Haiku Developers Begin Optimizing Their BeOS-Inspired OS For Performance

[awesz]

What is so special with BeOS that makes it so much better than Linux?

https://osvoyager.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/what-makes-beos-and-haiku-unique/

[edwaleni]

https://osvoyager.wordpress.com/2018...-haiku-unique/

Excellent write up. I certainly agree with one point:

BeOS had a way of making things easy to use, and yet put serious, developer-level tools in front of the user. All while still keeping things as simple as they would be on the classic Mac OS or Palm OS. That’s the real craftsmanship of Be.

I worked with BeOS from inception to the final release. Also worked with Be components off BeBits, used their ClarisWorks port called BeProductive and software from several other BeOS oriented websites. I have the Windows port of BeProductive still running just fine on Windows 7.

I would get the same question all the time, why? The metaphor for BeOS was unique. As the reviewer noted, it had the simplicity of MacOS but allowed one to work outside the walled garden that Apple had built.

I can recall many corporate GUI design sessions where we would discuss good approaches to establishing certain kinds of focus and window controls and BeOS would come up periodically followed by laughs from the pro-Apple crowd. They thought BeOS was a joke and I never understood why. A kind of ugly cousin one of their uncles was showing off.

It's not going to change the world, but I do like to see diversity in user interfaces. And BeOS provided it, I learned a lot by using it.

[LaeMing]

https://osvoyager.wordpress.com/2018...-haiku-unique/

Thanks for that link. I'm playing around with my own OS/interface ... nothing big and professional like Linux :-P ! - really*: it doesn't even use ASCII and I am part way through inventing an entirely new human language, and associated non-latin alphabet, for the UI .... that sound you just heard was uid313 screaming! :-P ). Having just got a workable emulation of a hardware text console up, and heading for a simple bitmapped GUI later down the line, I am interested in the ways others have approached such things that I may not have been exposed to before.

*expected user base of 1. I have a day job, and this is my hobby. :-D

(No code to be published at this stage, sorry. I only started teaching myself Rust three weeks ago and my code is all kinds of embarrassingly horrible! Look out for my new Rust book "How to poke random reserved symbols into your code until the borrow-checker quits its whining". In all good bookstores soon! (not). I am starting to get a feel for what those ampersands and colons mean and how to properly use them as I go, though. :-D )

[Volta]

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)

Fast interface, but that's all.

[RealNC]

No, the fastest that is still maintained is KolibriOS.

Ooh. Completely forgot this existed.

[santana]

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.

You know guys, what i hate in the Haiku scene? This kind of demanding comments. Yeah, i know from my ass what would help to the project, but i never step up to make it happen, just whusful thinking all the time. You know how depressing to see kind of comments like this since rpi1 got released? Do something, but don't tell how the project should be driven. Thats my 2 cents. Now you can ban me. Thanks.

[Spazturtle]

You know guys, what i hate in the Haiku scene? This kind of demanding comments. Yeah, i know from my ass what would help to the project, but i never step up to make it happen, just whusful thinking all the time. You know how depressing to see kind of comments like this since rpi1 got released? Do something, but don't tell how the project should be driven. Thats my 2 cents. Now you can ban me. Thanks.

Explain how his comment was demanding, go on. He didn't demand they do anything, so how was it demanding.

[santana]

Explain how his comment was demanding, go on. He didn't demand they do anything, so how was it demanding.

At every possible Haiku related news there is this kind of "Oh, ARM port is required, why is there no ARM port? are you guys imbicle not recognizing our needs? ARM PORT FOR THE WIN!"

But nobody even wrote a line of code. And what else if not this demanding?

But yeah, i just got triggered at the first rpi mentioning comment, maybe it was not the best example, but you got the point.

[danboid]

Serenity has now replaced Haiku for me as the most interesting, non-Linux FLOSS OS. Serenity isn't even one year old nor does it run on real hardware yet but its amazing what has been implemented in ~10 months mainly by a single developer. I like that he's starting from scratch with the window system and GUI toolkit rather than using X, Wayland or re-implementing something that nobody uses from the 90s. It is heavily influenced by Qt tho so I think it will be more familiar to a lot of C++/Qt devs than BeOS.

Serenity boots to its GUI almost instantly under qemu, whilst the Haiku boot time has a lot of room for improvement. Funnily enough, you can actually install Haiku faster than you can boot it on a lot of machines (if you exclude the boot time, ofc).

It will be interesting to see where serenity is in another year or two.

[Vistaus]

Btw, I would like to use Haiku full-time, esp. now that Wi-Fi is working so well, but I've gotten so used to Vivaldi (browser) and with the upcoming integrated mail client, I cannot use any other browser full-time anymore, so that limits my Haiku usage, unless Vivaldi gets ported to Haiku or something like Wine but for Linux apps (Line? lol) becomes available for Haiku.