One of my favorite operating systems, at least in terms of ideas and "what could have been"ness
- Very friendly (but also effective) installer. Probably the best I'd seen, at the time. Hell, maybe still the best.
- File meta-data as a 1st-class feature. Some cross-platform version of this remains a huge boon to computing efficiency that we've yet to work out. BeOS was ahead of the curve.
- I cannot emphasize enough how magical the performance was. A single-core pentium back then with maybe 64-128MB of memory, if you wanted to browse the web and listen to an MP3, on Windows or Linux, you could expect pops and other problems with playback any time you hit the CPU. Video playback while doing anything else? You kinda could, but there'd be dropped frames and audio issues all over. BeOS? Buttery. Smooth. Practically no matter what you did to it. And the system would keep responding snappily to input, under load that'd have Windows or Linux lagging. UI and media rendering/playback prioritized over everything else, it seemed, and turns out that's 100% the right thing to do for a normal desktop OS. I've seen exactly two other operating systems that could even come close to touching it on low-end hardware, on this front: QNX (w/Photon) and iOS. And iOS cheats to achieve it, by aggressively killing anything that's not in the foreground—and it was kinda better at it in earlier versions, on worse hardware, when it hadn't bloated so much, so that's less true these days.
Well there was Coherent OS but yes Unix was considered high-end/high-price
The Installer in BeOS/Haiku does't do anything special: it just copies everything from the source to the target. The Installer is available in the installed system too, therefore you can install your installed and personalized system to a different disk, basically cloning everything.
But you forgot the bootmanager from your list.
I still yet to see anything like this 2 in other OS.
It's almost like operating systems have gone out of their way since the 90s to overcomplicate this process.
Then again, Haiku went out of its way to overcomplicate its otherwise simple "just copy it" application installation process just a bit too.
2. Zfs-dump zfs-restore
;)
We are talking about desktop operating systems here, so this is completely irrelevant.
>zfs
Not an OS.
You can use Omni OS or Solaris as a desktop and i bet it's vastly more Desktop capable the Haiku.
>Not an OS.
No ZFS is a filesystem, and the Omni OS installer copies the image from the iso to the disk, the haiku installer is not a OS too.
Yep, it is a well known phenomenon some folks like to larp as mainframe administrator on their home pc but it wont make a server OS a desktop OS. This is also true for linux.
>No ZFS is a filesystem, and the Omni OS installer copies the image from the iso to the disk, the haiku installer is not a OS too.
I meant you can definetely use zfs tools to clone a volume, but who want to read the zfs user guide for this? From the user POV starting the Installer and picking the new target to copy the whole installed and personalized system on a GUI is the simplest way. No other desktop OS does this, because while programmers know the storage technologies evolving every day and storage space was always an important question, nobody tried to help to the user to move the installed system to a different disk, instead they offer sketchy 3rdparty disk cloning tools.
Mediocre solution, but we never expected anything else from programmers, most of them dumb / soulless.
Look buddy i stop here you lack basic knowledge.
HINT: Solaris is not a Mainframe OS, and Haiku is a single user system (aka launch everything as "root/admin"), and now think about it why it's so easy to copy files from one system to another ;)
And thinks zfs is a 3rd party tool on solaris...lost for words..
Sad, but true, most people talking here should never picked IT as a profession.
No choice of desktop managers or window managers, just very lean and streamlined software with little redundancy
I think people like it because its neat.
That said, in the days of single core, single event loop on all the major GUI frameworks (X11, Win32, Mac OS), it was absolutely a revelation about what was possible. The dovetails nicely with an earlier article about how quickly the pace of performance improvements felt magical in the early 90s, from the release of the 80386 to about 2010.