Haiku OS Begins Working On 32/64-bit Hybrid Support

[Vistaus]

You mean similarly to how hybrid on Windows led into people never migrating to 64bit and on Linux into a mess where you need to hunt down missing 32bit packages for installation because your distro will be 64-bit only for space reasons? Also won't run on 32bit processors anyway so you either need separate 32-bit-only flavour or drop support for a hardware class. I wouldn't say hybrid is all in all a must-have feature

Haiku 64-bit images are actually smaller than 32-bit images, so even with Hybrid stuff added it would only be a little bit larger than 32-bit, unlike Windows.

[Vistaus]

I don't even know why Haiku would need this. It's generally only needed for proprietary software. What proprietary software is there for Haiku other than perhaps some super ancient BeOS stuff?

Qt 4 and 5 run fine on Haiku, so there's actually quite a lot of software to choose from besides the native BeOS/Haiku software.

[edwaleni]

I don't even know why Haiku would need this. It's generally only needed for proprietary software. What proprietary software is there for Haiku other than perhaps some super ancient BeOS stuff?

gobeProductive by Gobe Software was an office suite for BeOS developed by former members of the ClarisWorks team. It was an excellent suite in the theme of ClarisWorks and Microsoft Works. Just before BeOS shut down, Gobe had successfully ported gobeProductive to Windows & Linux. These were all 32 bit binaries. But they were unable to get funding to bring it to market due to a crowded office suite space and the effort was shut down.

ArsTechnica reviewed a copy of the Windows and Linux versions and wrote up an article on it. (Link attached)

The Windows installer and the Linux Alpha (including the source) are still available online for download if you are interested.

The Linux version tarball is at http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/apps/

gobe_linux_x86_install.tar.gz

24-May-2002 01:01

9.9M

The Windows version which ended at 3.04 in 2002 installs even today and runs just fine on Windows 7 and I am sure it run on Wine as well.

[starshipeleven]

Haiku 64-bit images are actually smaller than 32-bit images, so even with Hybrid stuff added it would only be a little bit larger than 32-bit, unlike Windows.

I think he meant that to have a hybrid system you would need to pull down 32bit libs too and it would become similar to the situation on Windows and Linux, where if you are on 64bit and want to run 32bit applications you get some drawbacks overall. It's worse on windows than on linux.

[starshipeleven]

gobeProductive by Gobe Software was an office suite for BeOS developed by former members of the ClarisWorks team. It was an excellent suite in the theme of ClarisWorks and Microsoft Works. Just before BeOS shut down, Gobe had successfully ported gobeProductive to Windows & Linux. These were all 32 bit binaries. But they were unable to get funding to bring it to market due to a crowded office suite space and the effort was shut down.

With all due respect to gobeProductive, that's still an office suite from more than 15 years ago that has more interoperability issues with modern formats than current LibreOffice.

I mean, it does fit the "super ancient BeOS stuff" description of Chewi

[edwaleni]

I mean, it does fit the "super ancient BeOS stuff" description of Chewi

Of that, there is no argument.

Just noting there is 32 bit source code the Haiku team can use for an application if they so choose. And frankly, if one can't run some productivity suite (even Libre Office) on a host OS, most people beyond this group would ask the same question, (What good is it?).

At this point, Haiku would have a better response if they ported Monero or some cryptocurrency app, and made multi-GPU not only supportable, but entirely manageable and customizable through the OS.

But I digress.

[cb88]

I wasn't advocating 32bit.... But it is a fact of life that Retro BeOS users would throw a fit if legacy app support was completely dropped... being able to run both on one system image makes it a moot point.

That said pretty much any new application on Haiku is going to be developed on 64bit due to newer APIs and libraries being easier to be made available there first. Applications that actually need to be 64bit will be... the ones that don't it doesn't matter anymore if they provide a 32bit or 64bit version though the 32bit version will technically run on a larger subset of computers because almost all 64bit architectures retain the ability to run 32bit code because it's a basically free feature.

[Vistaus]

With all due respect to gobeProductive, that's still an office suite from more than 15 years ago that has more interoperability issues with modern formats than current LibreOffice.

I mean, it does fit the "super ancient BeOS stuff" description of Chewi

But like I said: Qt 4 and 5 run fine on Haiku, so there is modern software available for it. Sure, it's not going to beat Linux, but with modern Qt software it's at least a fun alternative for, like, a second PC or something. Plus the Haiku interface is fast, smooth and predictable, so perfect for a spare, old netbook you still have lying around.

[indezign]

With all due respect to gobeProductive, that's still an office suite from more than 15 years ago that has more interoperability issues with modern formats than current LibreOffice." description of Chewi

Haiku is now using the newer Calligra Suite 3.1.0 (aka KOffice) and Krita. They recently updated to Qt 5.10.1.

[edwaleni]

Haiku is now using the newer Calligra Suite 3.1.0 (aka KOffice) and Krita. They recently updated to Qt 5.10.1.

Thanks for sharing that info. I was not familiar with Calligra previously.