Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024

https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/haiku-os-the-open-source-beos-you-can-daily-drive-in-2024/

by rcarmo • 3 years ago

124 115 3 years ago

Haiku looked amazing and beautiful in 2009 when I first learned about it. Today it looks dated like Windows 95.

mtillman3• 3 years ago

Disagree strongly. I find its appearance 10X more visually appealing than any modern UI (win/mac/kde/etc). They’re all incredibly wasteful of space and chunky. Also, designers ruined OSX by making it flat and joyless.

alpaca1282• 3 years ago

They not just waste space but at the same time break some of the UI. Recently it took me half a minute to drag a window into view on Mac OS because aside from a few pixels every single part of the window "title bar" was actually some button or widget. I wish mainstream operating systems implemented DWM's shortcuts for window dragging/resizing, those are amazing: holding the key and left mouse button makes the window draggable anywhere, and right mouse button instantly resizes the window so the bottom right corner is at the mouse cursor position.

And I hate auto-hiding, narrow scrollbars so much. Scrollbars have exactly two purposes: show the scroll progress and allow faster scrolling than with the wheel/gesture. Both are effectively prevented by it going invisible.

There was a time when I found the Windows 98 UI a bit "old", but honestly in the long run it aged better than almost everything that came after.

mepian• 3 years ago

I wish modern operating systems looked like Windows 95, I think this was the one time Microsoft got their user experience right, except for the things that were forced on them by backward compatibility concerns, e.g. "in-band" filename extensions that were awkwardly hidden by later versions of Windows.

latexr• 3 years ago

Haven’t tried either, but there’s https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 and https://serenityos.org/

Apocryphon2• 3 years ago

That’s to a certain advantage though. There’s a nostalgic pining for simpler cleaner OS aesthetics. See the vaporwave and Frutiger Aero trends, and the interest in SerenityOS.

anthk2• 3 years ago

Aero was not simpler or cleaner. Ditto with KDE3 with Keramik. Usable and with clear widgets? Yes, but not simpler. Simpler, clean and usable were Mac OS 7-8, Windows 95-2k, or BeOS.

Also, lots of vaporwave confuses the 80's and 90's, often made from people which either they weren't there or they were too young.

To me the years from1996 and 2004 share lots of traits, (being Mac OSX almost the pinaccle of late 90's technologism and optimistic futurism), and early 90's were culturally almost an extension of the late 80's. Both in trends, music, movies... things began to change with Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, and so on.

LeoPanthera4• 3 years ago

I could not disagree more about Windows 95 looking "dated". It's one the clearest, simplest, and easiest to parse UIs I've ever seen.

Buttons look like buttons. Scroll bars are thick and clear. Draggable objects are obvious.

It's a huge shame that we've gone only backwards since then, IMHO.

paulryanrogers• 3 years ago

Sometimes I wonder what kids will consider a 'button' since their first few years will be touch screens, magic corner trackpads, and no-show clickers in MightyMice.

Do TV remotes even have physical buttons any more?

jbverschoor4• 3 years ago

Enable "high contrast mode" in macOS.. buttons look like buttons and some more things.. The normal mode is way too flat / low contrast.

lagniappe2• 3 years ago

I'll probably catch heat for this, but I think Windows 95 was the pinnacle of UI/UX design, and much of what we've done since have been regressions.

wolpoli• 3 years ago

One convention we lost was that text fields have sunken white background and other areas of the UI are generally grey. UI now uses bright white in most places, eventually causing the world to invent dark mode.

It's really gone backward.

waddlesplash4• 3 years ago

There's a "flat" decorator which makes things look more 'modern', if that's what you want: https://github.com/unarix/haiku_darkstyle#darkflat

(Available in the Depot; install "haiku_extras" package.)

Underphil• 3 years ago

Loved BeOS, and love HaikuOS. But a "daily driver" it is most certainly not. Don't be fooled.

mtillman3• 3 years ago

Having contributed to the project, I still agree. In my mind it’s perfect for retirees who don’t need zoom or mobile syncing. The browser is quite good imo as is the email client. I really like that it’s (by default) a single user environment-ideal for an old laptop.

al_borland2• 3 years ago

I have to imagine the Venn diagram of retirees and people who are interested in trying more obscure operating systems, has only a sliver of overlap.

Though I may end up in that camp one day. I did quite a bit of that between graduating from college and getting my first job.

tadfisher2• 3 years ago

I have to try Haiku, but the last time I used BeOS everything effectively ran as root. Not that Unix-style user permissions are the epitome of OS security, but at least an RCE vulnerability in the browser doesn't allow for persistent root or whatever.

lagniappe2• 3 years ago

It's a bit different, in that it's a single user system for the most part, whereas the Unix and Linux family are typically geared toward multi user environments.

em-bee• 3 years ago

haiku devs are working on some form of multiuser support

yjftsjthsd-h5• 3 years ago

I mean, it depends on your threat model, but https://xkcd.com/1200/ applies; for a single user machine what's the difference between the user and root?

bigpeopleareold• 3 years ago

I am not an expert, just remembering what I saw. I tinker with it a little (and am writing this in a Haiku OS VM, through Falkon.)

There is a daemon running when I call `ps` that I see is called package_daemon. I think it is this one: I think it has exclusive access to a set of directories where software and such is installed. There is no sudo, su, etc. because you don't need it. hpkg files are loaded by the package daemon into the correct paths.

I looked at this a few months ago just to get what it is doing. It has to have some security model that protects certain paths at least. This looked like it.

steviedotboston• 3 years ago

leave it to Action Retro to lie and mislead viewers...

ianai5• 3 years ago

Are they known for that? They deleted a perfectly respectable comment of mine yesterday and I’m a bit wary.

helloimhonk• 3 years ago

If it works on ones computer I dont see why it couldnt be daily driven depending on your needs. It has a webkit based browser, and a native emacs port, thats pretty much all i use day to day :P

sneak2• 3 years ago

No 3D acceleration.

jbverschoor4• 3 years ago

Early 2000s it was my daily driver. But man.. I used the filesystem like it was indented.. All my files had attributes. Unfortunately none of the metadata was supported on other platforms. Lots of wasted energy :) I loved BeOS

oso2k2• 3 years ago

   I used the filesystem like it was indented.

What does `indented` mean here. Not familiar with this usage.

sillywalk2• 3 years ago

Did you ever use Scott Hacker's CD ripping script?

It got the track info from cddb, added the attributes to both the mp3 files and the BFS extended attributes.

yellowapple• 3 years ago

I attempted to use Haiku as my daily driver about a year ago. Only four things really put the kibosh on that:

1. Lack of native / built-in support for full-disk encryption

2. Lack of a day-to-day usable web browser

3. Lack of the apps I regularly use on Linux and Windows (or good enough equivalents)

4. Lack of stability on the hardware I was using (Framework 11th Gen)

It looks like at least one of those is no longer an issue, thanks to Falkon. It also looks like there's been a lot of progress on getting Wine working and stable. If overall stability is sufficiently improved, then giving it another try might very well be in the cards, even without FDE.

hackeraccount• 3 years ago

Other then that how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

dogma11382• 3 years ago

If your daily driver is only web and email you can drive anything.

snvzz5• 3 years ago

FDE still a stopper, in this post-Snowden world.

Can't afford to do much on a machine that doesn't meet that bar.

ianai5• 3 years ago

At some point/place I heard it was going to have a ribbon type thing flow down menus. This would help follow stuff in deep drill downs. Really wish someone had done it.

https://store.kde.org/s/Opendesktop/p/1080563/

Personally, I think this OS has promise if it could get more modernization. It’d be nice to have another OSS GUI with some leanings into UI/UX.

Edit-modernizations like cross compatibility with linux, would be my guess. Think linux subsystem with gui support? Wonder what else…

Edit2-maybe throw in some modern stuff like swift (the apple language), zfs/bcachefs, and definitely a way to leverage already extant drivers.

jonhohle3• 3 years ago

BeFS is its own awesome thing. Sure, ZFS integrity and portability is nice, but the speed and metadata of BeFS is great.

ianai5• 3 years ago

Sure, but adding metadata to zfs would probably be easier than modernizing BeFS. Just in general as FSes are very worthy of being a project unto themselves. Thinking of low lying fruit to get maximum value easily. BeFS doesn’t have to go anywhere either.

zie• 3 years ago

I tried to use it as my mail client, I loaded it up and configured it, but it wasn't working. I did some very basic troubleshooting but couldn't find anything wrong and after a few web searches couldn't figure out how to find relevant logs to see what was broken.

I gave up and moved on.

chrsw2• 3 years ago

In terms of foundations and principles Haiku OS is more of a coherent platform that anything on the Linux desktop attests to be at the moment. In terms practicality, hardware support and a size of software ecosystem it is still very minor compared to Linux, which I find unfortunate.

nightowl_games2• 3 years ago

These two things are linked.

chrsw2• 3 years ago

This statement got me thinking. How do you mean? I wonder if you're thinking what I'm thinking.

snvzz5• 3 years ago

With a recent, working port of Wine, there's no shortage of software to run on it.

pjmlp• 3 years ago

All desktop OSes are, as they are thought as a whole stack, not jigsaw puzzles.

That is what made Android/Linux and ChromeOS/Linux attractive to the masses, they offer the structure, for users and application developers, that GNU/Linux has never managed to structure across the endless list of flavours on Distrowatch.

I really enjoyed using BeOS 5 during its heyday.

tombert2• 3 years ago

I remember hearing about Haiku about a decade ago, and I played with it in a virtual machine, and it seemed neat, but I'm not 100% sure why it buys you over anything else. This could just have been the virtual machine, but it didn't feel any faster than any other OS really, and the UI was fine, but kind of unremarkable to me.

I'm not saying all this to crap on the project; is there actually an advantage to using Haiku in 2024 over, say, Linux?

christkv• 3 years ago

An os that nobody is writing zero day exploits for ?

tombert2• 3 years ago

Yeah, and everyone is looking for the next "distraction-free!" setup, so I suppose it might accomplish that to some extent as well.

ianai5• 3 years ago

It boots really fast. And the UI on some linux DEs feels laggy at times. This shouldn’t have the decades of cruft making the GUI lag.

alpaca1282• 3 years ago

What Linux GUI are you referring to? The only one I could think of were the first versions of Gnome 3, but that is pretty smooth nowadays.

Conscat• 3 years ago

In 2023, Haiku got Emacs and Vulkan support that makes it much more attractive to me than in the past. But I still feel very reluctant to use something without the industry support that Linux has.

benley2• 3 years ago

Does that mean they have some accelerated video drivers now? Last I checked (maybe a year ago) there were none at all.

waddlesplash4• 3 years ago

(Haiku developer here.) There is one hardware accelerated driver, for Radeon Southern Islands; but it's third-party, out-of-tree, and not particularly simple to set up and get running. So, not really.

blue1• 3 years ago

Emacs runs in haiku OS. So most of my requirements are satisfied.

tobinfricke2• 3 years ago

Is it possible to run Haiku somehow on a Mac Mini M1, or does it require underlying Intel architecture?

xcv123• 3 years ago

x86/x64 only https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta4/

tobinfricke2• 3 years ago

Is there some kind of x86 emulator that will do the trick?

sillywalk2• 3 years ago

"Installing Haiku on Apple silicon Using UTM"

https://codingitwrong.com/2023/08/05/installing-haiku-on-app...

29athrowaway• 3 years ago

When I tried Haiku 3 years ago, it hanged regularly.

cmrdporcupine• 3 years ago

Once you start gluing various ported Linux applications onto these alternative OSes, they start to lose their distinctiveness and raison d'être. If you are using Qt/KDE apps, anyways, what does Haiku really bring to the table other than a smaller footprint?

I never programmed for BeOS back in the day, but my understanding was that half the advantage of it was its consistent clean ground-up API for building multimedia applications. I'm not sure how well that has aged, tho...

waddlesplash4• 3 years ago

Haiku's "raison d'être" is to be a fully-fledged desktop operating system for general use. So, if there aren't native applications to fulfill daily tasks, then Linux ones tend to get ported.

Anyway, as for the question "why Haiku, if it's just ported Linux apps?" well, because Haiku is a much more cohesive system than any Linux distro. Even if every app you are running on it is from Linux (besides Tracker and Deskbar), the entire system underneath those applications remains tightly integrated.

estebarb• 3 years ago

Around 2000 a fully functional BeOS Personal edition was included in a PC Magazine CD. It was fun to try other operating system (I didn't even had to create a partition, something hard to do considering our PC had just 8GB of DD). It was much faster than Windows 98, although didn't have much applications.

indigodaddy• 3 years ago

How well would this run on a 22” 2017ish iMac?

valeg• 3 years ago

cpp was a poor choice for the system but Haiku is cute. The dev team should figure out 2D/3D acceleration and this thing will fly. 64 bit edition has finally abandoned BeOS compatibility and looks really promising as a quick tiny hobbyist OS.

snvzz5• 3 years ago

cpp is probably inherited from beos.

dang• 3 years ago

Haiku Activity and Contract Report, October 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38273608 - Nov 2023 (12 comments)

Progress on running Haiku OS on VisionFive 2 RISC-V dev board - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35843775 - May 2023 (20 comments)

Haiku's (Kernel) Condition Variables API: Design and Implementation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35690656 - April 2023 (16 comments)

Haiku package management - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34879304 - Feb 2023 (52 comments)

Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34338487 - Jan 2023 (38 comments)

Haiku R1/beta4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34109349 - Dec 2022 (139 comments)

Lots more listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111732...

6R1M0R4CL3• 3 years ago

I loved BeOS. In the 90's it was my main OS including at work. When Be announced that BeOS will be gone, and Be too... I went to Linux. And never looked back. Started with a RedHat Linux 5, tried Debian, but could not get Debian to work with the dial-up modem, so went RedHat 5, then 6 and all those that followed until Fedora went out.

Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024

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