
Haiku OS (BeOS clone) - exim
http://haiku-os.org/
======
joshuamerrill
I always liked the BeOS interface—at least, in the context of the early 90s,
when its popularity peaked—but I find it pointless to clone a 20+ year-old UI.
With Kinect, Leap Motion, and other forms of input, it seems like there's a
huge opportunity to get away from the traditional windowed UI that has
dominated desktop OSes.

Not to knock Haiku OS—I just feel that if someone is going to create a desktop
OS from scratch, it's a chance to do something _really different_. I see this
as a missed opportunity.

~~~
jacques_chester
It's not the UI that excited technologists enough to recreate it from scratch.
It was the design of the operating system and its API.

BeOS was state-of-the-art when it was written, in the sense that it took the
accumulated wisdom and academic research up to that point as its starting
point. And in many ways it is _still_ state-of-the-art.

~~~
eloisant
Then why don't they keep the OS and API and write a brand new UI, like Apple
did when they made OSX from Nextstep?

~~~
gecko
Well, they kind of are.

When OS X came out (both the Mac OS X Server 1.0 and Mac OS X 10.0 varieties),
the UI might have _looked_ different, but you were basically running OPENSTEP
5 with a new coat of paint. Haiku could do a new theme fairly easily at this
point, and there are already quite a few touch-ups of the new-slab-of-paint
variety (e.g., subpixel antialiasing, support for tiled windows, various
improvements to OpenTracker).

The other thing that OS X brought to the table were new APIs, but most of
these APIs weren't really user-visible per se. (E.g., QuickTime was a
genuinely new addition to OPENSTEP, but the end-user would just see it as more
videos played now, and they played with lower CPU usage.) Here, too, Haiku has
delivered: it has new APIs for component layout, new APIs for end-user
notifications, and more.

So your comparison to what Apple did with OS X is actually quite apropos. Be
just hasn't felt a need to overhaul the UI as radically as Apple did in going
from OPENSTEP to OS X--in large part because, while some of those changes were
functional, many of them were more about making a statement than being
genuinely easier-to-use. (Note how much OS X 10.6 and 10.7 have largely
reverted to a kind of brushed-up version of the old Platinum interface: no
more pinstripes, flat grey buttons in most cases, flat grey title bars, etc.)
So I think they're doing exactly what they ought to be doing.

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reedlaw
Can anyone comment on the code quality in Haiku? From the FAQ it appears most
of the code is new and little was carried over from BeOS. Also, will it
include the GNU toolchain and standard libraries such as SDL? How difficult
will it be to maintain cross-platform applications?

~~~
gecko
No code was kept from BeOS except for a few high-level components that were
open-sourced while Be was still around (e.g., the Tracker). I've general found
the new code to be high quality whenever I've delved into it, but I have only
ever run Haiku in a VM, and then, only in short bursts. In other words, my
experiences were all good, but there are few of them.

As far as development: the GNU tool chain exists, and is indeed the
foundational tool chain. There's also a high level of de facto POSIX
compliance (though neither BeOS nor (current version of) Haiku are multiuser),
and many libraries you'd expect are available just fine. Even some large ones,
like Qt. This makes porting fairly easy—and much like on OS X, it's easy to
wrap a native Haiku GUI around existing tools.

The one bad part of development on Haiku is that the old-world C++ API has
resulted in some compiler weirdness. Haiku aims for full binary
compatibility...with C++ apps written on GCC 2.95. But developers, of course,
want GCC 4. So what happens is that, much like OS X has fat PowerPC/x86
binaries, Haiku has fat GCC 2.95/GCC 4 libraries. This doesn't actually make
development a pain, but it requires a bit of heads-up to navigate the linking
situation

~~~
tqh
We don't have fat libraries. We do have a hybrid system, either a gcc2 based
system with additional gcc4 libraries so a gcc4 application uses gcc4
libraries. Or the other way around a gcc4 system but with gcc2 libraries for
old apps. gcc2 is still the default system, and changing it has been
discussed.

~~~
gecko
Got it. I misunderstood how the hybrid part worked.

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JulianMorrison
Is it still single-user, run-as-root and unsecured?

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krollew
Well, I see Haiku becomes more and more popular. I wonder on one thing - why
would I be interested in next operating system if I have Windows 7 and Linux?
What does it have that those systems haven't? I think authors of Haiku should
find that and make sure that people that visit their site will read about
that.

~~~
toemetoch
IMO BeOS was to operating systems what Opera is to browsers. Innovative, good
ideas, efficient, ... but few people use it.

I remember demo-ing BeOS to a friend by opening a ton of videos at the same
time. He replied that Windows did that as well, until he tried it and the
system was trashing after the 3rd video. The "pauze" button in the copy/paste
progress bar ... a revelation.

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EternalFury
There are literally millions of smart hackers out there and only 1 entity has
ever managed to put a state-of-the-art UI on top of a Unix core: Apple.

[I will get flamed for speaking that way about Gnome and KDE, but they fall a
little short, IMHO. This being said, I don't blame the Gnome or KDE teams for
it. I blame the gazillions of distributions that add nothing beside a theme or
a background picture to the base packages they get from Ubuntu or Red Hat. At
least these Haiku guys seem to be adopting a more ambitious approach.]

Why is that?

I think an awful lot of people take on projects solely to make a name for
themselves...or because they truly believe they know better than Linus or some
other pundit they happen to despise.

A prophecy: The first entity to put a state-of-the-art UI on top of Linux will
have an opportunity to compete with Apple directly.

~~~
glesica
You are not getting down-voted for speaking ill of Gnome/KDE but rather for
making a completely subjective statement as though it were established,
objective fact.

I have used OS X as my primary OS for long periods of time (totaling about 15
months) on two separate occasions and I currently use XFCE. For _me_ , OS X is
unusable garbage.

Am I somehow fundamentally defective as a human being? Or do I just have
different preferences than you? The latter seems far more likely to me.

~~~
lucianm
You didn't try OS X long enough. This is more likely.

~~~
snowman41
Um, nine years? Did you read his post? If nine years isn't enough to recognize
any flaws, than the software is flawed anyways.

~~~
pimeys
Or you grow up yourself. People change.

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ElCabron
The humankind will be much better of, if you use and improve Linux. On the
other hand, I understand your passion.

~~~
dfc
Because monocultures have always been good for development and progress.

~~~
ElCabron
I didn't say "wipe OSX, iOS, Android and Windows from the face of the earth".
And Linux itself is sooo far from a "monoculture".

~~~
stcredzero
Sorry, we shouldn't be questioning the ordained oligarchy, I guess.

~~~
ElCabron
So many challenged people over here. I only said (my opinion) that humankind
will be much better of if you use and improve something, but you insist on
seeing something else. Do yourselves a favour and have some deep introspection
folks, cause lots of people get in trouble for hearing and seeing things that
are simply not there.

~~~
stcredzero
_humankind will be much better of if you use and improve something_

Haiku OS qualifies as "something?"

