Haiku: A New Kind of Operating System

Early in December, I wrote an article for Unixmen.com on Haiku, an operating system based on the now defunct BeOS.

You can read the article here, http://www.unixmen.com/haiku-a-new-kind-of-operating-system/

Just curious, has anyone in here tried Haiku and what do you think of it?

 

I have tried it recently, its just a toy nothing more IMO, BeOs had alot gong for it but failed bigtime, this is just a hobby for someone really and will never take off.

 

Its fast, got its foundations down, and has potential...Really needs financial backing and a full-time engineering team to push up its progress. Needs more development time.

 

It looks exactly the same as it did ten years ago, not a bad thing. One of the main problems with the original was it wouldn't easily run on any vaguely recent hardware (original pre-XP Athlons and PIII!) and so was largely forgotten. However running an unusual platform isn't the issue it used to be so it may be useful.

 

Necromanced thread, but not much in it:

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=761239

 

How does a OS that's been in development for a decade qualify as 'new'?

Also, what sort of hyperbolic nonsense is this:

Fastest at what?

 

There's some interesting development work going on with Haiku and a new UEFI bootloader. The code is here for the developers to have a look at.

https://github.com/tqh/haiku.efi

 

Looks like Haiku still exists.

Not sure why.

 

Wow, this thread still exists? why? Oh hello smokin whale

 

Because alternatives are worth it. Even if few people use it, the pure academic value of things like AROS, MorphOS, Haiku, Plan9 and many others are worth it.

The most terrible thing in the world is homogeneity. It's both boring and dangerous. Vive la difference.

 

Fair enough, but aren't we spoiled for choice already? Spread dev time too thin across several distros and what you get is a bunch of half-baked OSes, none of which that are actually worth using. I also don't see why you can't get educational value from other distros.

I personally don't see the point if they're trying to get some actual adoption (unless it's supposed to be nothing more than a hobby) but then again I'm probably not the target user for an OS like this.

 

I guess there would be educational value for the OS developers too, not just the users.

 

You seem as if all devs work for one company and get assigned mindlessly to 'distros' which is far from the case.

Devs have their own visions/ideals for an OS, and have the freedom to pursue those visions/ideals exactly hwo they see fit.

I think its great that this happens as it creates an ideas pool so much greater than OSX or Wndoze could ever achieve as they are single-visioned.

 

Someone revived the old thread, cool. You must have really dug deep into the archives to find this one.

I agree with elvis, you just can't put a value on what this kind of work and their projects is worth. In an academic sense, it is priceless in the form of academic value, research and education. Even if the eventual code is only ever viewed, used by a select few nerds.

 

I don't think so. More or less in popular use we have the Windows family of operating systems, and the UNIX family of operating systems (including UNIX, BSD, Linux, Darwin/OSX, and other offshoots).

Non-Windows, non-UNIX operating systems are interesting. These include ReactOS, BeOS/Haiku, AmigaOS, MorphOS, Plan9, and many others. They do things in a very different way, and that's worth exploring for a bunch of reasons. Firstly, no software suits every need (not even my beloved Linux). And secondly, how do we know the limits of what software can do if we're limited to two families of operating systems?

I don't think there's a shortage of developers in the world. Additionally, people are allowed to do whatever they like for fun. Most of us have had a crack at writing software in our lives purely for fun that will never see a production environment, and that's OK. Whether it's a game, or an OS, I don't see the harm. Not everything has to be for commercial gain.

I don't think large scale adoption is their goal. I know a few die-hard Amiga users who are still using their OS of choice today, and they don't particularly care that their OS only has a few hundred users worldwide. They do what they do, and they enjoy it, and they let everyone else do whatever they want. Live and let live, and all that.

I understand all the points you're making, and they're worth discussing. I think ultimately there's a boatload of software out there that falls into the "just for fun" category, much of it the world will never see. I agree that it's somewhat of a shame that good quality OS developers aren't doing more for bigger and more mainstream systems (particularly when you've got dickheads like Lennart Poettering doing dumb shit in Linux), but again there's still academic value in things that aren't mainstream.

I'm also slightly biased, in that I love old and obscure computing. A hobby of mine is collecting, documenting and researching non-standard computing systems (whether they're business, gaming, or anything else), and seeing the vast disparity of stuff out there is pretty mind blowing. Most people grow up in a "Windows vs Mac" world (or these days "iPhone vs Android"), and completely miss the enormous array of hardware and software out there that has been used across history for things we take for granted every day. Diversity is not only healthy, but it's also kinda fun and interesting.

 

in 1991 a young man released on a newsgroup his source code for a UNIX like kernel, because he didn't want to pay for MINIX, imagine if he didn't bother.

 

Very good point.

Most amusing was the line in his post: "just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu".

 

HURD (GNU kernel) is still progressing, but Linux is king in that space now.

 

One could really making an argument against the term "progressing".

Although it is still active and being developed, it really does move at such a slow pace that it becomes not worthy of considering if you're a software developer. You can essentially learn exactly the same skills tinkering around with Linux kernel development.
Personally, I think the entire Hurd stack should just be dropped and placed in the archives for historical purposes and remembered for its concept only, rather than its claimed capabilities of doing something that has already been done. ie. Linux.

 

Hurd development will always waddle on as the true believers and stalwarts of Free Software and Stallman disciples try to keep the dream alive. If it keeps them happy then go for it. Out of the box thinking can lead to exciting new ideas so I have no worries. Hurd still probably has more users than TempleOS lol.