Haiku R1 Beta 3 Released As Spiritual Successor To BeOS

[cb88]

I agree , I like the UI.

Mesa software is there, but basically none of the hardware driver work has been done and there are significant obstacles to implementing it as haiku's driver managers were in flux last time I read about it.

[TmTFx]

HPKGs are actually garbage and one of the reasons many people that really liked Haiku stopped following it's progress for the most part. I even had several machines with it installed, and now... yeah I can't be bothered. Haiku went from being bootable on sub 128MB machines to all of a sudden basically requiring 1GB of ram or more (this has went down a little since then but its still there). Also the merge between the writable and non writable areas is not clean... this means you end up with things like the old BeOS config folders that everone knew, becoming read only, and being forced to learn a that if you want to write to those files you need to use non_packaged folders, which are in themselves horrendous in the introduction of language specific features into the use of the OS as well as being completely unneeded for normal use, what they likely should have done instead is added packaged folders and done the exact opposite of what they did.

The package management system also caused a falling out with the long time supporter and owner of haikuware and bebits domains...

As far as 4k videos... yes and everyone does that these days... I won't want to be stuck with an unaccelerated desktop and that is exactly what Haiku has web rendering is also horrendously slow due to this in part. Literally every reasonable desktop computer these days has hardware graphics acceleration... either with a dedicated card, or integrated accelerator, not using that because of 25 year old arguments about graphics latency that were made obsolete 20 years ago... is silly.

I quite agree with you, they complicated the things a little bit, and this forces you to learn a new way to solve those new problems. That hurts and slows down the work until you learn how it works, but that's the way they chose, noone forked the project. Actually the 64 machines need less than 350MB of ram to bring you on the desktop and for 32bit systems less then 270MB, I noticed that Haiku used more ram than BeOS since day 1. I'm not defending their decisions nor accusing the team, which actually solved some problems in an effective way, I only hope that those enforced methods are less relevant for developers than you claim or, if not, would be solved with an easy workaround.

Actually I don't blame the package management for the faith of haikuware and bebits... every os today has a "store" for apps, and this method is easier, faster and more secure than having to download an app from the web. A pity, right, but that was necessary.

I don't use 4k videos, which actually I find excessively quality redundant and resource wasteful, but well I'm not everyone, and I say you are right when you say that a lack of graphics acceleration is a bummer, but they have priorities and I respect them, when there will come the time they will implement it over this incredibly fast graphic latency. But for now, that's not a reason to blame one of the most beautiful things Haiku has in opposite of other free OSes, have you ever tried for example a linux desktop with an unsupported video card? using Wayland or X, nothing compares to Haiku.

Cheers

[Luke_Wolf]

I might be able to do that.

I won't argue about Haiku's objective limitations. They're well known.
Haiku right now is lacking things that many linux entusiasts might want for daily use (3d acceleration, drivers, popular games, chrome, wide app support). However, I believe these features are closer than one might expect.

But that's not the point. I wanted to respond to your post about the things that make Haiku stand out for me. I can actually make a list:

Well thanks for one of you finally giving a real answer.

• Database-like filesystem: It's really easy to setup new, custom, personal file types and manage file attributes. Since it's similar to a DB, apps can use it like one, and at the same time Haiku provides the user and other apps an easy way to access this data. https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/usergu...ttributes.html
  • Let's assume you have a Haiku client to the phoronix forum. It's able to scan the forum and save files of type "Post" containing: author, text, and date, and files of type "Author" containing the relevant information. Now imagine a separate app that can scan for new additions to this DB, and shows you the twitter profile of interesting people you meet.
• Advanced file search: It's pretty advanced I'd say. I use voidtool's Everything for Windows. This is that and much more. https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/queries.html
• Talking about files, Haiku has a "Translator" system. You can write a program to tell Haiku how to convert a file type to another file type. https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/usergu...nslations.html
  • For example, you can use translators to convert ogg to mp3.
  • You can also use it to convert the "Phoronix Author" type into a "Contact" type to use in another program that's not the phoronix client.
  • Regular apps can make use of the Translator system as well. They can detect your installed translators and use them on the fly, allowing for easy "export" features, for example.

I'll admit that's an interesting concept but for any software to take advantage of it, it would have to be written specifically for Haiku. I'll give you points for a theoretical novelty but it's not a practical draw if nobody is actually taking advantage of it. Especially as this feature is incredibly non-obvious to anyone who decides to just boot up Haiku in a VM and dick around in it to see what it's about. That said KDE tried that concept and called it the semantic desktop with Akonadi and friends but it didn't exactly go anywhere because Akonadi was a clusterfuck and nepomuk was slow.

• Personal. Haiku system API is really easy to use. It's insane how plain simple it is to change the way you use your computer. It is at this step you realize that Windows and even Linux are not really for "personal computers". You can't appreciate until you dive a bit in. Personal means to be able to easily "make your computer work for you" instead of the other way around. You have a need, your computer is here to help you liberate your posibilities. https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/index.html
  • Of course, this really is for the technically inclined. But even so, technical people can easily make apps for non-technical people.
• Themes. With Decorators and ControlLook, you can easily change how Haiku looks, entirely. You don't like the window tab? no problem. (this guy made dark theme: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/flat-...ollook/9611/84)
• Hpkg. I really like that Windows lets you install and run random programs that aren't in the Windows Store. I appreciate that Haiku has a way to run stand-alone programs.

I mean I run KDE so customization and themeing are just kinda the norm. Linux lets you install apps outside the store too they're called AppImages.

Others:

• I'm not sure how it works, but Cortex is a demo app that takes audio (video too?) from the system and lets you transform it into something else. Would it be possible to, for example, detect if you're watching a youtube video to show a Haiku, system-wide "picture in picture"? I'm not sure about this, but it is interesting.
• I'm not sure how it could be used, but Replicants let you embed a piece of your program into another one. It's commonly used for Desktop applets/gadgets, but in theory your app can support replicants from other programs. https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/usergu...tml#replicants
• There's the "Hey" system as well. It's used to send messages across Haiku to change running app's behaviour and properties. I haven't thought a use case for this, but it is interesting. https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/humdin..._gui_with_hey/

I think I'm forgetting a point or two, but I believe these are the main ones that make Haiku stand out for me.

I just made an account to reply you, as it was practically an open invitation to do so

Well the second point exists in KDE and it's called KParts and the third point sounds like DBus.

[indezign]

Haiku's networking stack overall networking performance drops are abysmal. I read they didn't finish this part. Shame, really.

[cb88]

I quite agree with you, they complicated the things a little bit, and this forces you to learn a new way to solve those new problems. That hurts and slows down the work until you learn how it works, but that's the way they chose, noone forked the project. Actually the 64 machines need less than 350MB of ram to bring you on the desktop and for 32bit systems less then 270MB, I noticed that Haiku used more ram than BeOS since day 1. I'm not defending their decisions nor accusing the team, which actually solved some problems in an effective way, I only hope that those enforced methods are less relevant for developers than you claim or, if not, would be solved with an easy workaround.

Actually I don't blame the package management for the faith of haikuware and bebits... every os today has a "store" for apps, and this method is easier, faster and more secure than having to download an app from the web. A pity, right, but that was necessary.

I don't use 4k videos, which actually I find excessively quality redundant and resource wasteful, but well I'm not everyone, and I say you are right when you say that a lack of graphics acceleration is a bummer, but they have priorities and I respect them, when there will come the time they will implement it over this incredibly fast graphic latency. But for now, that's not a reason to blame one of the most beautiful things Haiku has in opposite of other free OSes, have you ever tried for example a linux desktop with an unsupported video card? using Wayland or X, nothing compares to Haiku.

Cheers

I wasn't really talking about *video rendering* graphics acceleration though that is important for people actually working on video... and Haiku is *supposed* to be a multimedia OS. That said, there are numerous applications that requrie 3d acceleration be they CAD related, art , or game related, even browsers use graphics acceleration these days (and Haiku has a lot of workarounds in the browser to allow it to render somwhat correctly without them).

And actually yes I have, Haiku has almost no acceleration especially on recent cards as this requires firing up the 3d engine (I think it does shadow buffering and maybe a few other nice tricks) That said... Linux is just as fast when you are not running bloated toolkits like QT5 and GTK2-3 which are almost as complex as HTML rendering engines. The Haiku GUI APIs are similar in complexity to GTK1... They have little to no CSS processing that is done at runtime its just code drawing the UI like older Linux APIs used to do.

Note there are ported applications using QT on Haiku and they perform similarly to Linux, not bad, not spectacular either. The rationale used for not implementing acceleration for the BeAPI is only 25+ years out of date.... seriously, bus latency is the main argument made against it! PCIe bus latency is about 300ns... similar to ram. The only reason I can think that this would become slow, is if you are trying to render excessively fancy effects using both GPU and CPU... meanwhile more and more of the fancy stuff is becoming possible to draw directly on the GPU with minimal CPU intervention meanting (no latency + increased speed due to running on a SIMT computer engine)