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Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

In high school I'd extensively used Windows from 3.1-98se, Linux (Debian, Mandrake), and dabbled a ton with BeOS and QNX (hampered from making either my main OS only by software support).

BeOS and QNX (Photon) were my two favorite desktop experiences of the bunch. They were so much better than the others—yes, very much including Linux. And BeOS was even at least as "friendly" and polished as Windows was at the time.

Here we are and neither's on the desktop and their closest modern equivalent that is prevalent is probably macOS, which is... fine as a consolation prize, I guess, but I still wish I could see a world where either of those made a real splash in the desktop world (I know QNX wasn't really trying to, but man, it performed so much better as a desktop OS than Windows or Linux).

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George Washington once said "The best time to become a Haiku contributor is yesterday. The second best time to become a Haiku contributor is today."

You know, I think he was right.

Do you have experience running Haiku and if so what's the current hardware story like? IOW, could a reasonably determined person get it running as a daily driver on a modern laptop?

I've used it just fine on a number of older laptops.

The rule of thumb is if FreeBSD supports it then Haiku will, as a number of important drivers were ported from FreeBSD.

There was a very short window of time around 2000 when BeOS was viable as a main OS, at least for a high school kid like me. I think I even got rid of Windows entirely and just had a single BeOS partition for a while. It was sooo fast on my little eMachines computer, which was such a breath of fresh air after having hand me down 386s and such that struggled to boot Windows. The only real trouble I remember was the network stack was kind of buggy and had to be restarted every now and then and I think printing was pretty non-existant.

Likewise, between 1996 and 1999 I used BeOS as my main driver and I felt like a smug time-traveller from the future walking amongst the rubes. “One Processor Per Person Is Not Enough”: how prescient they were! I knew they were right from the first moment I read their slogan.

I have extremely fond memories of using BeOS as a main driver OS back in the late nineties (‘96-‘98/‘99). First I had a BeBox (dual 603e-133MHz) and later a dual PIII-300MHz. The former was definitely my favourite hardware platform (‘exotic’ RISC architecture combined with das blinkenlights) while the latter far outclassed it once I finally sorted out the video-card driver issues). An absolutely splendid experience. To this day I still adore the chiselled looks of NeXTStep and BeOS GUIs from the period, but the added colourful “Nintendo-esque” elements of BeOS graphic design attracted me. Oh and the movable yellow tabs across the windows! I was also getting into amateur astronomy and there was a 3D starchart application that utterly awed me. I never knew that sitting in my bedroom in mid 1998 with a BeBox planning an astrophotography shot while Enigma’s Return To Innocence blaring in the background would become the high water mark memory of my late adolescence.

For quite a while, watching 1997 BeOS demo brought tears to my eyes. It was so sweetly designed in every way. Maybe except the regular multithreading issues. Even the source code, at least the small bit I saw [0], was utterly brilliant.

[0] part of the FS query language, so you could select/filter through file metadata for free.

> yes, very much including Linux

That makes perfect sense for that period, the Linux desktop experience was, well, not atrocious, but definitely left things to be desired.

It wasn't just that: it was much worse at handling multi-tasking and keeping the UI responsive, than either of those. But so was Windows, to be fair.

I'm pretty sure it's not much better now but hardware's powerful enough to make that less-painful.

Well a lot had to be configured especially for non-standard hardware. But generally it was far more stable and snappy than Windows. Also constant reinstalling and rebooting wasn't necessary. The QNX demo was nice but to be fair you couldn't do much with it unless you wrote your own software I guess...

both BeOS and QNX were a breath of fresh air after Windows 98. same as yourself, tried both as my main OS in early 2000s while at university.

thanks for the reminder!

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