Haiku Activity Report – January 2021

BeOS was ahead of its time, that's for sure. One thing it did exceptionally well was multitasking. Even if you had a intensive task running in the background, you would never notice any lag whatsoever in the GUI. Windows/Linux/etc on the same hardware would lag horribly when doing the exact same tasks. I understand many aspects of the OS and GUI toolkit was multi-threaded (as BeOS was designed to run on, and take advantage of, systems with multiple cores). To this day there is no OS that handles multitasking as gracefully as BeOS did. I still remain disappointed that it did not see much success as it had so much potential.

I wish I could use a Linux distro as snappy as BeOS was! Is Haiku the same in that regard?

Speaking of Icons, I love that they spent considerable time to optimze those[1], including their own vector format so that they can store it in the metadata of the file, so that displaying large folders with unique files would be speedy.

[1]: https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-sixth-day-with-haiku-under-...

> it looks dated

It's a real desktop OS, with a UI meant for a keyboard and a mouse. A rarity these days.

HaikuOS looks like an OS dedicated for desktop use. I've just gotten myself a Mac mini last week. Big Sur is the ugliest OS I've ever seen. If that's where the future is heading, then I'm not sure I want to continue using computers. I could use some dated UIs, such as the Haiku one.

I know it basically worked out of the box on a Thinkpad x230 Tablet, running off a flash drive.

There is no hardware 3D acceleration at all, but most GPUs supported by FreeBSD and Linux work fine for everyday use. Sleep and suspend are still a work in progress. WiFi and Ethernet support is heavily dependent on FreeBSD drivers, as such not every card is supported but there are a good number of supported devices. In general, a well-supported Linux/BSD machine will likely work well under Haiku (Thinkpads in particular).

For me personally, the biggest thing holding it back from becoming a daily use computer is the lack of a really good web browser. WebPositive has made great strides as the native browser, but it still has a long way to go. There are ports of other mainstream browsers but most are incomplete or unstable.

I sorely miss the era around 2000-2001 where I used BeOS successfully as a daily machine, able to browse the Web, access email, do document management and creation (word processing and spreadsheets), photo editing, music production, and video editing all with native-to-BeOS software. It transformed my Windows 98 machine from a slow, clunky, stuttering mess into a computer that felt like it was from the future. Nothing since has come close to that level of technological Nirvana.

It has emacs and a modern browser and a compiler, what else do you need?