BeOS Successor Haiku Keeps the Faith 448
kokito writes "OSNews managing editor Thom Holwerda reviews Haiku, the open source successor of the Be operating system. According to the review, Haiku faithfully/successfully replicates the BeOS user experience and 'personality,' boasting very short boot times, the same recognizable but modernized GUI using antialiasing for fonts and all vector graphics as well as vector icons, a file system with support for metadata-based queries (OpenBFS) and support for the BeAPI, considered by some the cleanest programming API ever. The project has also recently released a native GCC 4.3.3 tool chain, clearing the way for bringing up-to-date ports of multi-platform apps such as Firefox and VLC, and making it easier to work on Haiku ports in general." (More below.)
"In spite of its pre-alpha status, Haiku seems to be pretty stable. If you would like to give it a try, nightly builds are available from the Haiku Files website, both as raw HDD and VMWare images. Or if you happen to be in the Los Angeles area, you could also take a peek at a Haiku demo during the upcoming Southern California Linux Expo (Feb. 21 & 22), where Haiku will be exhibiting in booth #4."
Re:BeOS Haiku (Score:5, Insightful)
No, having different OSs isn't about beating Microsoft.
Have some imagination, please.
Re:BeOS Haiku (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the point of fighting one monoculture with another?
Microsoft's junk wouldn't be so bad if it didn't completely dominate the world. If it had some competition, it might make an effort to interoperate, making everyone's life easier.
Diversity stimulates research, growth, health and progress. Can we please put this "Linux/The Open Source Community needs to unite to beat Microsoft" meme to sleep. It's totally false and unhelpful.
Deadhorse? (Score:5, Insightful)
For a site supposedly traditionally supportive of alternative platforms, in practice there's a surprising amount of contempt for any alternative platform that doesn't fall into the cool club of Linux and OS X. I'm not a Haiku user, but if someone is writing an open source OS, good luck to them. Or maybe we should give up, and ridicule anyone who doesn't use Windows?
(I see this with other things - e.g., Internet Explorer is bad, Firefox is good ... but Opera for some reason is also bad. The usual argument of it not being open source doesn't even apply to Haiku, though. By that reasoning, we should be praising Haiku, and criticising OS X!)
Is anyone who starts an open source project flogging a "deadhorse", unless they're already mainstream? What a depressing attitude.
"Deadhorse" doesn't make sense anyway - according to Wikipedia, Haiku is a relatively new OS, only having received significant development in the last few years. Oh, it's a dead horse because it maintains some compatibility with BeOS? Big deal - by that reasoning, we should tag every OS X article "deadhorse", on the grounds that it shares its trademark name with a long dead twenty five year old OS that was never even particularly good at the time.
Re:BeOS Haiku (Score:1, Insightful)
Not every OS developer has "defeat microsoft" as a goal.
Article ignores NeXTstep's place (Score:5, Insightful)
and why it was chosen instead of BeOS.
Moreover, Mac OS X runs nicely on multi-processor machines (Be's major claim to fame).
I'd rather see effort like this poured into GNUstep....
William
Re:BeOS Haiku (Score:2, Insightful)
It's Haiku, not BeOS. And I wasn't aware there was a limit to the number of operating systems allowed to exist. Is there a limit for any kind of software, or just operating systems?
You know, where Brian tries to separate the People's Front of Judea and the Campaign to Free Galilee.
Except there they had a common cause. In the market, we have this thing known as competition.
We already have several OS alternatives out there, Mac, Linux, BSD. Why throw another in the mix which will never be supported mainstream?
Well, why bother with Mac, Linux or BSD then? Surely, it would be better if everyone just used Windows, right?
Re:BeOS Haiku (Score:3, Insightful)
I actually went to Haiku's site and poked around a little bit. Aside from the very 90's looking screen shots of a couple of apps - mail, contacts, media prefs., what is actually available to run under Haiku?
The apps are what make an OS usable, really. The OS itself should just get out of the way and let the (hopefully) plethora of apps do their job.
Re:Nice, but: What the hell runs on BeOS/Haiku? (Score:3, Insightful)
Antialiasing fonts? Vector icons? Holy cow, Batman (Score:2, Insightful)
modernized GUI using antialiasing for fonts and all vector graphics as well as vector icons
It's great that BeOS is still alive in some form, as it is obviously a great project. But really, don't boast with this sort of stuff anymore. It's 2009. Antialiasing fonts and vector icons might have been impressive in 1996, but now every actively maintained GUI features this.
Doesn't impress me (Score:2, Insightful)
As much hype as people wants to put in beos, the fact is that beos is...
-Incomplete, beos always missed important pieces (a reason why its so fast and slim: theres not much to load)
-Some parts have become old. For example, as great as the graphic subsystem was at its time, these days its old compared to the modern 3d-accelerated desktops. Even X.org is better than beos in this field these days.
-Some of the advantages are useless. Why do I care about installing a driver by dragging and dropping files? The desktop systems that really care about users do not need to do anything to get the hardware working, they automate the process as much as possible and do not require doing anything. Installing a driver in Windows is most of the times automatic, and there are rare exceptions where you have to insert a CD when you are asked to do it.
Any modern Linux distro is so much better than beos....
Re:Article ignores NeXTstep's place (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:BeOS Haiku (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to unite against Microsoft, the dominant power.
No, we don't have to do any such thing. Why is it that just because someone develops an alternate OS that it has to be used as a tool to fight against Microsoft? Not everyone who doesn't use Windows is doing so because they are trying to fight against Microsoft. This always comes up whenever someone mentions the many distros of Linux that everyone should unite cause we are supposed to be waging some "epic" battle against Microsoft, but many of us just don't give a shit about your stupid "war". Take your stupid battles somewhere else and leave the rest of us out of it so we can get on with coding.
Re:Article ignores NeXTstep's place (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd rather see effort like this poured into GNUstep....
The only reason to work on either BeOS or GNUstep is enthusiasm for the technology. If you think either one has any chance of ever being more than an enthusiast's toy, you're deluded.
Re:Deadhorse? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:BeOS Haiku (Score:2, Insightful)
We need to unite against Microsoft, the dominant power.
I don't really get that kind of thinking. First of all, it's just an operating system, not a war. I dislike Microsoft's business practices as much as the next person, but I'm not going to "unite" against a software company. I use Linux (Slackware, to be specific), but I use it because I like it, not because I want to "fight" Microsoft. I like tinkering and free software allows me to do just that. Even my (Microsoft) Xbox is running XBMC and I couldn't be happier with it.
.iso available yet, or else I'd be giving it a spin right now. If it works and people like to use it, what does it really matter to you?
I'm a little disappointed that this Haiku doesn't have an
Re:BeOS: still my favorite UI (Score:5, Insightful)
I have actually used BeOS a lot, mostly for composing. I have experienced the highest level of responsiveness from an OS with BeOS - this is still unsurpassed. When I talk about responsiveness, I specifically mean it from the point of view of the user. Applications that play some kind of media (be it MIDI, audio or video of any kind) will never, under any circumstance, be interrupted by any other process. If you copy a file while playing a video, it will not skip. The file may not copy as fast at times, or other processes may slow down, but the video will not skip. In addition to this, the user commands, be it with the mouse or with the keyboard, are always taken into consideration. No "hourglass" or other bullshit. I don't know how BeOS was engineered to achieve this, I only know that no other OS I used during and since then, achieved this sort of responsiveness.
I've used Linux a lot, and am definitely a fan of some distros, and I also like OS X quite a bit, but neither are 100% "committed" to my whim. With BeOS, what I want is listened to and executed, and fuck everything else. I guess this means BeOS would be a terrible server OS - but very often I miss exactly this kind of behaviour.
If Haiku manages to achieve the same characteristics, it will be for me, the best desktop operating system in the world. I specifically look for support of modern CPUs, chipsets, graphics cards and soundcards. Perhaps not all of them, or even not most of them, but the ones that will be supported will appear in my house.
Re:Licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
Your rant is nice and fine and all but it was Linux not BeOS that had the first 3D video drivers.
iPod is not the only game in town. If you choose to act that way, then your actions have unintended consequences.
This is why we are speaking of BeOS as resurrected abandonware.
Re:BeOS Haiku (Score:3, Insightful)
I did the same thing with Linux on a 100Mhz 486 with 32M RAM. Not only
was I playing back the mp3's but I was ripping them and converting them
at the same time. Netscape and Star Office were still perfectly usable
on top of that and my music didn't miss a beat.
I don't believe this for a second. Star Office, Netscape, and X itself were all performance-killers on 486s. No way you were playing MP3s and encoding them at the same time.
I'm not sure why you feel the need to lie, but it certainly doesn't make Linux look better.
Re:BeOS Haiku (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, and my Linux experience back then wasn't nearly as good as yours--it would skip when I sent or received an IM, saved any kind of document, when browsed to a new web page, or when it decided it needed to do some kind of housekeeping thing in the background. Not every time, but fairly often. It was better than Windows (which basically couldn't be used for anything else if you wanted to hear your music at all) but BeOS was still superior. I wasn't using super-light distros, though, so it may have been that (mostly Debian and Mandrake)
Re:BeOS Haiku (Score:4, Insightful)
Would that be the same Slashdot where we're having a lively (and so far, very reasonable) discussion on the front page about a non-Linux, non-MS OS?
Re:Article ignores NeXTstep's place (Score:5, Insightful)
Compare with Wine. The typical reason to use Wine is that you prefer Linux, but you don't have any choice because the app you need/want to use is Windows-only.
Since MacOS X isn't a monopoly, that doesn't occur very much with MacOS X. Nobody's bank tells them they can only access their account using MacOS X.
Ths typical Mac user likes MacOS because all the software and hardware is beautifully integrated and consistent, and everything Just Works. The last thing on earth that type of person is going to do is switch to Linux, but then insist on trying to run some kludged-together version of a Mac application that wasn't really designed to run on Linux.
Re:BeOS: still my favorite UI (Score:5, Insightful)
The philosophy of Linux (server) and Haiku (desktop) dictates different OS design and application. Linux seems kinda shoehorned into the desktop mold, it works but there are things that don't quite fit. Haiku isn't a server OS, it aims for the multimedia desktop. They compliment and work with each other.
Re:BeOS: still my favorite UI (Score:3, Insightful)
Who really wants a fair scheduler for a desktop OS? Most desktop users want the scheduler to respond to THEIR wishes at any given time.
Re:Doesn't impress me (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem here is that you're putting all the focus on BeOS, and not really looking at Haiku.
The goal for R1, which is getting pretty close, was to simply re-create the core BeOS R5. At that point, it will officially have recreated a stunning technology from 2000. I will assume you remember the state of Linux in 2000, right?
Post R1, that's when the work can really begin on addressing all those features you feel were lacking. Multi-user was probably the biggest one, but that is a known, and work can start on it.
Parts of BeOS are really dated now. And you are right, X is better now than it was 8 years ago. Let's see what they're able to come up with for R2 before saying it's too dated. Some improvements have already been worked in as discussed in the summary. The vector icons system is really sweet. Especially when tied with the metadata attributes of the FS, it's positively amazing.
Yes, any modern Linux distro is much better than BeOS WAS .
Give Haiku a bit of time, and I think those guys will surprise you.
Re:35 Seconds - Natively? (Score:3, Insightful)
I use Fedora 10 on my laptop and boot times are in the order of one minute and login to the KDE or Gnome session managers takes approx 30 seconds (login via command line takes about two seconds). The thing is I rarely log out, switch the machine off or even reboot unless I get a new kernel. Once I have logged in access time via a locked screen is two or three seconds. This equally applies to any member of my family where we have separate accounts but can switch between those accounts rapidly.
Yes having a fast boot time gives a certain flag waving right however you have to take everything in content and at the moment this "new" OS has a long way to go since it has to get a lot of community of support before it could be considered mainstream. This is not to say that no one will support this, personally I think there will be many who will and IMHO that is a good thing.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
links will be ported
but without graphics you face
a life without porn
Re:How secure is BeOS? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Article ignores NeXTstep's place (Score:2, Insightful)
I use Windows, OS X, and Linux on a daily basis and can find warts and things that don't Just Work in all of them. I'll allow that OS X does a better job of enforcing it's conventions for consistency's sake and if the drivers and software exist then a novice will have an easier time with hardware than Windows or Linux. Nonetheless, I don't drink the OS X-Is-Nirvana Kool-Aid.
Your mistake is assuming that everyone who uses OS X does. There's been the odd app or two on OS X I wouldn't mind seeing on Linux. GNUStep as a porting environment means that selected apps could gain some cross platform capability without sacrificing anything on OS X. That doesn't mean hordes of OS X users switching to oogy old Linux. It means some nominally OS X apps may gain Linux and BSD users or that Linux and BSD devs may bring some apps to OS X.
And I really would like to see GNUStep be a viable porting environment but I wouldn't want it to be OS X' Wine. I couldn't see that working well at all.
Re:Article ignores NeXTstep's place (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Deadhorse? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:BeOS Haiku (Score:1, Insightful)
Getting even modern Haiku developers to grasp that these APIs are nasty is essentially impossible. I think it's the regularity of the naming. BWindow, BMessage, BThis, BThat it seems to numb the brain. When you have some simple problem and the only solution they can find is to modify the entire OS, they don't recognise that it's an API problem.
It also turns out, unfortunately for them, that Be made some nasty mistakes they can't readily undo. Be's error codes (required in the C and C++ ABI) are upside down. That was forbidden by the time BeOS was available for x86 hardware (and it had been coming down the pipeline for a long time before that). But you'll still see Haiku fans demanding that people alter their perfectly good software to permit this craziness, or even trying to get the standards altered.
Re:BeOS Haiku (Score:3, Insightful)
Here, here.
I love Linux and run in wherever possible, but even after years of experience I always feel that I don't really understand 80% of what's happening under the hood.
If it weren't for Ubuntu's terrific work streamlining and simplifying the OS, I would still be running Windows in my desktop and maybe text-mode Linux in a headless server doing simple tasks (it was the only way I was able to make some sense of Linux 10 years ago and keep it from becoming overwhelmingly complex).
I used to use BeOS back in the day, and even coded one or two applications for it which were hopelessly crappy, given it was when I was learning programming.
I could make sense of BeOS, it was just simple.
For example, the kernel was a small file somewhere and drivers were separate small files somewhere else. The kernel would monitor the driver directory and if you dropped there a new driver file, the kernel would check it to see if it matched your hardware, and if so, activate it.
Media support was enabled by using a centralized codec system. Kind of like Windows does for video (and audio?) codecs, or GStreamer in Gnome, except in BeOS the codecs spanned every kind of file format, from images to office suite documents.
The OS wasn't perfect, and it wasn't always easy to do some of the more complex stuff, but what worked, worked wonderfully.
In these days where browser-based applications are becoming more advanced, I can see Haiku becoming a serious option at least for leisure computing.
I sure as hell would love to be able to use Haiku on my netbook, and if it were up to me, I'd be concentrating my development efforts into making that possible. I really think that this might be the killer application for Haiku -- a light OS which has all the basic functionality you use on the go (web, media, documents, chat).
Unfortunately, I don't have the programming chops, the time or the motivation to contribute, so I'll just have to keep cheering from the sidelines (Go, guys!)