I attempted to use Haiku as my daily driver about a year ago. Only four things really put the kibosh on that:
1. Lack of native / built-in support for full-disk encryption
2. Lack of a day-to-day usable web browser
3. Lack of the apps I regularly use on Linux and Windows (or good enough equivalents)
4. Lack of stability on the hardware I was using (Framework 11th Gen)
It looks like at least one of those is no longer an issue, thanks to Falkon. It also looks like there's been a lot of progress on getting Wine working and stable. If overall stability is sufficiently improved, then giving it another try might very well be in the cards, even without FDE.
Early 2000s it was my daily driver. But man.. I used the filesystem like it was indented.. All my files had attributes. Unfortunately none of the metadata was supported on other platforms. Lots of wasted energy :) I loved BeOS
lol.. I meant that intended :). BeOS made heavy use of extended attributes. Everything was a file, and you could add attributes. With modern filesystems, this is also possible, but what made BeOS so special is that the attributes were a core feature of the OS.
The file manager Tracker (Finder / Explorer) allowed you to select any attribute as a column name. The filesystem indexed all attributes, so it was blazing fast.
For example, all emails were stored as regular files (like Maildir). They had attributes for things like: MAIL:from, MAIL:when, MAIL:subject etc.
It's a different from using a separate indexing service like Spotlight.
I don't remember if I was ripping CDs at that point to be honest. I know my mp3s were all tagged and also used attributes. I think the playback position was also an attribute.
I have to try Haiku, but the last time I used BeOS everything effectively ran as root. Not that Unix-style user permissions are the epitome of OS security, but at least an RCE vulnerability in the browser doesn't allow for persistent root or whatever.
It's a bit different, in that it's a single user system for the most part, whereas the Unix and Linux family are typically geared toward multi user environments.
I am not an expert, just remembering what I saw. I tinker with it a little (and am writing this in a Haiku OS VM, through Falkon.)
There is a daemon running when I call `ps` that I see is called package_daemon. I think it is this one: I think it has exclusive access to a set of directories where software and such is installed. There is no sudo, su, etc. because you don't need it. hpkg files are loaded by the package daemon into the correct paths.
I looked at this a few months ago just to get what it is doing. It has to have some security model that protects certain paths at least. This looked like it.
I mean, it depends on your threat model, but https://xkcd.com/1200/ applies; for a single user machine what's the difference between the user and root?
You probably have to type a password to perform actions as your normal user, unless you've disabled the login screen for your system. But if you do enter that root password, what exactly can you do that you couldn't do as your own user that actually matters? Sure, root can ex. inject drivers to the kernel, but that's just an intermediate step. The real damage is typically in running a keylogger, getting access to your online accounts, sending DDoS traffic for a botnet, etc. - all actions that can be done with just your non-root user.
If it works on ones computer I dont see why it couldnt be daily driven depending on your needs. It has a webkit based browser, and a native emacs port, thats pretty much all i use day to day :P
I love how the same thread cites a lack of full-disk encryption as a dealbreaker for daily-driving without criticism, but 3D graphics is immediately questioned.
To be clear, I'm happy to also question FDE. In both cases, I can see why some users would need it on a regular basis but I also don't see it as a hard requirement for all users.
To be fair, the audience here considers computers to output a black screen with gray or white text. That's 2D graphics of the most basic form.
Also, it's actually fairly unintuitive to even most computer nerds and professionals that desktop compositing, decoding and rendering video, etc. are all handled as 3D graphics behind the curtains these days.
Seriously; set up a xeon vm without a video accelerator, vnc in, and try using it as your daily driver web browser. 128 cores weren’t close to enough the last time I tried (6 years ago).
> video playback, video encoding, video effects, [...] high res scrolling (I use an 8K display).
Are those 3D graphics?
> desktop window effects and compositing,
Does Haiku use those? If not, it seems irrelevant.
> Video games,
That's the one that I'll agree with, but is depends what we mean by "daily driver"; I was thinking of what would be needed to do productive work, and that possibly restricted by what kind of work you're doing, not the ability to run literally all use cases. So I agree that it's probably not a good choice for somebody who does 3D modeling, but it's probably fine for somebody who writes web back ends.
Not exactly but all hardware accelerated rendering today is done using the same APIs as 3D graphics. You would use OpenGL (or any other API) and basically render everything without the third dimension. There is no hardware accelerated graphics API for 2D graphics specifically anymore, they are all built on top of 3D graphics.
Having contributed to the project, I still agree. In my mind it’s perfect for retirees who don’t need zoom or mobile syncing. The browser is quite good imo as is the email client. I really like that it’s (by default) a single user environment-ideal for an old laptop.
The majority of them probably aren't interested in trying BeOS as a daily driver, either. More likely they'd use Windows, MacOS, or Linux. Maybe a BSD.
I know that the industry is littered with the skeletons of "kitchen PC for Grandma" that lets a senior connect to the grandkids, set a timer for those apple pies, and do some light surfing, and that it will never work on the slurry-filled Internet that Grandma's kids actually built in their day jobs - but with each passing enshittification of the home user PC experience, the siren song of a simple single user OS that is reliable, fast and secure grows louder.
As a retired grandparent I was delighted to see that software I worked on in the 1980s was recently used to crack a Quantum-resistant cryptosystem candidate ( SIKE -Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation) in minutes.
Well, there are many seniors doing great work and staying up to date on all kinds of new tech and so on. But one glance at the media directed at mass market seniors and you can also see that people believe there is a huge market for simplified devices and technology. Consumer Cellular, jitterbug phone, life alert necklaces, the list goes on.
All thru the 90s and 2000s there were attempts to make a PC into a home hub. I think even facebook tried around 2018 iirc. It would be something that you put on the kitchen counter and that serves as a recipe database, conferencing machine, and a useful kitchen helper: such as, setting a timer to go off to tell you that its time to get the apple pie out of the oven.
The UI for such a thing needs to be simple and bulletproof. Windows and Linux dont meet that bar. I think iOS comes close. In another timeline, it could have been BeOS.
In terms of foundations and principles Haiku OS is more of a coherent platform that anything on the Linux desktop attests to be at the moment. In terms practicality, hardware support and a size of software ecosystem it is still very minor compared to Linux, which I find unfortunate.
All desktop OSes are, as they are thought as a whole stack, not jigsaw puzzles.
That is what made Android/Linux and ChromeOS/Linux attractive to the masses, they offer the structure, for users and application developers, that GNU/Linux has never managed to structure across the endless list of flavours on Distrowatch.
A solo developer or a small team can create a very focused, consistent product. But once the masses of people are drawn to it, both as customers and as contributors, maintaining a hold on it as a visionary is difficult. Id argue that squeezing too hard to maintain that hold can strangle the project. A perfect idealized initial design and initial vision can drive consistency further along the timeline, but this is an ideal. We create something, then we give it to the world to be consumed. Haiku is still in its cocoon. It is unclear what would happen to it should it achieve the focus of the hivemind. It is unclear if the development team would even like that.
At some point/place I heard it was going to have a ribbon type thing flow down menus. This would help follow stuff in deep drill downs. Really wish someone had done it.
Sure, but adding metadata to zfs would probably be easier than modernizing BeFS. Just in general as FSes are very worthy of being a project unto themselves. Thinking of low lying fruit to get maximum value easily. BeFS doesn’t have to go anywhere either.
I remember hearing about Haiku about a decade ago, and I played with it in a virtual machine, and it seemed neat, but I'm not 100% sure why it buys you over anything else. This could just have been the virtual machine, but it didn't feel any faster than any other OS really, and the UI was fine, but kind of unremarkable to me.
I'm not saying all this to crap on the project; is there actually an advantage to using Haiku in 2024 over, say, Linux?
In 2023, Haiku got Emacs and Vulkan support that makes it much more attractive to me than in the past. But I still feel very reluctant to use something without the industry support that Linux has.
(Haiku developer here.) There is one hardware accelerated driver, for Radeon Southern Islands; but it's third-party, out-of-tree, and not particularly simple to set up and get running. So, not really.
Thanks for the response. Is there much hope for this to change at some point? I would love to eventually use Haiku on actual hardware, and the lack of video acceleration is the main thing that discourages me from giving it a go.
Once you start gluing various ported Linux applications onto these alternative OSes, they start to lose their distinctiveness and raison d'être. If you are using Qt/KDE apps, anyways, what does Haiku really bring to the table other than a smaller footprint?
I never programmed for BeOS back in the day, but my understanding was that half the advantage of it was its consistent clean ground-up API for building multimedia applications. I'm not sure how well that has aged, tho...
Haiku's "raison d'être" is to be a fully-fledged desktop operating system for general use. So, if there aren't native applications to fulfill daily tasks, then Linux ones tend to get ported.
Anyway, as for the question "why Haiku, if it's just ported Linux apps?" well, because Haiku is a much more cohesive system than any Linux distro. Even if every app you are running on it is from Linux (besides Tracker and Deskbar), the entire system underneath those applications remains tightly integrated.
Around 2000 a fully functional BeOS Personal edition was included in a PC Magazine CD. It was fun to try other operating system (I didn't even had to create a partition, something hard to do considering our PC had just 8GB of DD).
It was much faster than Windows 98, although didn't have much applications.
I tried to use it as my mail client, I loaded it up and configured it, but it wasn't working. I did some very basic troubleshooting but couldn't find anything wrong and after a few web searches couldn't figure out how to find relevant logs to see what was broken.
One convention we lost was that text fields have sunken white background and other areas of the UI are generally grey. UI now uses bright white in most places, eventually causing the world to invent dark mode.
We lost any concept of shading and borders, which has made modern day user interfaces absolute hell to navigate because everything melts together and looks the same.
Windows 9x/NT4.0 Explorer was the pinnacle of graphical user interfaces.
One regression that really annoys me: in recent KDE themes, the default "active window" and "background window" titlebar colors are indistinguishable. So you have no clue where all your input events are going to go.
And if you actually set them to reasonable colors, certain applications do weird epileptic things (looking at you, Firefox!)
I agree. You knew visually what everything did. A button was a button and was noticeably off or on and things like that. I would put classic on for my XP UI I love it so much.
It was a very explicit interface. It was not as sexy as a 3D composited one, but it did not play peek-a-boo. Scrolling through a list, like downloads on a web page, you would see 20 or 30 line items, not two or three. It also worked on a slow CPU without a GPU. We have lost something since those highly-optimized 2D interfaces, from the same era as Super Nintendo Mode 7 affine transform and After Dark/Xscreensaver 2.5D graphics.
The one area where I think 98 and 2000 regress from 95 is that they introduce "web content" in applications that are not web browsers - specifically, random objects respond to single-clicks instead of double-clicks, and blue underlined (and sometimes not even underlined) hyperlinks start to appear.
Sometimes I wonder what kids will consider a 'button' since their first few years will be touch screens, magic corner trackpads, and no-show clickers in MightyMice.
Do TV remotes even have physical buttons any more?
Also, there are still on/off buttons and volume buttons on phones. Video game controllers still use buttons. Car radios and car A/C and heaters still use physical buttons.
That's fair. I haven't yet seen a car with only a touchscreen and nothing else, but I wouldn't be surprised by the existence of such a car. I don't actively keep up with new cars.
Disagree strongly. I find its appearance 10X more visually appealing than any modern UI (win/mac/kde/etc). They’re all incredibly wasteful of space and chunky. Also, designers ruined OSX by making it flat and joyless.
They not just waste space but at the same time break some of the UI. Recently it took me half a minute to drag a window into view on Mac OS because aside from a few pixels every single part of the window "title bar" was actually some button or widget. I wish mainstream operating systems implemented DWM's shortcuts for window dragging/resizing, those are amazing: holding the key and left mouse button makes the window draggable anywhere, and right mouse button instantly resizes the window so the bottom right corner is at the mouse cursor position.
And I hate auto-hiding, narrow scrollbars so much. Scrollbars have exactly two purposes: show the scroll progress and allow faster scrolling than with the wheel/gesture. Both are effectively prevented by it going invisible.
There was a time when I found the Windows 98 UI a bit "old", but honestly in the long run it aged better than almost everything that came after.
I wish modern operating systems looked like Windows 95, I think this was the one time Microsoft got their user experience right, except for the things that were forced on them by backward compatibility concerns, e.g. "in-band" filename extensions that were awkwardly hidden by later versions of Windows.
https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 has a theme for GTK+4 with classic widgets, they work quite well w/ the new "responsive" mobile-friendly apps. Unfortunately you'll need to replace your GTK+ user config outright to use it because the new version has no support for themes.
That’s to a certain advantage though. There’s a nostalgic pining for simpler cleaner OS aesthetics. See the vaporwave and Frutiger Aero trends, and the interest in SerenityOS.
Aero was not simpler or cleaner. Ditto with KDE3 with Keramik. Usable and with clear widgets? Yes, but not simpler. Simpler, clean and usable were Mac OS 7-8, Windows 95-2k, or BeOS.
Also, lots of vaporwave confuses the 80's and 90's, often made from people which either they weren't there or they were too young.
To me the years from1996 and 2004 share lots of traits, (being Mac OSX almost the pinaccle of late 90's technologism and optimistic futurism), and early 90's were culturally almost an extension of the late 80's. Both in trends, music, movies... things began to change with Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, and so on.
To me, the appeal of Frutiger Aero is more in the proto-solarpunk marketing (skyscrapers surrounded by verdant fields under sunny blue skies, dolphins leaping) than the actual UI. Though hard to hate on the Wii Shop Channel.
Bluecurve from Red Hat is a nice bridge between the '90s and late '00s era, as far as design languages go.
cpp was a poor choice for the system but Haiku is cute. The dev team should figure out 2D/3D acceleration and this thing will fly. 64 bit edition has finally abandoned BeOS compatibility and looks really promising as a quick tiny hobbyist OS.
I loved BeOS. In the 90's it was my main OS including at work.
When Be announced that BeOS will be gone, and Be too...
I went to Linux. And never looked back. Started with a RedHat Linux 5, tried Debian, but could not get Debian to work with the dial-up modem, so went RedHat 5, then 6 and all those that followed until Fedora went out.
