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After 8 Years of Work, Be-Alike Haiku Releases Official Alpha
NiteMair writes "The Haiku project has finally released an official R1 alpha, after 8 years of development. This marks a significant milestone for the project, and it also debuts the first official/publicly available LiveCD ISO image that can be easily booted and used to install Haiku on x86 hardware. Haiku is a desktop operating system inspired by BeOS after Be, Inc. closed its doors in 2001. The project has remained true to the BeOS philosophy while integrating modern hardware support and features along the way." Eugenia adds this link to an article describing the history of the OS, along with a review of the alpha version."
Operating Systems are not trivial and hardware support is a real pain. It takes years even for large communities to do this and even a community as big as Linux's doesn't always get it right, neither do some companies for that matter. They look as if they're a small team trying to do a great deal.
I remember using BeOS on an old Pentium 166MHz with little RAM and being able to play many songs, browse and play videos and the same time when Linux and Windows struggled to do any one of these on the machine.
Sure, most people won't be interested, but variety is the spice of life and if some of the good aspects of BeOS get adopting, it will be a good thing for everybody.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
Congratulations to the Haiku team. Back when Be closed its doors, I remember there were several projects to recreate the OS, but most people didn't expect any of them to succeed. This announcement proves that wrong. BeOS was a fantastic OS and with Haiku making strides toward a stable release, the legacy can live on. Although it's taken a while to get this far, writing a full operating system from scratch takes a long time. Even large companies with dedicated teams generally take 5+ years to build a new OS, so 8 years for a group of volunteers to release a working system is quite reasonable. Once again, congratulations and thanks for all the hard work you've put in over the years. Although only an alpha, this release is quite stable and usable. Your efforts have certainly not gone unnoticed.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
No one has really answered you so far, surprisingly. I don't really know BeOS internals, but having toyed around with it as an ex-Amiga user looking for a modern equivalent (like many others), I can give you the general idea.
Basically, it's this: unix sucks.
Lol, it's flippant, but for all the greatness of Unix and Linux, especially compared to Windows, there's a definite truth to this. The problem is that unix is a few simple (and strong) principles from the early 70s, upon which nearly decades of evolution have occured. The fact that this was even possible is a huge testament to the flexibility of those core principles. Nonetheless, most of the evolution since is essentially a big hackish attempt to keep Unix up to date. For instance, go to phoronix and search for graphics stack. You'll find a lot of discussion about Xorg, the Linux kernel, graphics drivers, GPUs, libraries, the linux console, and how none of them are really consistent or integrated, and the problems that result. Moreover, Unix was originally designed for many users sharing a huge, expensive computer. It's not really designed for personal computers at all. Arguably, this distinction isn't so relevant these days.
BeOS, on the other hand though, is an attempt to make a modern, coherent, friendly, desktop operating system for personal computers. It's designed to be quick, to have a logical stack of libraries that cooperate (such as for audio and graphics, again, unlike Linux's audio/graphics stack).
Essentially, the point is just to build a modern system, and dump all the old, legacy cruft that just gets in the way. It's an attempt to draw a line under the past, and say, "OK, that's the old way. From now on, programs should use this stuff instead, so everything looks good and runs well, and integrates nicely."
So, a unix-like kernel with a pretty window manager is modern?
Damn. That's some strong kool-aid.
Apple did learn; they have their own retail stores. They don't rely on companies that make most of their money selling MS products and MS-related products for their business. Microsoft can't offer the Apple Store a discount on Windows if they don't sell OS X.
Be failed because it messed its customers around. Their first releases were for PowerPC and ran on Macs and their own hardware. Then they added support for x86, and didn't provide cross-compiler toolchains, so most third-party apps became x86-only and the people on PowerPC were left in the cold. Then they announced that they were going to switch focus to BeIA, and frightened third-party commercial developers away from BeOS. Then they turned down Apple's offer, demanding ten times what Apple was willing to pay, and eventually had to sell to Palm for around 20% of Apple's offer. Plam did very well out of the deal, paying $11m for the company and then getting $23m from Microsoft in settlement of the suit over anticompetitive practices.
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