
What makes BeOS and Haiku unique - valeg
https://osvoyager.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/what-makes-beos-and-haiku-unique/
======
spystath
I don't know if this is nostalgia talking but there is something particularly
attractive about the BeOS and Haiku desktop both in terms of design and
aesthetics. The interface actually has a certain depth and this is consistent
across icons, windows, dialogs, menus, buttons, etc. It's a shame that
interfaces nowadays are completely flat. They are almost... expressionless and
with the exception of the odd drop shadow they completely lack a third
dimension. When I first learned of Haiku (and BeOS), back when Gnome was in
the 2.x days, I was so impressed by the interface that I installed a look-
alike desktop and icon theme. I used it for quite a long time until GTK+ 3.x
eventually became prevalent.

~~~
agumonkey
All 90s GUIs have something that I miss[1]. I think the flat movement was a
desire for hyper genericity .. but turns out that a bit (just a bit) of visual
signal and faux skeumorphism (some widgets emulated actual LED keys found on
hardware) is good.

ps: also, flat came after both the aqua trend where effects were everywhere
and skeumorphism was pushed higher. Not that surprising in a way.

[1] beos, win311, macos classic, win95 (office97 era) and nt5

~~~
marcosdumay
I mis those from the 90's GUIs:

\- Standard interaction widgets. There was no breaking the scroll, there was
no button that you can't discover how to press.

\- Expert oriented interfaces. There was no action without a shortcut. The
most complex software always had some CLI or an API (optionally with an
intepreter).

\- Discoverability features. The sortcut descriptions were embedded on the
same places you had to click to get the functionality. Buttons were clearly
marked. There was almost always some text area telling you what was happening.

I don't miss skeumorphism, but it was often used to mark real features, and
those features were gone with the arbitrary skeumorphisms. Current GUI trends
were created by people with no interest on making their software useful,
instead they only keep an eye on showroom conversion rate. (Whether they are
right or not on doing so, it's a problem nonetheless.)

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Current GUI trends were created by people with no interest on making their
> software useful, instead they only keep an eye on showroom conversion rate.
> (Whether they are right or not on doing so, it 's a problem nonetheless.)_

Yeah, I feel A/B testing is really _the_ place where Satan secretly influences
the world. I'm losing track of how many times I've seen user-hostile or
application-debiliating decisions justified by "data" on user behaviour.
Something is very wrong here.

~~~
zapzupnz
Hello, Office's Ribbon.

# Runs horizontally.

\- Result: wastes precious vertical space on low-resolution widescreen
displays (i.e. business displays and most notebooks) that should be dedicated
to showing the document body.

# Due to being horizontal, GUI items appear/disappear depending on window
width.

\- Result 1: having two documents on screen can be disadvantageous compared to
having one on screen because a lot of the GUI items aren't showing or are
hidden in submenus, encouraging wasting screen real estate by only having one
document on the entire screen.

\- Result 2: due to the Ribbon's horizontality, instead of having the elements
stay on screen in a consistent manner and be easily scrollable, the interface
constantly surprises the user by unexpectedly hiding even key GUI items.

# No option to disable.

\- Result: if you wanted to have certain GUI items visible at the same time…
well, tough. If the floating palette that inconsistently appears when the user
places the mouse cursor over certain elements doesn't have your favourite
item, then you're out of luck if the items you want to use exist under
different tab groupings.

iWork '09 and prior had the best design: a main toolbar with general items, a
smaller context-sensitive toolbar underneath, and context-sensitive inspector
windows. If the revamped iWork had simply docked those context-sensitive
inspectors, rather than get rid of the context-sensitive toolbar, it mightn't
have received such a poor response.

The irony is that Office 2003 (and a few releases prior) already had
inspectors on the side, and those would have been perfect given the prevalence
of widescreen displays, leaving as much vertical space for the display of the
document body as possible.

LibreOffice seems to have three GUI modes; one like iWork, one like the old
Office, and one like the Ribbon.

~~~
leoedin
I've been using my taskbar on the side of the screen for the past decade,
because every screen I use has an excess of width and limited height. I seem
to be very much in a minority here - I guess people don't change things from
default?

~~~
snazz
> I guess people don’t change things from default?

Precisely. The average user assumes (often correctly) that the way things are
is the way things are. When it comes to what technical people think are basic
features (pairing a wireless keyboard to an iPad, or changing default text
size on iPhones, or any number of similar tasks on any system), the modern
“ease of use” guidelines suggest hiding everything away as much as possible,
severely limiting setting discoverability.

~~~
bdamm
Well, I consider myself an expert user, but I rarely change the default
because I switch between environments so often that it would represent a major
time overhead to extensively customize application to the way I really want
them. And besides, the way I really want them is so far away from the way they
are shipped that it's normally unrealistic to maintain that level of
customization.

So I get used to the defaults. It makes it easier to throw out, reinstall, or
switch environments if I need to. In any given day I use 5 or 6 different
primary environments.

~~~
xte
Probably i switch so often because of actual limited and limiting system
design: in a Plan9-like world user's desktop is the center of the world and
anything start from it and being done and used from it. In a commercial world
it's common to have tons of crappy devices (so you pay more things more often)
and no real integration.

Time ago I have a discussion with a "commercial" guy who say that the sole
really integrated platforms are cloud&mobile so they are obviously the future
because we are a society and we need to interoperate. I respond plugging my
laptop HDMI into the room projector and show a quick Emacs/EXWM(-X) demo:
email? Hit a single key (F6 in my case) and my MUA (notmuch-emacs) popup
instantly. On top of it's big search bar I have few single-key accessible
saved searches and bottom the big series of tags, a far superior "dashboard"
than bloated GMail UI. Of course compose a new message can happen with a
single key at any time with any open application I have focused. Oh I imaging
someone demand me a demo, a quick M-x skeletor (ivy-completed) popup, a single
key to choose beamer slide, quick typing and slides are made, tested locally
and uploaded. Another imaginary interruption and another task (skeletor again
+ org-mode), an imaginary patch sent via mail and voilà: magit integration.
All datas are really integrated and usable in a consistent environment,
anything can be done in a snap and NO other monster modern GUI or '90-style
can do the same. That's the past (starting from LispM/MIT AI lab glory time)
and the future like we have had "golden age" of ancient Greek polis and more
modern "middle (dark) age" and again a modern age. That's integration and
customization. No need to switch between systems (while can be done easily
with NixOS/GuixSD + homeManager/GNU stow + unison). My system is main and I
can replicate/extend it on any decent hw as nedeed. That's "switching systems"
IMO :-)

~~~
zapzupnz
I think you're talking about something very different than that about which
the person to whom you responded was talking.

I'm assuming they were talking about different systems they don't own, aren't
their own systems, and over which they don't have the sort of control to
install their own software and set things up using their personal
configuration files.

It's awesome that you've got, or at least dreamt up, a system that works for
you, but if you're able to use that exact system on every single machine you
use, that isn't quite what was being described. That's an ideal, but only
really feasible for personal machines.

Also, I'm going to get downvoted, but please put in a few line breaks.

~~~
xte
My point is that we should not normally need to use "other machines", of
course for work there are requisite but tech users should IMO do their best to
avoid working in bad environment/do their best to convince their company let
them use productive software. It _maybe_ a dream but IME it works at least if
you are an admin or a relevant devs or you find a good place to work in. Of
course it doesn't work if you are an administrative or other roles...

> Also, I'm going to get downvoted, but please put in a few line breaks.

I still have to learn the idiosyncratic way HN handle text... I do put
linebreaks, I'm edit in Emacs and paste here, however HN mess it up...

~~~
pferde
There was a nice related article linked on HN last week:
[https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/optimize-your-programming-
dec...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/optimize-your-programming-decisions-
for-the-95-percent-not-the-5-percent)

It mostly deals with decisions during programming, but the first part of the
article describes exactly this problem.

~~~
xte
My answer is that "the best" of anything are always a small percentage so I
care "my élite" not the masses...

Always remember a thing: from diversity born evolution, from standard borne
Ford-model workers.

------
snazz
Am I the only one who wants a modern OS designed for single-user use as
opposed to one that descends from a long line of time-sharing systems? That
isn’t a mobile operating system?

~~~
andai
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm becoming a big fan of
minimalism and simplicity.

I find it particularly funny that Android is based on an OS designed for
thousands of simultaneous users (although they did get some nice security /
isolation out of it).

~~~
paulddraper
> although they did get some nice security / isolation out of it

It's hard to understate this.

The rampant security vulns of Windows were due largely to its heritage as a
single user, sparingly networked computer.

~~~
snazz
As much as I agree with this, are security and single-user truly mutally
exclusive, or is it just that all the single user operating systems we know of
(correct me if I'm wrong) have poor security records?

~~~
phamilton
Solving multi user inherently results in building isolation which translates
well to security.

~~~
earenndil
But you can build isolation as a part of single user.

~~~
phamilton
Absolutely. I'm not saying you can't build it, I'm just saying that P(correct
security | correct multi user) > P(correct security) because you already have
an isolation mechanism in place.

~~~
earenndil
Not necessarily. You can design your isolation system to be better suited to a
single user system, rather than hacking it into a system which was meant to
support multiple human users.

~~~
phamilton
Again, not disagreeing. Just saying that in aggregate, and from looking at
history, the requirement of isolation in multi user systems trends towards
better security.

You can absolutely build a better single user system.

------
Fronzie
Back in the day, BeOS used to be quite more capable with regards to multi-
threading. The used to demo this with multiple videos playing.

Does BeOS/Haiku still have a technological edge somewhere (compared to say,
linux or windows)?

~~~
kitsunesoba
Haiku doesn’t have much of a technological edge at the moment, given that the
current goal is to reproduce BeOS 5 PE to its fullest extent before
modernizing.

Where it does have an edge, though, is how’s its being designed first and
foremost as a desktop OS with responsiveness as the top priority above all
else. The latter especially is depressingly uncommon in modern operating
systems.

~~~
mdasen
As someone who likes responsiveness, I've always wanted BeOS to take off.
However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter?

I'm running three apps right now: VSCode, Slack, and a web browser. Given that
VSCode and Slack are basically other browsers, how much does OS responsiveness
matter? Has the responsiveness battle just moved to the browser?

How much are people really running other than a web browser on a
desktop/laptop now-a-days? When I evaluate an OS today, I'm going to care
about how good its trackpad drivers are, whether I'm likely to have wifi
issues, whether it can run the *nix tools I need to do my work, maybe whether
I like the way it switches between windows/apps, and whether there are modern
browsers to run on it. Responsiveness was a big deal back when I was running a
Pentium II and BeOS had amazing demos (and I presume real-world usage) with
uninterrupted video while multi-tasking and just buttery-smooth context
switching in an era where you'd have your system lock-up. Heck, it was many
years before OS X got past the beach ball of death happening constantly.

However, today, it's my browser that locks up; it's my browser that I want to
be able to smoothly scroll through a web page.

I really want Haiku to succeed, but it feels like we might have moved beyond
the OS for so much that the OS can't have the same impact it once had. On the
one hand, the web has made it so that alternative OSs don't need a boat load
of software to be usable. On the other hand, because the browser is now the
OS, the usefulness of an alternative OS is lower.

~~~
reaperducer
_How much are people really running other than a web browser on a desktop
/laptop now-a-days?_

Currently open on my machine:

\- Safari

\- Firefox (streaming audio)

\- A program converting a 500 page PDF to 500 300dpi PNGs

\- A bash script extracting PDFs from a municipal web site.

\- A program downloading my video viewing for the week and converting it to a
format better suited for my iPad

\- iTunes serving audio and video to TVs in two different rooms

\- An FTP program doing weekly backups

\- A mail client

\- A VPN client

\- A spreadsheet

\- An IDE (Coda2)

And if I were to look at my wife's laptop, I can guarantee that she's running
more than just a web browser, and she's not technically inclined.

People have been pushing browser-only machines since the days of Novell's
"thin client" strategy in the 90's. Netbooks were a fad. Consumption-only
gained a small amount of traction recently with Chromebooks, but even the non-
technical people in my office are dumping their Chromebooks for real laptops
these days because they realize they have needs beyond Google's ecosystem.

Maybe we'll get there some day. But for now, if you want a laptop computer,
you have to have an actual laptop computer.

~~~
Klonoar
This is so incredibly niche, though. The average person wouldn't run half this
stuff.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
The idea of the "average person" is always something of a red herring, though.
The stuff the OP listed was:

\- Safari

A lot of people run web browsers.

\- Firefox (streaming audio)

A lot of people stream audio.

\- A program converting a 500 page PDF to 500 300dpi PNGs

That's a weird one, sure.

\- A bash script extracting PDFs from a municipal web site.

Also weird, but "average people" need to do some kind of automation once in a
blue moon, so let's not discount that.

\- A program downloading my video viewing for the week and converting it to a
format better suited for my iPad

The conversion is unusual, but people download videos to their iPad.

\- iTunes serving audio and video to TVs in two different rooms

A little niche, but "media server" is still a thing.

\- An FTP program doing weekly backups

Backups are a thing. A thing more people should be doing, but definitely a
thing.

\- A mail client

Not niche at all.

\- A VPN client

Not niche if your office requires a VPN. A lot do.

\- A spreadsheet

Definitely not niche.

\- An IDE (Coda2)

Sorta niche-y, but think of it as "text editor" and it's less so: it could be
a word processor, or Scrivener.

------
YetAnotherNick
Sometimes, I feel bad for OS with lower number of users like these, FreeBSD
etc. There are so many important things in OS that even if it really excels in
few things, it doesn't really count. The work that goes into creating these is
phenomenal, yet I cannot replace my Mac. I have been paying at least $300
extra for a laptop and have been making so many compromises on the recent
hardware.

~~~
lcampbell
Eh, I've been running FreeBSD on my primary desktop for about a decade now
(and have been running it on every server I can get my grubby hands on). It's
equally painful for me to use any other OS because of similar workflow issues.
We've all got a wide variety of tasks to complete and a good handful of
specialized tools to complete them with -- use whatever works best. If you're
doing server work, I recommend giving FreeBSD a trial run!

------
laumars
BeOS was by far my favourite operating system of that era. Fantastic platform
that really put the competition to shame. Fast, stable, pretty and powerful.

~~~
ChristianGeek
Same here. I still remember when I first booted it up and ran a demo app
(video playing on all sides of a rotating cube), how much it put OS 9 to shame
in terms of responsiveness and performance. I’m still pissed that Apple went
with NeXTSTEP instead of BeOS for OS X, but I’m glad they went with something.

------
gradys
Does anyone here use Haiku regularly? Would you recommend it?

~~~
dleslie
I do. It's fantastic for browser-and-code hacktops with limited ability.

------
rixrax
I realize this maybe a corner case and slightly off-topic, but it would be
really nice to be able to boot Haiku via PXE boot in our network
infrastructure. This would make it so much easier for people to play with it
casually. It seems[0] that there has been some effort to support this, but
last time I tried (about 3 months a go), I couldn't get it boot with couple of
hours effort (I know, may very well be user error ;-) ).

If anyone from Haiku is reading, would be really cool if you also offered
network bootable image by default that can successfully boot from 'standard'
PXE boot server setup.

[0] [https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/network_booting/](https://www.haiku-
os.org/guides/network_booting/)

~~~
waddlesplash
The PXE bootloader was broken following the merge of the package manager
(which as this article implies, required changes to the boot process.) Nobody
has taken the time to fix it again since then... help wanted, I guess.

------
yawaramin
I only read about BeOS in exuberant PC World articles in the early '00s, but I
got the impression it was really, really good–pre-emptive multi-tasking and
all. Now this blog post says that Haiku has device servers. That sounds like
the 'fast flyweight delegation' technique described here:
[https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/12/04/ffwd-delegation-is-
much-...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/12/04/ffwd-delegation-is-much-faster-
than-you-think/) ... and also used by the Erlang VM.

------
k__
Wasn't that the base of Zeta? An OS sold by a home shopping channel around
2000.

I never understood the hype and then they went bust.

~~~
rayiner
Zeta was based on binaries of BeOS Dano (what was going to be the next version
of BeOS before Be went under). It's unclear whether the company ever had the
source code.

~~~
waddlesplash
They absolutely did. What came out towards the end was that they didn't really
have a license for it; it's likely they had based their work on the BeOS
source code leak that occurred in the last few weeks of Be Inc.'s existence.

------
snvzz
For some reason, there's no mention of datatypes, a very nice concept they
took from AmigaOS3.

------
mimixco
Thank you for posting this! Just got a new USB SSD stick and I'm gonna try it
out. :-)

------
qwerty456127
Haiku is just so cool (although it probably can be made even better, UI
included, e.g. I really love the modern Win7/macOS/KDE5/Unity desktops idea od
using one icon for both launching and minimizing/restoring/switching an app).
I wish it could get more popular and developed more actively. I'd also love to
have Haiku-like window management (and widgets toolkit skin if possible, but
this is less important of course) on Linux (in KDE preferably).

------
xte
Sincerely the sole BeOS concept I found really nice that is also by some
extent in NEXT is the "fs database" or the ability to "query" storage by file
types etc vs only access in a classic files/directories tree.

On package management IMO Nix and derived Guix are real revolution...

------
Ericson2314
Some of this stuff sounds vaguely reminiscent of Nix. Which is unfortunate. I
rather see a port of Nix(pkgs) to Haiku so Haiku is able to continue their
wonderful _unique_ innovations rather than reinvent the (albeit rarer and
hirer quality) wheel.

~~~
PyroLagus
What except for the rollback reminds you of Nix?

~~~
Ericson2314
The immutable filesystem stuff that goes with it. Even if that's not to much,
are the goals different? I'd assume they're compatible enough.

------
hanniabu
Linux could kill windows and Microsoft if it just had an improved UI.
Currently it looks like a mashup between windows and mac and it's just not
working. I've noticed improvements over the years getting closer to Apple's
designs, but not quite there and it's unfortunate how much that last minute
matters. Once that list mile is covered I think we'll see linux becoming more
and more popular as a standard OS.

If Office Libre were to update their UI I think it would make a killer
combination.

~~~
vedantroy
I think more then "prettier UI" is necessary. I switched from Windows to Linux
a few months ago, and while I appreciate being able to use more developer
tools and not have annoying ads in my OS, I feel like Linux is just more
unstable. My wifi/bluetooth randomly stop working, forcing me to restart my
computer. That's unacceptable.

~~~
davemp
Unfortunately there's not much the Linux community can do about bad drivers.
(I assume you have some broadcom chip). The only people really equipped to
write the drivers are the vendors. The documents and firmware running on the
chips are not published and you can't realistically email their engineers. So
Linux devs are basically SOL. Hats off to the legends who sit down and reverse
what's needed anyways.

In general, vendors only have financial incentive to get windows drivers
working well.

It's the self defeating prophecy of the Linux desktop.

Apple spins their own hardware and I'm sure gets proper documents from the
vendors they select.

~~~
IshKebab
Yes there is. Windows can restart it's graphics drivers of they crash for
example. And it has a stable driver ABI so companies can actually release
closed source or out-of-tree drivers in a sane way.

Linux just assumes that all drivers _must_ be perfect with no bugs, and _must_
be open source and distributed with Linux itself. That's just not realistic.

~~~
beagle3
Upgrading Windows from 7 to 10 caused s lot of older devices to stop working
for a lot of people, despite the stable ABI; in most cases, it was just driver
unavailability and not incompatibility, but that’s a distinction without a
difference for most users.

Linux just keeps on working with old devices across distributions and updates.

Linux takes 6m-24m till vendor unsupported drivers stabilize - but at that
point, it works way better than windows (and basically forever) in my
experience.

~~~
pjmlp
That is simply not true.

Old drivers get shaved out of the kernel tree and good luck getting them to
work again in more modern kernel versions.

~~~
beagle3
I am sure they are, as was the i386. And yet, from experience of ~20 people,
none had hardware obsoleted by Ubuntu, even very old hardware - though some
had hardware obsoleted by win10 (which was in some cases the trigger to try
Ubuntu)

~~~
pjmlp
Tell that to my AMD card, which no longer has the same OpenGL support level as
before they decided to reboot the Radeon drivers.

[https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd-
catalys...](https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd-catalyst-
fglrx-driver-16-04)

Sure, maybe I can take some weekends off to port the missing features to new
kernels....

------
pjmlp
Being one of the first C++ OSes. I really enjoyed that feature.

And having a certain Amiga feeling to its culture and multimedia capabilities.

------
Annatar
"3\. States"

Solaris 10 (and now by heritage illumos) has had this with beadm(1M) since ten
years ago, if not longer.

------
eecc
If it runs the jvm, a modern browser and it handles laptop standby I’m sold

~~~
waddlesplash
OpenJDK 1.8 is (finally) back, and with Swing support even (though only on
32-bit, it still needs to be boostrapped on 64-bit.)

WebPositive works "acceptably", Otter/QupZilla are significantly better. All
can at least play YouTube, etc.

We don't have standby support at all. :/ Most of the device hooks are there,
and we use ACPICA for ACPI support, so it's just a matter of wiring all the
right things up and adding some buttons... but we are pretty starved for time
as-is, so nobody is working on it at present.

------
protomyth
Looking at the screenshots, I really still like the look of the windows and
icons, but the system font is really holding it back. I didn't realize how bad
it looked compared to modern system fonts. I get the feeling a font switch
would really improve the look.

~~~
Gracana
The screenshots are scaled a bit. They look better full-size:
[https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/dano-people-
in...](https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/dano-people-info.png)

~~~
gmueckl
Hm, character spacing is pretty much broken in this screenshot. Not sure what
is going on there, but it is certainly not completely correct.

~~~
waddlesplash
That's a screenshot of BeOS, so the font rendering engine behind that is from
1998. Not very surprising, then :)

~~~
protomyth
Well, it looks the same in [https://www.haiku-
os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/](https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/)

~~~
waddlesplash
Those screenshots are DejaVu Sans, not Noto Sans, and with a different font
rendering engine than the ones in this article. We should probably update
those, though.

~~~
protomyth
Ok, is there a screenshot from the current Haiku build?

~~~
waddlesplash
Yes, the ones in this article, e.g.
[https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/75-packages.pn...](https://osvoyager.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/75-packages.png)

------
totfz
>One of the coolest areas of package management is that you can go back in
time and boot up into a previous state of the system, all thanks to the new
packaging system. To do this, simply open the boot menu, choose the boot
volume, and select Latest state or a nicely time stamped ‘version’. Very cool.

New versions of programs may modify the user config files in a way that old
versions may not be able to read those config files anymore and even corrupt
them. How is this handled, if at all?

~~~
waddlesplash
What config file format are you using that applications would corrupt newer
ones? The only one I can think of would be raw memory structs written to disk,
which is nasty and ridiculously unportable even across 32-bit vs. 64-bit, let
alone other architectures.

On Haiku, config files are generally either plaintext (kernel/drivers/a few
core apps, so they are easily editable) or archived-BMessage format. The
former are almost always read and not written, and the latter are key/value
based so at worst the application would just not know about the new keys, and
possibly remove them, which isn't the end of the world.

~~~
zlynx
Configuration changes depend on the developers. For example, I used to use
Evolution on Linux / Gnome as my email client. Their attitude to compatibility
is terrible. As in, they just don't care at all.

If you allowed it to upgrade your Evolution data store there was no going
back.

In a BeOS case it would be as if it migrated to different configuration keys
in the new version, then the old version would detect corruption, throw a fit
and erase ALL the keys.

------
SvetlanaYak
I like the read!

