Haiku Developers Begin Optimizing Their BeOS-Inspired OS For Performance

[holunder]

Very cool to see them putting so much effort into this OS! I could see it becoming a legitimate competitor to FreeBSD or Linux in a couple of years for basic tasks.

Haiku is surprisingly ready for basic tasks. They have a WebKit browser, a LibreOffice port and ported lots of drivers over from FreeBSD. I have used this for fun already ten years ago – on bare metal! Just give it a try.

[Guest]

Great news!

I hope Haiku will start seeing software support, as it's quite lacking right now.

[smitty3268]

They begin to what? Haiku is the fastest OS (from the ones that are still maintained) I've ever seen. (OK, second fastest, the fastest is FreeDOS, but that doesn't count. :P)

Did you read the blog post? Sounds like there were serious slowdowns when doing things like compiling.

[Vistaus]

Its sad that many of these niche OS are just x86. There are Plattforms like the RPI where its should be easier so support since its a fixed platform. Its also easy to Flash just a new SD or swap them.

They have a 64-bit build and are working on ARM builds as well. So no, it's not "just" x86.

[Vistaus]

They begin to what? Haiku is the fastest OS (from the ones that are still maintained) I've ever seen. (OK, second fastest, the fastest is FreeDOS, but that doesn't count. :P)

No, the fastest that is still maintained is KolibriOS.

[Vistaus]

Haiku is surprisingly ready for basic tasks. They have a WebKit browser, a LibreOffice port and ported lots of drivers over from FreeBSD. I have used this for fun already ten years ago – on bare metal! Just give it a try.

And Qt is also available, with some great software like Falkon (QupZilla) web browser, the browser that is now KDE's default browser

[uid313]

Why do people develop and bother with Haiku?
If there was any great piece of application software for BeOS or any great window manager, application launcher, or desktop environment or other userspace software then just port that to Linux.

But why bother an entire operating system? What is so special with BeOS that makes it so much better than Linux?

[ElectricPrism]

From the ground up means developers can try different design philosophies.

BeOS was the first to do certain things I cant remember if it was threading or what.

RedoxOS is also coming along nicely with ports and remakes of popular C/++ Linux counterparts.

Devs just want to make stuff just like painters want to paint, not everything has to have a purpose, it can just be fun or rewarding.

[cb88]

Now, RPi, Haiku and a cordless keyboard would be great with a TV

No, it wouldn't. Realistically, it would be dog slow on an RPi... since no acceleration would be supported. RPi 2 that Haiku targets currently is roughly as fast as a mid-high range P3 in single threaded tasks.

The only reason RPi is usable at at all for video streaming on Linux is that it has accelerated drivers for most of that.... and binary drivers for graphics acceleration. There is an open VC4 driver for RPi but it doesn't do video acceleration and is only OpenGL ES. https://dri.freedesktop.org/docs/drm/gpu/vc4.html

I have more hope for the upcoming Exynos CPUs with Radeon Navi derived graphics... since that may actually work with Mesa drivers once those are working on Haiku down the road. But the problem there is that is an entirely different platform from broadcom's and would require a fair bit it work to get working... which is why ARM is largely a timesink :/ once you finish a port you realize the hardware isn't even sold anymore.

[tildearrow]

Why do people develop and bother with Haiku?
If there was any great piece of application software for BeOS or any great window manager, application launcher, or desktop environment or other userspace software then just port that to Linux.

But why bother an entire operating system? What is so special with BeOS that makes it so much better than Linux?

"Why do people develop and bother with Linux?
If there was any great piece of application software for Linux or any great window manager, application launcher, or desktop environment or other userspace software then just port that to Windows.

But why bother an entire operating system? What is so special with Linux that makes it so much better than Windows to the average consumer?"

Yeah, sure. I don't like this "kill every small effort and just stick to pop" attitude from you.