Yes having a fast boot time gives a certain flag waving right however you have to take everything in content and at the moment this "new" OS has a long way to go since it has to get a lot of community of support before it could be considered mainstream. This is not to say that no one will support this, personally I think there will be many who will and IMHO that is a good thing.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
links will be ported
but without graphics you face
a life without porn
It supports multiple users in the same way that the Model T came in multiple colors: "You can have any color you want, as long as it's black." With Be/Haiku you can have as many users as you like, as long as each one is root.
Protect your browser with the Force Safe Search add-on
Getting even modern Haiku developers to grasp that these APIs are nasty is essentially impossible. I think it's the regularity of the naming. BWindow, BMessage, BThis, BThat it seems to numb the brain. When you have some simple problem and the only solution they can find is to modify the entire OS, they don't recognise that it's an API problem.
It also turns out, unfortunately for them, that Be made some nasty mistakes they can't readily undo. Be's error codes (required in the C and C++ ABI) are upside down. That was forbidden by the time BeOS was available for x86 hardware (and it had been coming down the pipeline for a long time before that). But you'll still see Haiku fans demanding that people alter their perfectly good software to permit this craziness, or even trying to get the standards altered.
Here, here.
I love Linux and run in wherever possible, but even after years of experience I always feel that I don't really understand 80% of what's happening under the hood.
If it weren't for Ubuntu's terrific work streamlining and simplifying the OS, I would still be running Windows in my desktop and maybe text-mode Linux in a headless server doing simple tasks (it was the only way I was able to make some sense of Linux 10 years ago and keep it from becoming overwhelmingly complex).
I used to use BeOS back in the day, and even coded one or two applications for it which were hopelessly crappy, given it was when I was learning programming.
I could make sense of BeOS, it was just simple.
For example, the kernel was a small file somewhere and drivers were separate small files somewhere else. The kernel would monitor the driver directory and if you dropped there a new driver file, the kernel would check it to see if it matched your hardware, and if so, activate it.
Media support was enabled by using a centralized codec system. Kind of like Windows does for video (and audio?) codecs, or GStreamer in Gnome, except in BeOS the codecs spanned every kind of file format, from images to office suite documents.
The OS wasn't perfect, and it wasn't always easy to do some of the more complex stuff, but what worked, worked wonderfully.
In these days where browser-based applications are becoming more advanced, I can see Haiku becoming a serious option at least for leisure computing.
I sure as hell would love to be able to use Haiku on my netbook, and if it were up to me, I'd be concentrating my development efforts into making that possible. I really think that this might be the killer application for Haiku -- a light OS which has all the basic functionality you use on the go (web, media, documents, chat).
Unfortunately, I don't have the programming chops, the time or the motivation to contribute, so I'll just have to keep cheering from the sidelines (Go, guys!)