Haiku OS.

D

Dendros

I found this OS by pure chance and it seems really interesting, I burned a live image of it on DVD to test it a bit. It is an open-source OS and its interface is unique in fact it seems to be a GUI-centric OS like Windows or MacOS and from what I have read, it's based on a dead commercial OS - BeOS, in the same way in which ReactOS is a free re-creation of Windows.

It does not seem to be an Unix-like OS, although I may be very wrong on this. For example it doesn't seem to have a multi-user structure and privilege separation, only one user is created and this user is an administrator without a password so I don't think it's very secure. But it does run many Linux apps, has a central repository and a package manager like a Linux distro or a BSD OS, I find this really interesting and a bit weird.
Compared to Linux or BSD it's lacking many drivers, for example no hardware acceleration at all, but considering that it's still in its infancy, it's OK.

It's still in beta phase but I would like to see and test a production version of it. Has anyone ever heard of it and gave it a try?
 
Yes.
Seeing that there is a certain 'overlap' in persons between BeOS and QT, it is no wonder that many KDE apps port easy. It's POSIX and it has a solo place on one of my laptops. The file system is also good integrated into the rest, a splendid idea.
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Haiku has many great ideas I wish FreeBSD had for the desktop. Particularly it’s desktop related API ”kits” and how they can be called/integrated with developing GUI apps. It reminds me of Cocoa from macOS. Good stuff indeed.
 
They were on the way to replace the old macOS9 but overplayed their cards. Sad it went that way. Imagine Apple without Steve...
 
I'm testing Haiku from time to time and my impression is that work has greatly accelerated over the past year.
Its UI looks a bit odd at first but there are some interesting concepts behind that are worth having a closer look at.
It's developers also seem very user-oriented and I really like that!
 
Yep. Steve's Job. He got a new one at the local Apple shop.

Here he is working now:

steves_job.jpg


Of course his name badge says Dillon, so not to confuse the customers in thinking he was the founder.
 
After more testing, I can say that Haiku is definitely not ready for regular use. I had quite a few crashes and weird graphical glitches but I don't bash on it because I understand that it's still in development. There is an interesting fact: it seems that Haiku uses some FreeBSD drivers, mainly for network and Wi-Fi adapters.
I wonder how long will it take for Haiku to be more stable and therefore useable.
 
From what I have read, this ArcaOS is a closed-source, commercial OS so no wonder that its development was much faster. On the other hand, Haiku is a free and open-source OS developed by volunteers in their spare time so it's a bit unfair to compare it with ArcaOS.

I believe that Haiku will eventually have a production release, if some more users and developers will become more interested in it.
 
anonymous9 said:
ArcaOS was announced in October 2015 and released in May 2017. Haiku has been in development for 11 years; it is probably safe to assume it will never have a production release.
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Warp (the popular OS/2) came out in 1994. Which means that Haiku (being built from scratch) has another 15 years of development before you can begin to make that assumption ;)
 
There are already enough production-grade OS, nobody's waiting for one more, so I don't think projects such as Haiku aim at producing yet another one. ;)
 
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anonymous9 said:
I'd be surprised if ArcaOS has more developers than Haiku. ArcaOS still ships with Java 6 and when I had a valid subscription I asked them to get Java 8 and said it might also attract more users. The answer was time and money of why they can't. So being commercial doesn't matter in some cases.

Also, Serenity Systems developed eComStation after IBM ended Warp. eComStation had a few releases, but with version 2.1 GA, Mensys BV took over development. A beta release of 2.2 was released by XEU.com, but it never went GA. You can still purchase eComStation 2.1 GA from XEU.com. So there is no guarantee Haiku will ever release a production ready product. A commercial company selling eComStation never made it out of 2.2 beta.

I bought a copy of both eComStation and ArcaOS. But my subscription isn't valid for ArcaOS anymore. Interestingly, ArcaOS only allows a 1:1 installation, meaning one license per machine. But eComstation allowed you (maybe still does) to install on three machines for each license.
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"Time and money" is always a ridiculous excuse to not doing something. Like mobile developers when asked "why the device X will not receive version X if the hardware is still good". I guess the opensource community are all rich at this point.
 
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Menelkir said:
"Time and money" is always a ridiculous excuse to not doing something.
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Not in the case of ArcaOS, which is a commercial OS.
IBM has abandoned OS/2 for a reason and, in 2020, who cares about an OS/2 descendant? Very few people, indeed.
The developers of ArcaOS are even lucky that there still are people willing to pay for it.
So if they want to make a living out of it, they'd better be very careful about how they use their time and money!
 
It is still used by banks and some ATMs. Re-verify that software may be really expensive, if it can be replaced in any case.
 
20-100-2fe said:
Not in the case of ArcaOS, which is a commercial OS.
IBM has abandoned OS/2 for a reason and, in 2020, who cares about an OS/2 descendant? Very few people, indeed.
The developers of ArcaOS are even lucky that there still are people willing to pay for it.
So if they want to make a living out of it, they'd better be very careful about how they use their time and money!
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Yeah but if some of their customers need a feature, I'm pretty sure they'll do the job instead of saying that "you already paid but it costs money".
 
Haiku has seen progress of porting QtWebEngine and sooner or later will ended up with a QtWebEngine-powered Otter browser. This really filled most of the requirements for a modern browser on this OS. As they got QtWebEngine (note: OpenIndiana even doesn't have QtWebKit let alone QtWebEngine!), the day they got Chromium ported and running is not that far. They have good and passionate developers, good for them.

But the current Haiku is very fragile. It's somewhat like Windows XP. When a single application crashes (most of the time it's a GUI application), if you are lucky it will show a dialog to allow you to terminate that program. The dialog being shown is a story, but the program could be peacefully terminate is another story. Sometimes you are lucky that it's just terminate without hanging the whole system. Sometimes you are not, the whole system just hangs and the only way to get back to a working state is reset the system. Sometimes if you are lucky, you could use ProcessController to terminate the problematic process. Sometimes you are just not that lucky. It's a lottery game!

The current state of it hardware support is not really good. There is no graphics aceleration at all. The last time I tried it on my real hardware, it failed to work with my keyboard. The system is in an unusable state so I have to abandon the idea of having it on real hardware. On VirtualBox, it worked fine but the mouse is always seems to lagging, the overall system experience is not smooth at all. I think Haiku is an interesting OS but I will not messing with it anymore, either on real hardware or virtualized. I want to focus on FreeBSD more.
 
Dendros said:
I wonder how long will it take for Haiku to be more stable and therefore useable.
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Haiku came from BeOS. I had a great interest in Be when it was active. So I also had interest in Haiku when it came out. I'm guessing but this was at least 10 years ago? If it's not stable to some extent by now then I have no interest anymore.
 
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