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Comment by szszrk | Hacker News Reader

Is it promising as a basic daily system? Some modern web browser, email client, some common console tools or things like Python to run them? Or maybe there is a ports-like system developed unofficially?

I used to test every iso of Haiku I found, but it felt very much a development project then actual system for simple daily use. I wonder what's the status now.

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I'd say iffy on the first. The native browser is based on a modern port of WebKit, but it's buggy and not feature-complete. Things like Youtube work in-browser, but not well (buggy player, sometimes choppy playback, etc.). Wasm doesn't work. It's otherwise pretty functional. There's no Firefox/Chromium. There are alternatives to the native browser, but they're not significantly better.

It has the second, and third (Python 3 is ported). It's POSIX-compliant, so there's tons of Linux/Unix CLI stuff available.

There is a package manager with a lot of software, both native and ported. Many of the staples are available (LibreOffice, VLC, etc.), but there's also a lot missing, some with alternatives (there's no GIMP, but there is Krita, for example).

Overall, I think it's usable as a basic system, but you could definitely run into some issues with software availability and web browsing if you want to do more powerful stuff.

> there's no GIMP, but there is Krita, for example

I wish they'd rather port Inkscape.

I'd check for native software first instead of Gimp, as Haiku had a lot of background on media production. My 2 cent tip.

Haiku's icons are vector based right? Is there a native Haiku vector art software?

There's a native icon editor.

Haiku has pretty good native audio, video and image editors.

>there's no GIMP, but there is Krita

Sounds like a win/win to me!

The browser is said to use WebKit 612.1.21. This sounds relevant, although I'm not really sure how new 612.1.21 actually is. LibreOffice also is available already. As are Python 3.7 and VLC. Many people run Haiku on real hardware rather than in a VM (although I would speculate the HCL is rather humble).

This sounds pretty usable to me already.

Lazarus also is available which means the emerging Sublime-replacement CudaText editor can be ported as well as the Double Commander.

ArsTechnica did an in-depth review last year [1] which was also discussed on HN [2].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/a-decidedly-non-linu...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676975

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