I like the idea of more operating systems to pick from. I'd love to try Haiku or BSD one day soon. What motivates people to invest in these very niche systems?
I'd love to play around with them for fun but is there more to it?
I'd love to play around with them for fun but is there more to it?
Since then I've kept an eye on it and plan on going back to it with some more powerful and better supported hardware to really get to play around with stuff like the interesting filesystem and get some things I use all the time ported over. Would love to switch over from mainly using Linux to having a Linux home server, and using Haiku as a daily driver and sshing in for Linuxy stuff.
> The system is not all that well optimized, uses a 15 year old compiler which does not uses any modern CPU features, and by default, the kernel is built in debug mode which makes it much slower than it could be.
> How do other operating systems still manage to feel slower? I have no idea.
(Those kernel debug options are no joke, they are a massive slowdown. The ones for the TCP stack alone take network throughput down to 1/5 of what it is without it; the ones for SMP, the virtual memory manager, lock facilities, etc. combined make the system visibly less snappy. We disable these on beta builds, but they are enabled on nightlies, and back in 2011 they were on by default.)
[1]: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/why-is-haiku-so-fast/6317
Also, many modern distros and desktop environments are bloated: you either have a choice between a full-featured, resource-hungry desktop (Gnome/KDE) or an efficient minimalist window manager (i3/sway). I believe the same applies to different parts/layers of the system.
Haiku doesn't have the same feature set (yet) as full-featured modern desktops and doesn't have to deal with dozens of compatibility layers, so maybe that's also part of the reason it fares better.
In the 20 years since, I have not used an OS that has made me as _happy_ to use as BeOS. Early OS X around 10.4-10.5 came closest.
Do people have love deep in their hearts for Windows or even macOS 11?
It's hard to explain these days, but back in the late 90s it was just so far ahead of everything else except maybe NeXT and NeXT was entirely out of reach for 99% of the world.
The UI was ridiculously smooth and fast and everything worked together like a well oiled machine.
- https://youtu.be/cjriSNgFHsM?t=350
Here they play an mp3 and a video that continue to render while you move the windows around, on a 133mhz machine without it even putting up a sweat. Clearly that's nothing today but that was unheard of at the time.
Beyond that it had amazing features you still don't see on operating systems today like the file system being an actual queryable database. Common metadata like ID3 tags from MP3's were entered into this and queryable.
The standard email client stored emails as individual files and just queried the file system. I believe the address book did the same for people.
The tabs of the individual windows stack together across apps! There were just so many little wonderful fit-and-finish things like that you don't get these days.
- https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/GUI.html#stack-ti...
I feel like most desktop OS's strive for parity with eachother. BeOS was trying to be better.
Windows 2000, yes.
Amazing OS, insanely fast, and lightweight. With only a handful of background running processes and a couple dozen services it was possible to know exactly what was running on your computer at any time.
On at least one occasion I was able to detect malware on my machine by noticing unexpected background network traffic via the light on my network hub blinking when it shouldn't have been.
Windows XP will go down in history as the OS that an entire generation is nostalgic for, but Windows 2000 was its fiddly, hard to setup, but rock solid once running, older brother.
What kind of difficulties?
It was on AMD systems. :-D
And getting gaming to work was a separate challenge.
It wasn't terrible, but it did require knowledge of what chipset your motherboard was running and you had to know that certain magic patches were needed to the OS.
Absolutely, i love W2k. No bling-bling no bloat, the last lean and honest windows....serenity-os devs think the same it looks ;)
I used w2k until windowsXPsp2 was released, XP was a least for me bloody unstable before sp2.
That's golden. Would deserve a blogpost on its own.
If you weren't actively loading a webpage or playing a game, there wouldn't be any network traffic.
This was back before the days of auto updates or telemetry!
So basically if I was doing something locally, and I saw the lights blink on my hub, and my (tiny!) process list didn't have any obvious suspects, I knew something was up.
Malware wasn't nearly as well hidden back then, so uncovering it wasn't all that hard.
> Malware wasn't nearly as well hidden back then, so uncovering it wasn't all that hard.
Yeah catpicture.jpg.exe was definitely easier to identify than modern viruses are.
Why would I do this? It is more than nostalgia or fun, although that is part of it. I believe that diversity is vital to keeping the technological landscape healthy. Most people are happy to go with the status quo, fewer are willing to work to make positive changes and even less are willing to fund their efforts.
Will something come of Haiku because of this? Directly or indirectly, yes. Someone will be working on a vision that may differ from that of Apple/Microsoft/linux, etc. This will have a ripple effect as either Haiku succeeds, or those who work on it take their viewpoints and knowledge to other companies and efforts. Either way, this sort of diversity helps out in keeping the technological ecosystem from becoming more and more of a monoculture.
This of course involves many trade-offs (losing access to common "modern" tech like containers, slower performance) but for my company the trade-offs were justified.
Tell me more! I cut my teeth on ipchains/iptables back in the early 90's, and feel very familiar with it. That said, I know that doesn't mean it's the best/easiest at all. I've tried to grok Pf once or twice, but never ended up getting very far. I wanted to ask you if you began with Pf, or if you came from something else? More or less, I'm trying to figure out if Pf was difficult for me just because it wasn't my first.
My favorite feature of pf is the configuration file, which is a human-readable/writable file which sets the state in a consistent way, rather than iptable's preferred mechanism of using a bunch of CLI commands executed in just the right sequence. I want a guaranteed consistent state when I'm configuring firewalls across a fleet, and pf.conf makes that not only easy to achieve, but the default behavior. Just modify the conf file, copy that to all the boxes, reload pf, and your firewalls are all updated and guaranteed to be in the same state, regardless of whatever state they were in before.
You can read the pf.conf file from top to bottom to figure out what's going to happen to any packet. All the rules are included right there.
I would just read the man page for pf.conf which gives helpful examples (https://man.openbsd.org/pf.conf.5#EXAMPLES) as well as this resource: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/config.html.
well this would be one motivation really.
personally, i like the ability to break with conventions and do things differently. especially on the user interface level.
like hurd or plan 9, haiku has some unique aspects.
now i just need to find a machine to actually run it.
-- posted from netsurf on 9front.
Nostalgia, curiosity, and hobby
My interest in FreeBSD began about 12 years ago, when a friend of mine told me about the BSD operating systems and he said that the one he was using was very secure (OpenBSD) and that it had good documentation and that these BSD operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and others) are each developed "as a whole", as opposed to Linux which I had recently begun seriously using but which is developed as a bunch of separate much more loosely-tied projects and then bundled together in the form of various distros.
I installed FreeBSD and liked it a lot. I just felt at home, somehow. And for a good while I was running FreeBSD also on my desktop and my laptop.
Fast-forward to present day. On my laptop I run macOS. On my servers I run FreeBSD. My MacBook Pro M1 laptop is my daily driver. I have a desktop that I run Linux on but I rarely boot it because mostly I have no reason to. Almost everything I do I can do with my MacBook Pro M1 and with my servers that run FreeBSD.
But even though I like FreeBSD so much, I feel and fear that Linux keeps advancing in much bigger strides than FreeBSD, because of the many many more people contributing to Linux compared to how many people are developing FreeBSD.
I really want to get into eBPF on Linux soon and explore that. It seems like it could help me gain both insights into the execution of the software that I develop, even more than is possible with DTrace maybe. And I want to explore what can be done on Linux using kTLS and eBPF together. And I am curious to find out more about things like what they talk about at https://pchaigno.github.io/ebpf/2020/11/04/hxdp-efficient-so...
And all of those things have me thinking a lot about whether the positives of using FreeBSD (jails, OpenZFS in base, a system that is developed as a whole, etc) actually justify staying with FreeBSD. Or if I should ditch FreeBSD and focus my energy on Linux instead of on FreeBSD.