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Comment by raitucarp | Hacker News Reader

Awesome. But, I suggest Haiku people need hire ui/ux for their default theme/window. It will sure attract more user to try this OS as alternative.

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Functional, cohesive and pretty.

I’m more than happy if the former two are done and dusted and my experience with BeOS and since on the former two has been pretty good. If something is pretty but not functional, people won’t use it. If something is functional but not pretty, it’ll get used nevertheless.

People might say it’s a false dichotomy but GNOME 3 and early Windows 8 are substantial examples of the opposite.

Windows 95 wasn’t pretty in any traditional aesthetic sense but by god was it ever functional and cohesive and successful despite basic bitmap faux-3D. Nobody cared.

The BeOS and Platinum interfaces are among the best ever created

It’s crazy to me that there are no Linux DEs dedicated to creating a faithful reproduction of the Platinum era Mac desktop. One can configure XFCE or MATE to get something vaguely similar, but it’s really not the same.

Would like to try my hand at building something like that myself, but X on top of being phased out is a strange beast to learn and there’s practically no material on writing something for Wayland.

There's one setup that I've used with XFCE before, but it's not perfect.

I've been working on and off implementing some Platinum stuff in Pharo's upcoming new graphics layer (called Bloc) and these have come out OK. That's where I'd really like to use it -- my whole desktop can be like Hypercard

> Would like to try my hand at building something like that myself, but X on top of being phased out is a strange beast to learn and there’s practically no material on writing something for Wayland.

You should look up the work of Sir_Cmpwn (aka Drew DeVault), specifically the wlroots project and his excellent writeup: https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/29/Wayland-shells.html

No doubt. Pixel Art at its peak. The icons in particular were spectacular. But none of it would be considered pretty by today’s typical aesthetics. Shameful really.

You're probably being downvoted because Haiku is kind of by definition supposed to look like BeOS.

But I do think you're right in that if BeOS had survived, it would not look like that in 2019. It's probably time for Haiku to start evolving the UI/UX to keep current as the spiritual successor of BeOS.

... Please no.

The style is part of its appeal.

While I am not too big on Haiku's aesthetic, and agree that it could use some modernization. I think the earlier focus should be on supporting some more of the underlying platforms that could get more software running on the system.

I think if they could get patches upstream for chrome and node, which would allow electron, that could open the doors for a significant increase in usable end user applications. The article's demonstration on progress for Java applications is very impressive on its' own.

Aside: being able to use user tweaked UI/UX would be nice in general, but would probably be a break from the BeOS origins. I used to run a shell replacement on Win2k and XP era, but I liked win7 so much I stopped using it (don't even recall the name right now).

In the end, there's no cause for rudeness here. While I don't think I'd be able to use Haiku currently, it's nice to see progress here. I'd also be interested to see a window manager for linux that followed the Be/Haiku aesthetics as I think a lot of people would appreciate it. Personally I really like the dock/taskbar in Win7 and 10, though I prefer the Win7 start menu. I run mac, windows and linux regularly (mac and windows daily, linux at least once a week on elementary).

This is pretty sbujective but I really dig the pixel art of the icons and the general look & feel of the windows.

If Haiku was a Linux Window Manager, I would use it in a heartbeat.

I would really like the tabbing windows etc on linux, it would make using a single monitor much nicer...

There are window managers like that for linux. E.g. http://notion.sourceforge.net/ or https://github.com/pekdon/pekwm or http://www.fluxbox.org/

So I know dang watches the content of comments to see if they’re up to the guidelines, but does dang also look at excessive downvotes? The comment here is greyed out, something that should only be reserved for highly offensive comments. Which this is not...

It isn't offensive (and probably is unfairly downvoted), but it shows a lack of research. The purpose of Haiku is an open source reimplementation of BeOS 5, so naturally the windowing UI looks just like BeOS [1]. There's a reason Haiku looks the way it does.

It's a bit of a stretch, but you could argue the comment goes against this guideline:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

[1] http://lowendmac.com/2001/user-interface-mac-vs-beos/

AFAIK voting is purely down to user's discretion, so sometimes you do see posts get hammered by the 'downvote = disagree' mob, but it doesn't happen that often.

Yes, I wonder why they down-vote my comment

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