Comment by superboum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by superboum | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

3 days ago, I installed Haiku on bare metal: an old PC from ~2004. I was not aware that a new version was planned at that time, but the upgrade was completely smooth.

My idea when I installed Haiku was to make my own version of the "old computer challenge"[1], with an emphasis on using GUI apps.

Similarly to @probono (a FOSS dev), I also found Haiku "shockingly good"[2] at being a lightweight, responsive, easy-to-use desktop OS.

After some patching, I was even able to compile Tectonic[3], a modern LaTeX engine written in Rust, and Quaternion a Matrix client supporting E2EE[4]. All that running on a single core Athlon 64 and 1.5GB of RAM.

I posted some screenshots in a Mastodon threads if you are curious[5] (but my posts are in french sorry :/). And of course this comment is posted from Haiku!

[1]: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-07-old-computer-challe...

[2]: https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-first-day-with-haiku-shocki...

[3]: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/

[4]: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion

[5]: https://mastodon.tedomum.net/@tgoldoin/109554115997967651

Around 2001, I ran the contemporary BeOS demo on a Pentium MMX 200 MHz machine with 32 MB of RAM. Even with those limitations, the thing screamed. I believe it was live CD you downloaded and burned.

I am absolutely not surprised it works well on Athlon 64.

Ahh, the memories! (266 MHz PII, 64 MB RAM ... maybe upgraded to 384 MB RAM by the time I was quad-booting Debian, Win2k, BeOS and QNX)

Maybe I ran BeOS slightly before a demo CD was available, or maybe I just didn't risk burning a coaster. (Remember those days where you had to worry about your OS not being able to feed the CD burner as fast as it was writing?) When I demoed BeOS around 2000, it was on a floppy (I repurposed a free AoL floppy from a few years earlier... by that time AoL was mailing free CDs instead of free floppies). The demo floppy allowed one to format a BeFS partition on the drive, and I think even put the kernel on the drive, but kept the bootloader on the floppy to encourage purchase.

I woke up one morning to see the floppy drive light on, and apparently a BeOS kernel or usespace driver bug caused it to spin the floppy continuously all night without moving the read/write head. I popped out the floppy and pulled back the dust guard to discover a thin stripe where the magnetic media had been polished off of the floppy. The drive didn't read any floppy correctly after that; presumably the read/write head was covered in magnetic media dust.

I don't remember how, but I eventually found instructions for copying the bootloader off of the downloaded floppy image and getting GRUB to find it, so I didn't need to put my replacement floppy drive at risk.

I remember having the exact same experience on slightly less powerful hardware with that BeOS demo. I remember throwing everything at it and it just kept on going like it was no big deal and me constantly going "wow, wow, wow" haha! It was such a bummer going back to Windows after experiencing that.

Pentium 75 mhz was enough for the BeOS demo. It was almost like using QNX. I believe I tried BeOS on some 486'es too, but if I did not at least it screamed, and burned, as you said, even on a Pentium 75mhz. The only limitation of the 'demo' was that usable space was like locked into 512MB extendable user-space, if I'm not wrong. Please do correct me/this.

BeOS never (officially) supported 486 class processors, I can't recall if it actually uses Pentium instructions and won't run, or if it's just super slow on 486. I think it is actually compiled for Pentium.

> 3 days ago, I installed Haiku on bare metal: an old PC from ~2004. I was not aware that a new version was planned at that time, but the upgrade was completely smooth.

If there is one thing to say about Haiku, their slow and steady approach has resulted in a remarkably solid Kernel and base system. It is extremely light and has a well-built and consistent environment. I've always hoped more engineers would hop on the bandwagon to accelerate development, but what the team has achieved is notable in comparison to other alternative/"hobby" OSes.

It also runs really well on old netbooks - it's revitalised my Asus EEE 701 4G (even though the screen resolution is below the official minimum requirement), it fits comfortably on the internal 4Gb SSD, and even the wifi works!

I had a single core Athlon 64 that I upgraded to a dual core back in the day. That was my primary PC until I got a Ryzen 2400G several years ago. All are really great CPUs for many years after they're made. Next up might be a Zen 5 APU. I'm on a slow upgrade cycle...

I believe Linux should be even faster, right? Probably it only lacks a lightweight and responsive DE, and a distro with sane defaults, e.g. no gazillions of random processes running at the start. But e.g. the compilation, or anything compute heavy should be faster under linux?

I wouldn't have thought so, no.

Linux is a huge OS by the standards of BeOS and Haiku, with an early-1970s design and layers and layers of legacy cruft between the kernel and the user.

Dr Tanenbaum called it obsolete even 30 years ago: https://www.edn.com/linux-is-obsolete-thread-is-started-janu...

... and he had a point then.

The kernel is not huge though. Even a modern Linux kernel runs on really, really resource limited hardware ( eg. embedded ). As said above, it is all the other crap that takes up memory and slows it down ( and makes it useful of course ).

It is not the Linux kernel that makes the Linux Desktop so much heavier than Haiku though.

No, that is true and a fair call.

Saying that, the first machine I tried (and failed) to install Slackware 1 on was I think a 486 with 8MB of RAM, and I am not sure 21st century Linux will fit on that...

I switch between Haiku and Q4OS on the same netbook, and they are both very responsive. The Linux distro does indeed have some performance advantages. However I haven't tried beta4 yet.

It is possible that musl based distros such as Alpine, could somehow compete for having a lot smaller code footprint to execute, but "normal" glibc ones would hardly match Haiku's speed. That doesn't necessarily make Linux inferior; it's just the price to pay for decades of development from thousands of developers and being portable to a huge number of platforms. The upside is we (Linux users) have a lot more software and supported hardware than Haiku, as of today.

How's the support for Samba/NFS?

There's a built-in NFSv4 client, but I think it may have fallen a bit behind NFSv4's evolution; I recall hearing you had to turn some feature off in order to get it to connect to a standard exported volume from Linux.

SMB is supported by fusesmb, which is available as a package.

Cool. Network file system support is critical for how I would use it. I've loved the experience for the most part, otherwise.

Well, and Emacs support, but that's in now.

oh i loved reading the old computer challenge at the time. Solene did some great write ups about it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com