Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/haiku_beta_4/

by bitigchi • 4 years ago

112 38 4 years ago

theregister.com

kristopolous2• 4 years ago

The register once again does competent tech journalism.

lproven3• 4 years ago

[Author of the review here]

Gosh. Thank you.

(I mean, I hope that's not being sarcastic...?)

noisy_boy• 4 years ago

It probably can be used to save under-powered hardware from being discarded; one would think that for limited-scope usage (e.g. browsing/basic productivity etc), it should perform well.

adrianmsmith• 4 years ago

under-powered hardware ... one would think that for limited-scope usage (e.g. browsing ...), it should perform well.

Alas, I fear that browsing is probably one of the things that require good performance and a huge amount of software and complexity. Because browsing probably involves "checking Gmail" (huge amount of JS, need a good fast JS engine e.g. with JIT etc.) or "watching a YouTube video" (need to have video codecs correctly connected to the graphics card hardware), etc.

soperj• 4 years ago

Just check gmail using lynx ;)

prmoustache5• 4 years ago

nah.

I eventually found out that only the shittiest websites force you to have powerful computer and I could browse many of the most interesting ones using lagrange through a web to gemini proxy. Feels like having all the web in reader mode. Same can be done using a browser for the terminal such as w3m or links. Both support images nowadays.

A web browser is unnecessary to check emails anyway. Your example is probably the most easily solved.

Video streaming is another thing.

UncleSlacky3• 4 years ago

It sometimes helps to use the mobile versions of websites instead. There are also dedicated email clients and tools like youtube-dl for downloading videos.

UncleSlacky3• 4 years ago

Yes, it runs well on my Asus eeePC 701, even though the resolution is below the official minimum requirement. Even the wifi works.

jason_slack• 4 years ago

This is a project I would love to be involved in. I still have my BeBox!!

chazeon• 4 years ago

I am confused about this:

Haiku, like BeOS before it, is not a Unix. If you actively like Unix, and what you want to do already works well on Unix – any Unix, and that includes macOS, as well as Linux and FreeBSD – then you probably won't see much appeal here.

Don’t they support the same set of terminal command as in other Unix-like systems? From what I saw [1] there aren’t much difference. Well that is what what people care about unix, right?

[1] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications/list...

prmoustache5• 4 years ago

Don’t they support the same set of terminal command as in other Unix-like systems? From what I saw [1] there aren’t much difference. Well that is what what people care about unix, right?

You can use bash so yes most builtin shell commands are supported. You won't have all the linux specific commands though.

d12bb• 4 years ago

Unix is not just a set of terminal commands, it's the whole system architecture, and the fact that all those derive from the original old AT&T Unix. If I run the Bash shell on Windows, it won't turn it into Unix either..

jonhohle2• 4 years ago

Most people probably don’t care about Unix, but rather POSIX user space.

waddlesplash3• 4 years ago

(Haiku developer here.) This is actually a very common misconception that Haiku is not a UNIX, and it's sad to see The Register get it wrong.

It's debatable whether or not BeOS was a UNIX, but I think by most standards it is: the `fork()`-based process model, UNIX-style file descriptors (but no `mmap`), etc.

Haiku has all the bits BeOS had, of course, but we have far extended our POSIX compliance: of course we have mmap, but also pthreads, and /dev/ (including all the staples, like /dev/null, etc.) These aren't mere compatibility wrappers, but often the "native" APIs; some of the Be APIs are implemented on Haiku using them (while others use lower-level APIs.) There is no "POSIX compatibility layer" in the kernel, it's just natively POSIX all the way down.

spijdar• 4 years ago

One big difference with POSIX/UNIX is the lack of multiple users. My understanding is Haiku is working to add support for multi-user/privilege separation of some kind, but at least for BeOS this was a fairly big difference.

dixie_land• 4 years ago

Technically UNIX being a trademark only the following systems are UNIX

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

Many systems are definitely UNIX-like and many are to different degrees POSIX-compliant

pxc2• 4 years ago

Haiku sounds much more usable than I'd realized:

The new version supports HiDPI displays [...] and has significantly improved Wi-Fi support, including via some USB Wi-Fi adapters[.]
[...]
It has translation layers for both X11 and Wayland, as well as for Gtk apps, alongside the WINE support it gained this time last year. This means a number of new apps, including the GNOME Web browser Epiphany, a full graphical version of Emacs, updated POSIX layer, WINE, and more.
[...]
In testing, we didn't experience a single crash[.] [...] Just for reference, this article was written on Haiku itself, on the bare metal of an old ThinkPad W500, using a Markdown editor called Ghostwriter.

All I really need for most of my computer use is a web browser, Emacs, and a decent command line, and I imagine similar is true for many HN readers. Sounds like Haiku is ready for hobbyists in this crowd to use for a fair chunk of our most common computing tasks.

I love the Linux desktop, but I'm really curious about non-Unix F/OSS desktops. I will have to see if there's a place for Haiku in my life on some old hardware!

kristopolous2• 4 years ago

Way easier to try it out. Just fire up a vm in virtualbox or whatever your preference is. They even wrote documentation on it https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/virtualizing

pxc2• 4 years ago

That's definitely how I'll spin it up to test it, but for me, bare metal use feels more convenient as well as more 'real', once u get past the initial setup.

I'm hoping that it might be fun for me to explore and even struggle with a little bit in the same way that Linux was exciting for me as a kid. :)

lproven3• 4 years ago

[Author of the review here]

It absolutely is, yes. That is how I captured the screenshot for that article.

But the thing is that that doesn't let you get any real feel for how it works with the hardware.

One big aspect, of course, is the performance. That's why I used one of the oldest slowest laptops in my testing fleet for the writeup.

On a 15YO C2D with spinning rust, Haiku b4 starts about as quickly as Ubuntu from NVMe SSD on my day-to-day Core i7. It is impressive.

Secondly the wifi support is impressive too. FreeBSD only supports some old wifi standards and the connection is not all that fast. Haiku talks -n and -ac standards and it's quick, as quick as this old machine's wifi card can do. It saw both my 2.5GHz and 5GHz WLANs, too, separately.

Regular readers of my reviews of alternative and niche OSes will see that I usually try in VirtualBox first, and then if that is successful, I move on to bare metal. Depending on the sophistication of the OS, I may use an "easy" machine, such as a laptop with only integrated graphics, or a "tough" machine, such as one with two GPUs and switching support.

Quite a few OSes never make it out of a VM in testing. Frankly, if something can't support the well-standardised virtual hardware of a VM, it is likely to fair badly on bare metal.

asah• 4 years ago

Sorry I missed the marketing - I love that it's different, but who's the target user and what's the pitch for them to use Haiku? The author warned about backlash, but having a tight pitch is a key ingredient in continuing the warm vibes and avoiding backlash.

IMHO not-Linux isn't so scary anymore, plenty of people have fought with MacOS to get the better hardware, slicker desktop, etc.

Does it run Docker? If so, I'd love to see a solid integration where I can have bug-compatible linux environment for development, but Haiku for simplicity, speed & UI

prmoustache5• 4 years ago

I think it appeals people who want a fast booting, snappy OS with base low memory usage.

If you focus on apps using the original tooling/toolkit it looks very integrated. A bit less if you start using gtk/qt apps though.

Since it has some virtualization support it should be able to run docker/podman from a vm, which is basically what happens with docker on MacOS or Windows. I haven't seen a project similar to docker/podman desktop on it but this is not a show stopper imho. I would look at a project like portainer for people wanting a gui for docker that can run wherever docker run.

0x445442• 4 years ago

I think for personal computing a single user, multi tasking OS is the sweet spot. It's too bad that stagnated with BeOS and Amiga.

prmoustache5• 4 years ago

It is lovely to use once you learn the keyboard shortcuts

My main gripes for now:

- no full disk encryption which means it can only really be used as a kiosk computer and not contain anything sensitive.

- I haven't been able to play anything reliably from netflix or hbomax. either with otterbrowser or epiphany/Gnome Web. Probably Widevine can't be run on those and even tweaking user agents won't help.

Right now it is relegated as a kiosk computer for the kitchen to follow recipes and play music on an old laptop when I am cooking.

cardanome2• 4 years ago

Isn't the netflix problem mainly due to DRM-stuff? Not sure how they could fix that.

Agreed on the disk encryption. Other than that Haiku is indeed getting dangerously close to being feasible as a daily driver.

For work Docker support would be nice-to-have but one can always set up a Linux VM instead. Docker performance on Windows and Mac is crap anyway.

Narishma• 4 years ago

Agreed on the disk encryption. Other than that Haiku is indeed getting dangerously close to being feasible as a daily driver.

Why is that dangerous?

jonhohle2• 4 years ago

That’s somewhat ironic because that’s basically what Be pivoted to shortly before their demise. AFAIK the Sony eVilla running BeIA was the last release from Be. They were about 15 years too early with the concept.

waddlesplash3• 4 years ago

It is lovely to use once you learn the keyboard shortcuts

If you mean Alt vs. Ctrl, you can swap to Ctrl-based keyboard shortcuts by clicking the button in the "Keymap" application. But, the Quick Tour tells you this, there's a reason we encourage users to take it :) https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/welcome/en/quicktour.html#shor...

prmoustache5• 4 years ago

I mean in general. Resistance to change is a natural thing.

Same applies from going from Windows to Mac, Gnome to KDE Plasma and vice-versa.

otikik2• 4 years ago

"17 years"

"image thumbnails in the file manager"

It took them one less year than Gnome to implement that one!

https://www.omglinux.com/gnome-thumbnails-file-picker/

tokai• 4 years ago

please don't flamebait

otikik2• 4 years ago

Not trying to start a flame here. Just found it funny that the same feature in two different projects took about the same amount of time to get implemented.

JNRowe• 4 years ago

The official release notes garnered a great number of comments last month¹, including loads of informative stuff directly from upstream dev waddlesplash.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34109349

lproven3• 4 years ago

Thanks for sharing this! I filed it late in the day and forgot to do so myself, so enjoy the karma. :-)

Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty

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