
Haiku R1/beta2 has been released - waddlesplash
https://www.haiku-os.org/news/2020-06-09_haiku_r1_beta2/
======
charlesdaniels
I'm glad to see Haiku is still making progress!

I really enjoy the visual style of Haiku. The look-n-feel of it seems better
to me than any other UI I've seen, and I say that as someone who never used
BeOS, so it's not the nostalgia talking.

It would be really cool if Haiku was able to get to a state were it's usable
as a daily driver. I think having an OS and interface more focused on a single
user at a graphical terminal rather than a multi-user system with graphics
tacked on would be positive.

BeFS also has some really great ideas that aren't replicated in other more
modern FSes, namely it includes database-like functionality that enables some
really neat features via a standardized interface, rather than hiding them
away in vendor-specific file formats. If you're interested, Practical File
System Design[0] uses beFS as it's example filesystem (and it's also a really
good book in general).

0 - [https://www.amazon.com/Practical-System-Design-Dominic-
Giamp...](https://www.amazon.com/Practical-System-Design-Dominic-
Giampaolo/dp/1558604979)

~~~
mdasen
I also like the look of Haiku/BeOS, but to me it looks a lot like Apple
Platinum from Mac OS 8 and 9: [https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/10/39579b3...](https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/10/39579b3ce39de8d4e8e2b489a2a93880-780x585.jpg).

I'm curious what you like about it. I personally miss a lot of design things
that have fallen out of style.

On Windows, it feels like everything is blindingly white/soft grey with no
texture or borders to help my eyes focus. Transparency is used without regard
for its utility. Instead of using borders, they use space which ends up
wasting a lot of screen real-estate. The differentiation between active and
background window is very subtle.

macOS has many of the same issues. Scroll bars aren't shown unless you're
scrolling. You can change this behavior, but still. Background windows are
hard to differentiate from foreground windows. Transparency is used for
seemingly no reason.

That said, macOS does offer better design queues than Windows 10. The macOS
finder will use a slightly different color for the left panel than the main
work area. Windows 10 uses the same white for both areas drawing focus as if
they're equal. Buttons in macOS have a very subtle bump out to show that
they're buttons vs just being completely flat. There are usually small borders
between things.

Take this screenshot: [https://thehacktoday.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/10/screensh...](https://thehacktoday.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/10/screenshot-folder.png). There's no border between the
back/forward/up buttons and the content below. Everything is the same white.
Clickable items have no real indication that they're buttons. macOS:
[https://icdn2.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/import-m...](https://icdn2.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/import-
music-in-macos-catalina-finder-1.jpg). You can see more clear demarcations.
Buttons clearly stick out a little, the left panel is a different color with a
tiny border, the title bar is a different color with a gradient, etc.

Haiku's design harkens back to a day when we demarcated things. Haiku's active
windows are yellow while background windows are grey
([https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Haiku_OS...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Haiku_OS.png)).
This makes it instantly clear what is the top window. There are borders on
everything and a subtle beveled effect.

Is that the kind of stuff that you like about Haiku's UI? Is it something els?

~~~
cmrdporcupine
I agree with all your points. But worth pointing out that BeOS predates Mac OS
8 and 9. Not sure if there's a line of influence between the two, but uthere's
definitely a 1990s 'demarcated' design; not just with colour but with simple
visual elements.

And attention to physical placement. Windows 95 made a strange choice when it
placed the 'close' button next to minimize/maximize, making it entirely
possible to close-by-accident. OS X then strangely threw away the classic Mac
positioning and adopted something like Windows, and made this worse by
choosing in its first versions to make the function of the buttons unclear
until the mouse moved over them.

I really enjoyed Sun's "OpenLook" design back in the day:
[http://toastytech.com/guis/ow2default.png](http://toastytech.com/guis/ow2default.png)

Minimalist while not being spartan or unclear.Skeuomorphism but not overdone.

~~~
charlesdaniels
While we're talking about cool old UIs, I'll also point out IRIX 4dwm[0]
(google image search "IRIX 4dwm" for more examples). It's far before my time,
but based on the screenshots out there on the 'net it seems like a pretty good
UI for it's time period.

0 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX)

~~~
cmrdporcupine
That's just Motif isn't it?

Well, I guess it's a custom shell for Motif.

~~~
charlesdaniels
That, and a custom set of applications which might have been written in Motif.
There have definitely been better UIs since then, but for it’s time I it seems
pretty impressive.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
It's very much a shame that licensing on Motif was so restrictive. At a time
when Unix desperately needed a standardized toolkit, the wrong moves were
made, and fragmentation was the result.

------
colesantiago
Interesting to see this isn't another linux distribution, but a _real_ OS.

Some of the software ported to this OS [0] (some not on this list but looking
at their repo [1] ):

LibreOffice

Krita

Telegram

Jetbrains (PyCharm, ItelliJ)

Rust, Node.JS, Python, Java 12

Qt Creator

Arduino

Obviously there's more in their repo, looking promising though. (Try find your
favourite software in there!)

[0] [https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta2/release-
notes#mor...](https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta2/release-notes#more-
ported-software)

[1] [https://depot.haiku-os.org](https://depot.haiku-os.org)

~~~
badsectoracula
Though IMO this misses the point of the OS which is the deep integration and
fast UI the native APIs allow that these cross platform applications (and any
application ported to Haiku through Qt and Java) ignore. There is no real
reason to use Haiku over some Linux desktop (you can even make XFCE look kinda
similar to Haiku/BeOS if you want) if the applications you use do not take
advantage of it.

~~~
waddlesplash
As a Haiku developer (and user, naturally!) I have to disagree. Obviously
native software would be preferred, just as it is on macOS, but I am pretty
sure that macOS users will tell you that they still prefer macOS, even if they
are using Firefox, or JetBrains, or Inkscape, etc., yes?

The Linux desktop is a horribly fragmented and fragile ecosystem. Haiku lacks
a lot of features the Linux kernel has, but the overall system architecture
and design is significantly cleaner and less fundamentally fragile.

~~~
badsectoracula
I never implied that the Haiku developers would dislike these applications, so
i'm not sure you being a Haiku developer has anything to do with your
disagreement.

And yes, macOS users probably also tell you that they prefer macOS, though
note that they also are often _very_ loud about preferring software that takes
advantage of their OS' features because this is why they use that OS.

The thing is, macOS has a much richer selection of software than Haiku has
(and most likely, ever have) so macOS users at least can fall back to those.
But if all you are going to use on Haiku is ported software that ignores
native APIs then what is the point of using an OS with less hardware support
and features?

The Linux desktop being fragmented doesn't mean much - your Qt application
ported to Haiku will also work on KDE perfectly fine and chances are even if
you limit your software selection to Qt-only applications, you'll still have
more applications to work with. Though that fragmentation is really a poor
description since there are standards you can rely on, like X11 - sure someone
might be using Gnome or XFCE or Window Maker or i3 or whatever as their
desktop, but applications do not target those environments, they target a
lower level of the stack that is shared among these and making an application
on XFCE doesn't mean it'll only run under XFCE.

So yeah, it might look fragmented, but unless you are some custom support
worker that tries to navigate someone through the UI via phone, that isn't
much of an issue in practice (and "in practice" is the important bit here
because the reasons i've seen people put forth for having Qt/Java applications
ported to Haiku and ignore Haiku's own APIs are all about practicality - which
ignores the elephant in the room which is that if you care about practicality
using Haiku in the first place wouldn't be a good choice anyway).

~~~
dundarious
Being a developer (and a user as they acknowledge), they have relatively deep
experience with the system and the benefits of "native" vs. ported apps.
Because of that, they have a reasonable basis of knowledge in order to dispute
your statement about the suitability of Haiku for someone using those apps, or
the benefits of using those apps on Haiku.

~~~
badsectoracula
They may have (i don't know) but they didn't dispute anything, they just said
that they disagree and the rest was about what macOS users would probably say
and something about how Linux is more fragmented and how in theory Haiku is
better but neither of those had anything to do with what i wrote.

------
dang
Those curious for more may wish to see also:

2018
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099127)

2017
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15973918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15973918)

2016
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12566056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12566056)

2013
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5564766](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5564766)

2012
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123941)

2010
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334827)

2009
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820844](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820844)

Sundry:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=comments%3E0%20haiku-
os.org&sort=byDate&type=story)

------
aquabeagle
I've tried Haiku a few times and liked it, but it feels like the beta label
has been around forever and is not doing them any favors. It's 2020, you're
not publishing software as a big-box release in stores, just cut a release
already and then keep iterating!

From Wikipedia:

 _It wasn 't until September, 2009 that Haiku reached its first milestone with
the release of Haiku R1/Alpha 1. Then in November, 2012 the R1/Alpha 4.1 was
released, while work continued on nightly builds.[8] On September 28, 2018,
the Haiku R1/Beta 1 was released.[9] On June 9, 2020, Haiku R1/Beta 2 was
released._

Almost 11 years and it's still not out of beta?!

~~~
waddlesplash
What can I say? We have extremely stringent quality standards ;)

The "beta" label signified that we had implemented all the features we thought
mandatory for R1. Of course there are new ones in this release (like HiDPI
support or the NVMe driver) because we still want to use Haiku on contemporary
hardware, so changes still get made. But largely we are more oriented towards
stabilization and "usability", i.e. fixing bugs or minor enhancements that get
in the way of actually using Haiku.

But it's also the case that we do not get a massive amount of work done every
month; probably around or less than a "man-month" between the dozen or two
developers.

~~~
Koshkin
ReactOS is still in alpha after 22 years. I guess their standards are even
higher.

~~~
bryan_w
To be fair windows does keep introducing new API. BeOS has been "stable" for
some time now

~~~
Koshkin
IIRC the goal was to be _driver-compatible_ (with Windows Server 2003).

------
return
The actual R1/Beta 2 release notes provide more details on what's in this
release [0]:

[0] [https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta2/release-
notes/](https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta2/release-notes/)

------
olah_1
Hidden gem of the Haiku project is the "Learning to Code in C++" tutorials.

[https://www.haiku-os.org/development/](https://www.haiku-os.org/development/)

------
trarman
I'm amazed! On a whim, I tried installing it to my old ASUS EEE 7" netbook.
Everything seems to work! Haiku just breathed new life into that old device.

~~~
UncleSlacky
I tried the last major beta release on my 701 4G, but couldn't get it to work,
I think due to the minimum screen resolution requirements. I'll try again with
this one - some people on the Haiku community forums reported success with
their 7" netbooks.

------
mullsork
Congrats to the Haiku team! I recently started testing it out, hoping to
contribute soon, and it's pretty neat. I last played with it 10 years ago, and
it feels a lot more solid today. Really looking forward to what's in store for
R2 when R1 is released!

------
MintelIE
I used BeOS for a couple years in the 1990s as my exclusive OS. It had all the
software I needed at the time. I especially liked the feature where you could
clone your whole working system to another drive or partition, live. That
actually saved me on a couple occasions, I would perform a weekly backup of my
whole live system to a secondary drive.

It's so nice to see this project making great progress.

------
yjftsjthsd-h
By complete coincidence, today was the day that I finally decided to try Haiku
on a spare laptop... and it just worked. Battery's recognized, display's
running at full resolution (no VESA or whatever), wifi worked without issue.
I'm typing this comment in WebPositive:) This is actually pretty great.

------
libx
Haiku lags and will lag main stream operating systems regarding drivers for
hardware. But if they could make it run in Raspberry Pis, with one set of
hardware it would be awesome. A light weight operating system on a light
weight computer.

RPi's could be the killer "app" for Haiku.

~~~
waddlesplash
Honestly the main way we lag right now is missing sleep support (nobody has
attempted it) and 3D acceleration.

Otherwise, Haiku runs on modern hardware just fine. I have a custom build from
this year under my desk with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (8c16t), an NVMe drive, and
Haiku boots off the NVMe and runs great with all 16 threads. It even can
connect to the internet via the WiFi card on the motherboard.

~~~
hedora
I’m curious. I’ve long suspected hardware compatibility would get easier as
everything moves into the same package as the CPU.

Have things been playing out that way?

~~~
waddlesplash
Sort of. Things like USB, which past 1.0 has only one controller per
generation, released the current controller design in 2010 with the first
chipsets on the market in 2011. So that at least is less of a moving target
than it once was.

But, I mean, NVMe follows on SATA much like SATA followed on IDE, so on that
front things are not so different. And for WiFi, there is not a common device
interface for that, so each new generation of hardware from each manufacturer
requires a large chunk of new driver code. Haiku reuses FreeBSD's WiFi drivers
and 802.11 layer, but as you can see, they are having a hard time keeping up
(only recently was one developer hired part-time to work on it, I believe.)

So, it's kind of a wash, really -- on x86 commodity PC hardware, that is. Part
of the reason Haiku on ARM still has not taken off is how wildly diverse that
ecosystem is, especially how much of a moving target it is.

------
miki123211
How does Haiku's accessibility story look like? Any plans for a screen reader?

Blind user here, I would like to try this out and see what all this fuss is
about, but I think I can't. Can someone explain what's so great about Haiku's
UI?

~~~
waddlesplash
(Haiku developer here.) The way the UI is structured, creating a screen reader
would not be too difficult, and I think one of our developers attempted it at
one point, but it was certainly never finished and is not usable right now.
Sorry :(

Beyond the spirit of and compatibility with BeOS, Haiku's advantages are being
full-fledged desktop operating system developed by a single team as a single
unit (that is, unlike Linux or the BSDs where the kernel, window manager, GUI
toolkit, application suite, etc. are developed by separate teams and combined
by yet other groups); and also our occasionally unique approach to systems
design and implementation (for instance, the Haiku package manager is based
around a union mount of block-compressed filesystem images.)

The UI itself is reminiscent of 1990s UIs (gradients, bevels, more saturated
colors), with a modern feel (modern fonts, antialiasing, etc.) The window
borders are not rectangular, but are instead yellow "tabs" which are only as
wide as their text is, and so windows from separate applications can be
"stacked" and used as a unit, like tabs within applications.

------
jug
Interesting— two showstoppers for me fixed since Beta 1. USB 3 is now much
better supported including as boot devices, and NVMe drives are now also
supported. I might just be able to at least boot and see this! Judging by
this, the traction actually sounds decent. Wait - what? It’s 10+ years old.
Yes, but that was just two major improvements out of several, and during 20
months.

------
rwmj
Haiku has a really lovely smooth "90s-style" graphical interface. Always
responsive whether you run it locally or (as I more often do) run it in a VM.

------
memexy
The ideals of Haiku are great but is anyone using it consistently? If they are
what workflows benefit from Haiku's feature set?

I understand the theoretical benefits. I'm curious if anyone is actually using
Haiku features in some non-trivial way, e.g.

> Database-like file system (BFS) with support for indexed metadata

A filesystem with indexed metadata sounds great but who is actually using it
and how?

I tried to search for comments with the obvious phrases but all I found was
this comment from 10 years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1335692](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1335692).

~~~
jessermeyer
> A filesystem with indexed metadata sounds great but who is actually using it
> and how?

One of my first sour experiences with NTFS was the horror involved in learning
how to find which files have changed since some given time in a directory. I
expected a SQL-ish interface but...omg. omg.

The reason for tracking changes in files was for hot loading art assets into a
running program.

~~~
memexy
Yup, filesystems in general should have a database/SQL interface. I'm
currently using CouchDB and Apache Tika to index and search my files. It works
but there is no way people who are not programmers would enjoy using such a
system. It's extremely inelegant and requires constant context switching and
I'd much rather be using an operating system that had all this functionality
as part of the filesystem interface.

~~~
mycall
> Yup, filesystems in general should have a database/SQL interface

That's basically what FILESTREAM is in SQL Server if you squint.

------
qwerty456127
It has one of (together with QNX Photon) the most beautiful widget look-and-
feels I've ever seen. Can I have similar for Qt, Gtk and/or Windows?

------
moreorless
It has been a long long time since I gave Haiku a look. It is getting there.
Setup on KVM took less than a minute. Looking nice. Networking seems a little
slow when loading web pages, otherwise looks good. I miss WebPositive.

~~~
extro
WebPositive is included.

~~~
moreorless
Yes. I know. I am posting from it right now.

------
wodenokoto
Legends of BeOS’s fast multimedia handling still lives on and I wonder if
Haiku has some sort of edge today when it comes to playing multimedia or
recording music?

~~~
slantyyz
It was bonkers. I could barely play two videos simultaneously on my Pentium in
Windows 9x, but I could play four simultaneously on the same box booted into
BeOS. The OS was small and fast.

------
croo
I tried haiku back in 2011, it was a fun 2 hour then I forgot about it. Since
that short experience, every other year news find me that it reached a new
milestone.

It does sound like fun to write a new os... but this project is at least 10
years old. How and why did it survive and reached beta? Why does it still
exist?

What practical applications does this OS has (or will have) over the commonly
knowns?

~~~
azinman2
Why do people work on old cars? For the love of it.

~~~
vvpan
So you are saying Haiku is a hobby project with no goal of being um...
"production"? Are you sure that people building it feel the same way?

~~~
azinman2
Considering it's a small set of developers who all work part time re-
implementing an OS from the 90s that failed when it was a commercial entity
fully staffed, it's hard to imagine that they're super serious about it being
a "production" OS.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
A couple quick comments:

(1) While Be, Inc., failed, it's debatable whether it failed because the OS
wasn't good enough. It was certainly being used in commercial production in
certain places already -- not just by hobbyists. Steinberg was selling a BeOS
version of their (very high-grade and expensive!) audio production system,
Nuendo, and I actually _saw_ Level Control Systems' CueStation, an "audio
automation system" for Broadway-grade live performance systems, running on
BeOS in the wild -- it was running the control booth of Cirque de Soleil's
permanent installation at Disney World. BeOS was doing _shockingly_ well in
attracting commercial applications in 1997-1999 given its tiny user base --
what they were failing at was attracting hardware companies to ship pre-
installed systems. Be's management was dead set on the idea that "steady and
slow growth as a niche OS" just wouldn't do, and they needed to either be the
next Apple or die trying. And, when they punted on desktop BeOS in favor of a
custom version for what turned out to be the absolutely imaginary market for
internet appliances, they pretty much chose "die trying."

(2) I think it depends on what you mean by "production". I mean, it's probably
never going to be competing with Linux servers. But is it possible it could be
competitive with Linux as a desktop OS? Maybe. A few years ago I wouldn't have
been that optimistic, but they've done a tremendous job with ports.

~~~
city41
> what they were failing at was attracting hardware companies to ship pre-
> installed systems.

Microsoft told hardware manufacturers that if they ship machines with BeOS
they would charge them more for Windows licenses.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20131109045719/http://www.intern...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131109045719/http://www.internetnews.com/ent-
news/print.php/3073811/)

------
noisy_boy
Window stacking is one of the best features of Haiku. Gnome should consider
useful features like this to improve the user experience.

~~~
yyx
If they implement it, then it would be a hamburger menu.

~~~
noisy_boy
Its all three vertical dots and/or gear icon now. Only place I can see the
hamburger menu is Firefox.

------
bjoli
I just saw that it has guile and Emacs. Together with Firefox that means 99%
of my computer usage is covered.

~~~
anthk
WebPositive and/or Qupzilla/Falkon.

------
lordleft
I remember folks who would wax nostalgic about BeOS, and claim it trounced
Unix & Windows when it came to performance. Could anyone speak to the
technical strengths / interesting aspects of this OS?

~~~
kitotik
I think most of the perceived performance was a result of pervasive multi
threading, which was novel at the time.

For example, I remember being able to simultaneously play 5-6 mp3 files, load
a web page, play an mpeg video, and browse the local file system while having
complete UI responsiveness and no audible/visual glitches. This was pretty
much unheard of at the time, especially on modest consumer hardware (pentium 2
~350mhz IIRC)

~~~
slantyyz
Yeah that pretty much sums it up. The OS ran circles around pretty much any
other OS you had running on the same hardware.

I remember the OS installing in a crazy short amount of time.

~~~
einr
It booted in ~10 seconds on my Pentium II 266 system, which was a VERY BIG
DEAL back then.

------
berry6
It reminds me (maybe just for me) old Amiga OS called "Workbench". I mean I
like this.

------
snicker7
I would love a faithful replication of the BeOS/Haiku desktop on Linux.

~~~
waddlesplash
People have tried it before, but all those projects are now defunct.
Ultimately it winds up being "just another Linux desktop environment", or even
a mere reskin of another DE. The kind of deep system integration that is
possible when the entire system is developed as one project is extremely
difficult, if not actually impossible, to do in the Linux ecosystem.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Crazy idea: Have you ever thought of porting your desktop environment to
Genode? ( [https://genode.org/](https://genode.org/) ) And fully integrating
their Sculpt into it? I mean, on Amd64 you are already binary incompatible, so
that wouldn't count as an argument against it.

~~~
waddlesplash
Someone suggested it (but then, the community is large enough that all far-
fetched-but-not-impossible ideas have probably been mentioned at one point or
another :)).

I don't really know what the differences between porting Haiku's userland to
that or to Linux would be. Everyone loves to make arguments about how
microkernels are so great and all, but there still isn't a major operating
system or distribution with a significant number of everyday users on one.
Plus, all of our same philosophical objections to using the Linux (or any
other kernel) as the basis for Haiku would still apply.

~~~
chelmuth
Also some one started it with HoG (Haiku on Genode) [https://discuss.haiku-
os.org/t/genode-and-haiku/8384](https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/genode-and-
haiku/8384)

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Phew! Not so crazy I am...

------
agambrahma
I get (I think) how this is different from a Linux desktop, being developed in
entirety as a single project, instead of being split into a kernel, and user-
space distro, and fragmented apps on top of that, but ... is there a tl;dr on
how this compares to (say) FreeBSD, which is another "kernel + user-space in
one package" thing?

~~~
waddlesplash
FreeBSD still runs X11 and a bunch of other applications on top of it to get a
working desktop, and the result is ... even less pleasant than the Linux
desktop, according to some reviews:
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-
linux-d...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-linux-distro-
review-freebsd-12-1-release/)

------
Koshkin
So..... Why would Jane the User pick Haiku OS over, say, Ubuntu?

~~~
jdboyd
Because she really wants something fringe and not really Unix. I'd be
surprised if there was any user or developer that didn't do Haiku as a hobby.
I've never heard of a single person making money from it.

~~~
waddlesplash
Well, you're about to:
[http://tunetrackersystems.com/](http://tunetrackersystems.com/)

~~~
OldHand2018
I think that's really impressive. An expensive piece of software shipping an
operating system to go along with it. And they have a video showing worldwide
installations, demonstrating that it is a successful product. Well done!

------
dmichulke
Took me a while to figure out what it is:

"While the first release(s) of Haiku will be very much like the _BeOS R5, the
operating system it is reimplementing_ ..."

~~~
wtallis
The domain name is _haiku-os.org_. Every page includes an "About" link at the
top, and the root page has a two-sentence description in a large font at the
top.

They really couldn't make it any easier to figure out what Haiku is.

~~~
dmichulke
The news release doesn't show a thing about what it is nor is there a link.

The URL with an OS in the name tells me what category it is in but not the USP
(I don't really get that from the two sentences either but at least it's
something)

So I went looking (not via Home or About because usually they are useless,
YMMV) but via Documents.

So here I am, saying that it took me a while to figure out what it was.

~~~
vhodges
There is no USP really... it's an OpenSource reimplementation of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS)
(before your time?). Haiku has been around in some guise or other since the
early 2000's.

BeOS was/is pervasively threaded and took full advantage of multiple cores (a
very novel thing when it came out - BeBox had two PPC processors).

Similar projects include: ReactOS (Windows 2000), AROS (AmigaOS), FreeDOS (MS-
DOS), FreeMiNT (Atari ST). I think there might even be one for OS/2

~~~
slantyyz
For all intents and purposes, if you had no exposure to BeOS, you won't really
get why this project exists.

It is so crazy to think that we could be living in a completely different
world today had Apple opted to acquire BeOS instead of NeXT.

~~~
toyg
I suspect Apple would have struggled to attract the amount of developers they
did, by moving to a non-unix systems; which in turn might have hampered their
efforts on mobile.

~~~
slantyyz
Well the bigger impact is that Steve Jobs may not have ever returned to Apple.

------
LargoLasskhyfv
Sigh. Probably will try it later. Did try the R1/beta1, and had to fiddle in
the BIOS to get usable output on secondary display (can't remember if i
managed dual-screen) on intel graphics. Liked the look and feel of it, mostly.
Because on the secondary display on 24"@1920X1200 the icons looked somehow
stretched wide, but just a little. Not so on the internal 13"@1280x800.
Question is: what to do with it? How stable is the FS? Where are the
videos/intros which _really_ show what i can do with it, which i can't with
other desktops? Haven't found a really compelling reason so far. (Hmmm, seems
like they updated their slideshows and list of videos...)

Would FreeCiv stop slowing down to a crawl on larger maps in late game? Could
i abuse AQEMU as performant dockerthingy for the applications i need?

~~~
stOneskull
> Question is: what to do with it?

perfect for an old 32 bit computer lying around. a computer for the
grandparents. or the kids. or dual-boot into it for a focus for writing, with
minimal distractions.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Dual-booting _is_ a distraction to me. Could also blow up some editor into
fullscreen while having no messengers/mails running and be done with it.

------
jqpabc123
Haiku looks like an interesting project. I like the concept and the consistent
design, but ... it is still missing one critical feature ... a viable business
model.

Linux is an example of what to expect without this critical piece. Decades of
manhours from some of the best and brightest, millions of lines of code ...
and a miniscule marketshare on the desktop.

~~~
agildehaus
It's not a business. Why does there have to be a business model?

~~~
jqpabc123
It doesn't need one --- as long as it only aspires to be another hobbyist OS
with a miniscule desktop user base.

~~~
agildehaus
It aspires to be something the developers enjoy hacking on and using, which is
the very reason it exists at all. Why you seem to think it needs to be more
than that is puzzling.

I'm sure the developers would love for it to be more than that, but there's a
limit to what can be done and it's ASTONISHING what they have done.

