
Trying to work in Haiku, the BeOS successor - awiesenhofer
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/ars-spends-too-much-time-trying-to-work-in-haiku-the-beos-successor/
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bobcallme
Another garbage article brought to you by Ars Technica. People seem to have
this habit of complaining about projects that are gratis, have few developers
and little to no funding. People should be grateful that these projects exist
or work at all. All of these drive-by hit pieces are getting really pathetic
and Ars Technica is not the only "tech news" tabloid doing this.

I personally support the work of the Haiku project and have not had as many
issues as the writer of this article. Maybe if so many sites were not bloated
with garbage, the web browser would not have fallen over. Sites should have a
fallback mode in case of situations where js is not turned on or the browser
is not HTML5 compliant. As for the email client falling over, I think there is
more at play than the author is letting on.

~~~
qubex
Another (occasional) Haiku user and supporter here. This article isn't even a
review of the OS, it's just a web-browser grumbling session. In any OS I
hardly ever use the browser for work-related tasks.

~~~
Techn0logist
What job field are you in? I think I've been in web development too long,
because this is not my experience.

~~~
qubex
I'm the CEO of the family firm. Formerly I was the CFO. I'm not involved in IT
despite my history and prior experience.

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zokier
I found the article bit disappointing. Basically the author focused almost
exclusively on the failings of the browser. Of course I suppose that reflects
on authors profession (being a writer for a web publication), but I would have
hoped to see attempt at bit more diverse tasks.

~~~
intoverflow2
>Of course I suppose that reflects on authors profession (being a writer for a
web publication)

Far too much of this navel gazing when reviewing products from the tech press
these days. Like the iPad being championed as a work device just because you
can write up a blog post and a tweet on it and a complete disregard for any
profession that isn't accomplished only via tweets and blog posts.

Hilarious a tech blog site being held up as a basic challenge for a web
browser. IIRC the early WebKit team had extensive hacks and work arounds to
make sure the abysmal code of major sites like this and newspapers actually
rendered "correctly".

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qubex
I have a very fond memory of BeOS, I had a BeBox way back in the second half
of the nineties. It was my first multi-processor (now "multicore") system and
I've never looked back since. The system, the philosophy, and the OS were
ahead of their time by leaps and bounds. That said, at the time it was a
solution in search of a problem.

I've been trying out Haiku for several years. I have to say that it brings
back very fond memories and is astoundingly feature-complete, but the
limitations of its architecture is beginning to show: the system has no in-
built notion of security and lacks even the most basic primitives for such
purposes insofar as it isn't multi-user and has no notion of access
privileges. The architecture is POSIX-complete but without users it is
surprisingly limited.

Of course there is no real chance of extending the architecture to 64 bits or
of porting it to non-x86 architectures.

Haiku is a great effort, but it's a requiem for what BeOS could have been.

EDIT: it seems that there is a 64-bit version I was unaware of.

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ZenoArrow
Based on what I've seen from the Haiku OS website and mailing lists, I believe
the first beta of Haiku R1 is due to be released relatively soon (in the next
6 months, at the latest). Seems a shame this article had to be written before
then, but I suppose at least a few more people might be made aware of its
existence.

The main thing that was holding back the next release was the infrastructure
around the package manager, but most of the development hurdles with this seem
to be sorted. There's some ongoing work to build packages before the beta
release, but I can't see that taking the rest of the year.

~~~
eschaton
Honestly, not having a steady semiannual or annual release cadence—even if
each release is a small increment over the last—has probably held Haiku back
more than anything else.

Many people don't want to even try nightly builds, so they try the last many-
yeas-old release, see issues many of which are already fixed, and write it
off.

Were I them, I'd only block a new release on the ability to do manual and
automatic updates from the UI. From there everything else is gravy.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Releases are a double edged sword though. Regular releases can drive more
interest, but that also means more time spent answering queries and a faster
accumulation of technical debt.

By iterating on ideas away from user demands, you can more quickly make
progress with less concern about breaking changes. However, this period is
only really useful whilst the fundamental parts of the software are getting
implemented. Some would argue that package management is a fundamental part of
an OS, others would not.

In other words, I'd expect that you'll see more regular releases after the
first beta is out.

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jhbadger
Basically my experience as well. I check it out every couple of years for
nostalgia sake. It really is fairly feature complete for a BeOS clone. The
problem is (besides the lack of a modern web browser for it) is that what was
amazing about BeOS 20+ years ago is pretty much what is expected by any OS
these days.

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nkoren
Except the part where you could run the whole OS, and a browser, off a 1.44mb
floppy.

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krylon
If that matters to you, Menuet OS[1] will still run off a floppy.

The bigger problem, these days, is finding a floppy drive that still works,
and a floppy disk. I had to install MS DOS 6.22 on two computers about two
years ago, and finding three floppy disks for the installation media was
rather challenging. ;-)

[1] [http://menuetos.net/download.htm](http://menuetos.net/download.htm)

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redm
I too used Be-os in the late 90's. Our application was a stand alone internet
browsing device. Lots of potential in the OS that was never realized, maybe if
Apple had bought it over Next.

Today, I don't think we need another under-developed desktop OS; if anything,
pouring more resources into Linux to get something that's actually competitive
with MacOS and Windows instead of just semi-competitive would be a better use
of time. Alas, after 20 years of waiting, I feel like that's unlikely to
happen either.

~~~
agumonkey
JL Gassee took the risk of asking the high price, Apple refused... we know the
rest.

Rewatching late 90s BeOs demos made me really emotional. The actual
performance, the mindset, the aesthetics so much was right. Felt better than
my latest linux on a 2007 dual core.

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DannyBee
I remember porting gcc 3 and GDB to BeOS. Reading this article, it doesn't
look like the 32 bit version ever progressed past that :)

~~~
badsectoracula
AFAIK the problem lies with GCC breaking the ABI. Haiku tries to solve the
issue by building the userspace APIs with multiple GCC versions to preserve
the ABI for older apps. I do not think this is a good idea in long term though
since you need to keep older GCC versions around to provide backwards
compatibility _and_ make sure your C++ code compiles with all GCC versions
from 2 to whatever is the latest one.

A better solution would be for GCC to provide means for working with binaries
and libraries produced with older versions of the C++ compiler, ideally
including 2.

Perhaps a more realistic solution would be to create "proxy" libraries for the
previous GCC versions that all they do is to redirect the calls to the latest
version.

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rvense
OpenBeOS started just after Be folded. Binary compatibility was a priority,
and remained so for a long time. I think especially still having an office
suite (Gobe Production) was important, but it is my impression that this
concern has faded.

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dwhitney
I used BeOS back in the day too. Doesn't look like Haiku is making much
headway. Are there any alternate operating systems that are?

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SyneRyder
I'm not sure about headway, but the last ReactOS release took me from "blue
screens constantly, unusable" to "actually able to run the Windows apps I
make". It's possible I could actually get some work done and compile my
software using it.

Problem is, when I actually _need_ to get work done, it's easier to just use
Windows 10.

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_Codemonkeyism
I did love my Bebox as it was the first multi core I've owned. The LEDs were
amazing. Sadly it didn't have a brighter future.

~~~
qubex
Do you still have it? My dual-603e is still in working condition, but I
preferred the colour scheme of the original dual-603.

