
A decidedly non-Linux distro walkthrough: Haiku R1/beta2 - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/a-decidedly-non-linux-distro-walkthrough-haiku-r1-beta2/
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waddlesplash
(Haiku developer here.)

This review misses or misstates some pretty key details about Haiku:

* The statement that "Haiku's design diverges radically enough from modern standards to make application porting very difficult" is just plain false. Haiku is extremely POSIX compliant and we have ports of Qt (as you may have noticed from Otter), etc.

The reason there is no Firefox or Chromium is not due to any technical
limitation of the OS itself, but purely because none of us devs know a lot
about those codebases (which are larger than Haiku itself!) and want to put
the time in. We would be happy to help others port them.

* The "OS crash" on YouTube is not really an OS crash but rather a window manager / display server crash, which is much more recoverable than an actual kernel panic. Yeah, we probably should have caught that one before the release, but somehow we did not...

* It's also not the case that we do not support "any USB network interfaces whatsoever"; as the screenshot you have shows, we don't support _USB WiFi_ adapters. We do support USB ECM ethernet dongles, USB Pegasus, and at least some USB ASIX ones.

~~~
perardi
Yeah, harping on the browser situation seems a bit unfair. Chromium is
phenomenally complex, almost an operating system unto itself. It’s not like
porting a text editor.

[https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-
documents/display...](https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-
documents/displaying-a-web-page-in-chrome)

~~~
linux2647
Yes, and then there’s Emacs…

~~~
wtetzner
Actually, Emacs would probably be easier to port, given that a large chunk of
it is implemented in Emacs Lisp.

~~~
kazinator
GNU Emacs contains over a quarter million lines of C.

~~~
wtetzner
Right, compared to the 4.8 million lines of C++ in Chromium...

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smallstepforman
Jims review on Ars was a bit unfair, considering the enormous difference in
man power involved with the Haiku community and the commercial support most
other OS’s have - there is a factor of at least x1000. Yet Haiku is brave
enough to tackle an integrated system of its own. For instance, Web+ is a beta
browser purposely built to target only Haiku, whose primary goal is to use
native features. It would have been easier to port Firefox, there even was a
port 15 years ago when it was still called Mozilla. But it was sluggish then,
and a more native solution was suggested.

Although Web+ is young, thorny and buggy (now), with every iteration it gets
better, more stable, and faster. And the core OS functionality benefits with
improvements other apps can utilise. For instance, lots of blending modes were
added to AppServer to support web standards, so every native app gets these
features as well. The net classes improved, media streaming improved. The
article mentions a crash with YouTube by a refactored memory paging off-by-one
error, which has been fixed 3 weeks ago, and this bug fix benefits all apps.
All software has bugs, they get fixed eventually.

There are benefits to Haiku which most casual observers don't register in
their brief sessions. It requires a bit more “miles” before the benefits are
discovered. It’s a young system with potential. It’s a beta of R1. There will
be more revisions in the future, more iterations, more quality.

Unlike the __nix distros which are an amalgamation of various independant
components with duplicate integration channels, Haiku is building a tailored
unified system. The end benefit will be noticeable in component integration
and efficiency, which the heterogeneous __nix systems will struggle to match.
Haiku is targetting the front end user, not the invisible back end.

~~~
slantyyz
> Jims review on Ars was a bit unfair, considering the enormous difference in
> man power involved with the Haiku community and the commercial support most
> other OS’s have

I get that context matters, but if you're going to write a review about a
desktop operating system, you should be comparing it to the other desktop OSes
that are available so that readers have a point of reference.

> It’s a young system with potential. It’s a beta of R1.

To be fair, it's taken almost twenty years to get to the R1 beta. I've been
following its development on and off since the demise of BeOS. I remember
reading about all of the in-fighting from the early days of OpenBeOS, so I'm
glad that they've made all the progress they have.

What they've produced is indeed admirable, but you can't ignore the fact that
the technology world is in a very different place since they started this
project.

When I look at Haiku today, it is like opening up a time capsule of a late
90's era operating systems.

Even when I had BeOS, I still had to dual boot with Windows due to the lack of
broad application support. So as a somewhat interested observer/follower of
the OS's development since the project began -- once I get past that feeling
of nostalgia -- it's even hard for me to see the potential that you talking
about.

~~~
partdavid
Well, a more interesting review would address not only what doesn't work well
and what you can't really use it for; but also what you can use it for.

In other words, yes, it's fair to say "don't use this for surfing the web or
if you have an EVOO laptap". But ideally you would then suggest what you
_could_ use it for and how it works in those areas. I would have expected at
least to understand the state of desktop productivity software, music playing,
networking, hacking, playing games, printing, etc.

And given that a lot of readers (unlike yourself) will never have used BeOS or
be that familiar with it, what's it like? If you read an email and someone
sends you a PDF, do you save it and open it in a PDF reader? Does something
else happen? Is any of it interesting in some way?

~~~
slantyyz
"Web surfing" might seem easy to dismiss, but look at the original iPhone.
Sure, it had a nice form factor, etc., but the thing that made the iPhone a
game changer was mobile Safari, a modern web browser. Remember when Apple's
response to "hey there are no apps" was to use "web apps"?

Well, I tend to consider the bare minimum for any desktop OS to be viable is
the ability to run a modern web browser (which would let you do your email,
desktop productivity, music playing, games and PDF viewing).

Hell, I'd even go so far as to say that Haiku's next major milestone should be
to get Firefox or Chromium to run on it. With a working modern browser, all of
a sudden it's at least as functional as a Chromebook. Which means you might
actually be able to use the OS as a daily driver in spite of its other
shortcomings.

~~~
nonbirithm
> With a working modern browser, all of a sudden it's at least as functional
> as a Chromebook. Which means you might actually be able to use the OS as a
> daily driver in spite of its other shortcomings.

I find it sad that the sentiment is that a computer without a modern web
browser is not useful for daily work. And also that those browsers are
massively complex and can only be practically developed by entrenched
corporations with stable revenue streams.

What's frightening is that soon this might actually become true, if it wasn't
before.

And at the same time I see Web+ and wonder when it will ever be standards
compliant, much less stable, given the size of the team behind it.

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qubex
I remember first reading about BeOS and the BeBox in some 1994-or-thereabouts
edition of WIRED (which featured an interview with Jean-Louis Gassee).

I was utterly amazed by the screenshots of the GUI and the thought of a
computer with “parallel processors”. The slogan “one processor per person is
not enough” absolutely smote me and I was hooked. BeOS looked like everything
nineties non-dismal utopianistic science fiction looked like and the BeBox
with its dual RISC CPUs and “blinkenlights” on the front to display workload
and a “GeekPort” on the back for attaching random hardware were at the very
least very exotic machines with a lot of presence and that made quite a
statement.

At the time I also had my first interactions with NeXTStep, and I’m pleased
how things went (overall) but back at the time, it seemed like “not choosing
Plan Be” was going to have disastrous consequences. How wrong I was...

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slantyyz
> it seemed like “not choosing Plan Be” was going to have disastrous
> consequences

Can you even imagine what that alternate reality would be like?

Given how Be did not come with Steve Jobs, the entire tech landscape could
have been very different, and Apple may not be the powerhouse that it is
today.

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hyakosm
The mistake here is probably to consider HaikuOS from a linux perspective.
This OS is especially interesting because it's designed only for desktop
computers (not servers, not phones, not toasters) with fully integrated
components to develop native applications (Application Kit, Game Kit, Media
Kit, ...).

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mprev
Is it really a distro? Surely a distro is a collection of tools, applications,
and a kernel that form an operating system.

Haiku is a single project operating system, so when they make a release it's
not a distribution as such, is it?

We wouldn't call Windows 10 a Windows distro.

~~~
warpech
Oh how I wish there were Windows distros

~~~
xvilka
ReactOS[1]?

[1] [https://reactos.org/](https://reactos.org/)

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dimitar
I like the BeOS interface in that it has a nice feel of polish and integration
similar to MacOS.

Also it doesn't pretend your computer is a tablet. Even MacOS succumbed to
that trend with version 11. In 10 years someone in Silicon Valley is going to
rediscover classic mouse UI and sell it as something new and advances.

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f0ok
"Why doesn’t the tilde key work properly?

The tilde ~ key is a dead key, used to type characters like ñ."

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qwerty456127
Haiku is beautiful. I wish it gained more traction (so I could run it on bare
metal and use it for all my daily tasks once) without changing its look-and-
feel.

Can I download the Qt theme by the way? I want to style my KDE system like
Haiku.

~~~
waddlesplash
Nope, you can't, because the Qt theme actually uses Haiku's native control-
drawing APIs under the hood, just like the Qt Windows theme uses.

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themodelplumber
> Much like TempleOS, it's not very directly useful

I thought this part of the review was a bit over the top. The author seems to
conflate "useful to me" with "useful to anyone" throughout. And in service of
such a position, some very black and white conclusions are reached.

Where utility is concerned, we live in a world where bullet journaling on
paper is still very popular and also a relatively recent development. It's not
exactly the same experience as your brand new tablet may offer, but it's not
expected to be. Similarly, in my experience, Haiku was very directly useful,
but I didn't go into the experience expecting to surf the Ars website or watch
videos on YouTube. I used Haiku on a netbook, and it was a terrific,
appropriate, and even tranquil, environment for writing, organizing, planning,
and reading.

In short, I found that Haiku was useful and desirable for getting away--and
this includes getting away from the exact conditions the author of this review
was trying to equate with a minimum bar for a personal standard of utility.

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yellowapple
> The next browser we tried, Otter, did a better job with Ars—but Otter failed
> to render video in either YouTube or Vimeo.

That's a smidge surprising, since Otter on Haiku x86-64 (on my laptop) does
indeed render at least YouTube videos fine (I'm playing "Pamela" by Toto on it
right now), albeit not as performantly as I'd have hoped (long time to load,
and some stuttering at the start of every video).

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knuffced
The comparison with TempleOS was a real low blow and it makes me wonder if the
reviewer is being entirely serious or just sees all operating systems not
immediately useful to him to be a total waste of time.

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jankotek
I used Beos way back in 2001 as my main OS. Compared to linux it was more
stable and used less resources. Great to se it still exists.

