A decidedly non-Linux distro walkthrough: Haiku R1/beta2
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This review misses or misstates some pretty key details about Haiku:
* The statement that "Haiku's design diverges radically enough from modern standards to make application porting very difficult" is just plain false. Haiku is extremely POSIX compliant and we have ports of Qt (as you may have noticed from Otter), etc.
The reason there is no Firefox or Chromium is not due to any technical limitation of the OS itself, but purely because none of us devs know a lot about those codebases (which are larger than Haiku itself!) and want to put the time in. We would be happy to help others port them.
* The "OS crash" on YouTube is not really an OS crash but rather a window manager / display server crash, which is much more recoverable than an actual kernel panic. Yeah, we probably should have caught that one before the release, but somehow we did not...
* It's also not the case that we do not support "any USB network interfaces whatsoever"; as the screenshot you have shows, we don't support USB WiFi adapters. We do support USB ECM ethernet dongles, USB Pegasus, and at least some USB ASIX ones.
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/display...
I once needed help compiling software with an unusual build system, on Haiku. The fix was trivial and purely to the app's build system, and the Haiku devs were friendly and helpful. It was a very positive experience that I remember whenever seeing an article about Haiku. Just donated $25, keep up the good work!
We have already made significant improvements in the past few years in the security department, with NX bit (DEP), ASLR (including KASLR), W^X (kernel only for now), and SMAP/SMEP all now functional and enabled by default.
However, there is still a long way to go. Not all syscalls do correct access checking (I started an audit here but I haven't finished it yet) and the GUI runs as uid 0 (you can run CLI apps and sign in via SSH as other users, though.) Slowly but surely...
Projects like Haiku put fun back in computing.
It caught a few linuxisms that hadn't been caught by testing on *BSD, but wasn't a pain to target.
Although Web+ is young, thorny and buggy (now), with every iteration it gets better, more stable, and faster. And the core OS functionality benefits with improvements other apps can utilise. For instance, lots of blending modes were added to AppServer to support web standards, so every native app gets these features as well. The net classes improved, media streaming improved. The article mentions a crash with YouTube by a refactored memory paging off-by-one error, which has been fixed 3 weeks ago, and this bug fix benefits all apps. All software has bugs, they get fixed eventually.
There are benefits to Haiku which most casual observers don't register in their brief sessions. It requires a bit more “miles” before the benefits are discovered. It’s a young system with potential. It’s a beta of R1. There will be more revisions in the future, more iterations, more quality.
Unlike the nix distros which are an amalgamation of various independant components with duplicate integration channels, Haiku is building a tailored unified system. The end benefit will be noticeable in component integration and efficiency, which the heterogeneous nix systems will struggle to match. Haiku is targetting the front end user, not the invisible back end.
The memory paging refactor is not in the beta, so those bugs are not related.
I think the WebPositive "system crash" (really a display server crash) is the AlphaMask reference-counting bug, which a fix was pushed for on the "master" channel but nobody has reported back that it is definitively fixed yet (but I also have not heard any reports that people still encounter it, so that's a good sign.)
Does that really matter to the person who uses the end product though?
I agree that Haiku has had a lot of work put into it by dedicated people and is something of a marvel because it's a non-Linux FOSS desktop OS that is actually usable, but I don't see why that need be a consideration of a review.
I get that context matters, but if you're going to write a review about a desktop operating system, you should be comparing it to the other desktop OSes that are available so that readers have a point of reference.
> It’s a young system with potential. It’s a beta of R1.
To be fair, it's taken almost twenty years to get to the R1 beta. I've been following its development on and off since the demise of BeOS. I remember reading about all of the in-fighting from the early days of OpenBeOS, so I'm glad that they've made all the progress they have.
What they've produced is indeed admirable, but you can't ignore the fact that the technology world is in a very different place since they started this project.
When I look at Haiku today, it is like opening up a time capsule of a late 90's era operating systems.
Even when I had BeOS, I still had to dual boot with Windows due to the lack of broad application support. So as a somewhat interested observer/follower of the OS's development since the project began -- once I get past that feeling of nostalgia -- it's even hard for me to see the potential that you talking about.
In other words, yes, it's fair to say "don't use this for surfing the web or if you have an EVOO laptap". But ideally you would then suggest what you could use it for and how it works in those areas. I would have expected at least to understand the state of desktop productivity software, music playing, networking, hacking, playing games, printing, etc.
And given that a lot of readers (unlike yourself) will never have used BeOS or be that familiar with it, what's it like? If you read an email and someone sends you a PDF, do you save it and open it in a PDF reader? Does something else happen? Is any of it interesting in some way?
Well, I tend to consider the bare minimum for any desktop OS to be viable is the ability to run a modern web browser (which would let you do your email, desktop productivity, music playing, games and PDF viewing).
Hell, I'd even go so far as to say that Haiku's next major milestone should be to get Firefox or Chromium to run on it. With a working modern browser, all of a sudden it's at least as functional as a Chromebook. Which means you might actually be able to use the OS as a daily driver in spite of its other shortcomings.
But that's not everyone, especially among people who might want to read about a "new" OS. I do more things with computers, for both fun and work, than use a web browser. I'm interested not only in what web browsing is like, but also what it's like to hack on a program, or configure the OS, or get a piece of hardware working, or produce digital art, or play a game, or make a game.
I'm not saying the review is wrong; I'm saying it's incomplete. I'm pointing out that a better (more complete, fairer) review would answer not just the question of what users an OS is wrong for, but also at least tries to examine who it's right for.
I find it sad that the sentiment is that a computer without a modern web browser is not useful for daily work. And also that those browsers are massively complex and can only be practically developed by entrenched corporations with stable revenue streams.
What's frightening is that soon this might actually become true, if it wasn't before.
And at the same time I see Web+ and wonder when it will ever be standards compliant, much less stable, given the size of the team behind it.
I was utterly amazed by the screenshots of the GUI and the thought of a computer with “parallel processors”. The slogan “one processor per person is not enough” absolutely smote me and I was hooked. BeOS looked like everything nineties non-dismal utopianistic science fiction looked like and the BeBox with its dual RISC CPUs and “blinkenlights” on the front to display workload and a “GeekPort” on the back for attaching random hardware were at the very least very exotic machines with a lot of presence and that made quite a statement.
At the time I also had my first interactions with NeXTStep, and I’m pleased how things went (overall) but back at the time, it seemed like “not choosing Plan Be” was going to have disastrous consequences. How wrong I was...
Can you even imagine what that alternate reality would be like?
Given how Be did not come with Steve Jobs, the entire tech landscape could have been very different, and Apple may not be the powerhouse that it is today.
Haiku is a single project operating system, so when they make a release it's not a distribution as such, is it?
We wouldn't call Windows 10 a Windows distro.
https://www.haiku-os.org/community/guidelines_creating_haiku...
Actually, that's a kinda interesting question; I think what makes a distro is that it's a combination of components, right? So FreeBSD isn't a distro, it's one single thing. But GhostBSD is a distro, because it takes a base OS and bundles it with packages and tweaks to make it a nice GUI system. So does the existence of Windows LTSC and [Windows] Server Core (or even Nano) not imply that Windows is a distro? They all take the NT base OS, and pack on various components to build different versions of the "Windows" product family. Or is that more like adding sets to a BSD; just because you can include or exclude the X tarball doesn't make OpenBSD not a single system. Maybe the distinction is who's making it; Windows isn't a distro because it's all Microsoft's parts; a GNU/Linux distro, in contrast, is a patchwork of parts from different organizations.
Edit: typos
Also it doesn't pretend your computer is a tablet. Even MacOS succumbed to that trend with version 11. In 10 years someone in Silicon Valley is going to rediscover classic mouse UI and sell it as something new and advances.
The tilde ~ key is a dead key, used to type characters like ñ."
Can I download the Qt theme by the way? I want to style my KDE system like Haiku.
I thought this part of the review was a bit over the top. The author seems to conflate "useful to me" with "useful to anyone" throughout. And in service of such a position, some very black and white conclusions are reached.
Where utility is concerned, we live in a world where bullet journaling on paper is still very popular and also a relatively recent development. It's not exactly the same experience as your brand new tablet may offer, but it's not expected to be. Similarly, in my experience, Haiku was very directly useful, but I didn't go into the experience expecting to surf the Ars website or watch videos on YouTube. I used Haiku on a netbook, and it was a terrific, appropriate, and even tranquil, environment for writing, organizing, planning, and reading.
In short, I found that Haiku was useful and desirable for getting away--and this includes getting away from the exact conditions the author of this review was trying to equate with a minimum bar for a personal standard of utility.
That's a smidge surprising, since Otter on Haiku x86-64 (on my laptop) does indeed render at least YouTube videos fine (I'm playing "Pamela" by Toto on it right now), albeit not as performantly as I'd have hoped (long time to load, and some stuttering at the start of every video).