
Haiku meets 9th processor - protomyth
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/pawe%C5%82_dziepak/2013-12-20_haiku_meets_9th_processor
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GuiA
I have a fantasy that 20 years from now, Haiku will be the operating system of
choice for hackers with design sensibilities (NB: I didn't say _graphic
design_ ) who want a powerful, flexible, programmable OS that just works and
requires minimal configuration.

This niche is currently filled by OSX, but I think it's slowly falling out of
favor because of Apple's increasing focus on the end user and "iOSifying"
everything.

Of course Haiku is still some ways from it, but I've been following its
development for a while now and I feel like it's on the right track. If one or
two manufacturers end up providing good hardware for Haiku to run on when it's
a bit more mature, it'd be wonderful and then my vision would happen.

There are worse foundations and inspirations to have than BeOS - a man can
dream :)

~~~
thaumaturgy
FWIW Debian stable (esp. with KDE IMO) is now _very_ close to this. I have no
patience at all for a fiddly daily machine, and for the most part I've been
pretty happy with it.

There are probably other Linux distributions (Mint?) that can fill this niche.

I only mention this because, if people are looking for something right now,
setting aside a little bit of time to try out Debian stable or Mint might be
worthwhile.

But yeah. I'd love to see Haiku become a strong alternative OS. I've been
keeping an eye on it ever since it was announced. (I still have the BeOS R5
disc that I installed on a PPC machine years ago.)

~~~
mortyseinfeld
The people that used BeOS and look forward to Haiku are going to disagree with
you on that. I'm guessing that they look at Linux distros as a hodge-podge of
various libraries without any cohesive philosophy.

~~~
GuiA
Yeah, that's my position. I use OSX at work and Arch at home; and while I love
Linux, it is quite messy. (Which works to its advantage in many ways- it
wouldn't be that powerful and flexible if it weren't)

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techtalsky
I guess I'm not surprised. 100% discussion about whether Haiku deserves to
exist, zero discussion about the post. Can anyone talk about the significance
of the removal of the hard processor limit?

~~~
wmf
It's good to remove hardcoded limits, but everything I see in this post looks
like it was implemented in Linux and FreeBSD years ago. I'm sure this has been
discussed somewhere, but it's not that clear why Haiku has its own kernel at
all.

~~~
girvo
Because it can. Also, because doing things differently is fun. It's API is
something to behold, and besides, would you say the same thing about Plan 9,
or BSD, etc?

~~~
wmf
The BeOS user API is interesting. It's not clear to me that the kernel is
actually different in any appreciable way.

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rtpg
I've always been confused as to what sort of niche Haiku is trying to fill. Is
there that much of a demand for BeOS applications?

Maybe I'm just too young to know

~~~
AlecSchueler
I've actually been using Haiku as my primary work OS for a while now. I don't
need much software beyond a web browser and a text editor (increasingly true
for many people I imagine) and Haiku offers some benefits over Linux in simple
shell features like stack & tile window management. Check out the User
Guide[0] for a sense of the unique features.

[0]: [https://www.haiku-
os.org/docs/userguide/en/contents.html](https://www.haiku-
os.org/docs/userguide/en/contents.html)

~~~
rtpg
For the web browser, is there good support for modern browsers?

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ryanweal
No, it has a built-in browser. Not sure what engine is behind it but it
reminds me of the Konqueror days. There is no Firefox build that is reasonably
current that I have seen yet (hopefully I'm wrong, please someone prove me
wrong).

~~~
jay-anderson
WebPositive is based on Webkit (see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebPositive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebPositive)).
I'm fairly sure you're right about firefox. The only version for beos (that I
know of) is a port of firefox 2 (see [http://haikuware.com/remository/view-
details/internet-networ...](http://haikuware.com/remository/view-
details/internet-network/web-browsers/firefox-bezilla)).

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ryanweal
I have been interested in Haiku for awhile but could not get it to install.
Last week I finally realized that I could run it in a VirtualBox instance so I
started trying it out. I like it... very simple UI, very clean, and very fast.

It comes with many Unix-like shell utilities including scp and ssh. git is
installed. There is a graphical text editor and something resembling a package
manager that will allow you to fetch vim.

The web browser is a bit lacking/weird/not-sure-how-to-describe, but reading
through the installation manual it appears that many Wifi chipsets are
supported via BSD drivers.

Press shift when booting if you can't get anywhere, and definitely read the
manual. There are few necessary concepts to learn...

Really reminds me of Mac OS 7-9, but much more stable and a better user
interface. I'm considering using it for back-end web development (as most of
my work is server-based). I'm not concerned about Flash anymore so that is a
non-issue.

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girvo
I've been using Haiku since around 2009, and while I've no experience with
BeOS itself (I'm far too young), I adore it. It's such a well thought out and
designed system, right down to the APIs. Heck at this point, I'm tempted to
use it for all my dev work (server side), as I enjoy using it so much. It
lacks the quirks linux has across distros (somewhat an unfair comparison, as
haiku has one distro and that's it), while being super quick and a joy to use.
It's truly a desktop operating system, which I think is a good thing. It's
like an unpolished, open source Mac OS in that way. The multicore and
scheduler work being done is going to be handy for taking advantage of new
computers.

Now building a desktop OS is a an odd niche. At this point, all of us live on
the web, and the desktop matters little, as we have the move towards mobile
OSes, and the integration of mobile features into our operating systems. If we
ever see a move back towards more "traditional" desktop OS paradigms, perhaps
Haiku will see more use, but for now it's community is small, passionate, and
fun. I don't think it will ever be big, but one can dream right? :)

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JoeAltmaier
The issues of priority and starvation are large issues. I see the OP
implemented another ad-hoc behavior, which I predict will move the issue to
another place but not eradicate it.

I believe priorities are a sucky way to express the developers desire to
perform some tasks in a low-latency manner, while others are ok to delay for a
larger time. Maybe latency would be a better thread parameter than priority.
It has the advantage of being a hard metric, one you can easily measure and
adjust your algorithm against.

But latency is slippery. Do you mean time-to-first-execution, or time-to-
completion? Completion of what? The OS would have to be aware of some units of
processing (message digestion time?). This is not a bad idea. I'm all in favor
of the OS having a more complete model of what the developer is trying to
accomplish.

Anyway my 2C worth.

~~~
robbs
I was just reading this last night and thought you might find it interesting:
[https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/12/5/21](https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/12/5/21)

Con Kolivas, author of a CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel, had a very
similar idea.

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whyrusleeping
I'm left wondering what the advantage of using haiku would be over fedora,
ubuntu, mint, or debian?

~~~
xj9
It's a nice UNIX with a cohesive environment and design (both in terms of
software and UI) philosophy. Other than than there aren't a lot of
"advantages" because its alpha software.

Maybe check out some BeOS R5 videos, they were doing some really cool stuff
before they went under!

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggCODBIfWKY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggCODBIfWKY)

