Haiku Activity and Contract Report, October 2023 | Hacker News Reader

Haiku Activity and Contract Report, October 2023

haiku-os.org

62 pointstodsacerdoti12 comments

I use Haiku in my old Asus EEE PC 701. It fits in the 4gb SSD leaving space for applications, 1gb of RAM is enough and it supports a lot of daily use applications like libre office or emacs(I'm using version 29 with denote for my personal Knowledge Base). The only think that I didn't manage to make work was the camera. It's very stable on that machine and gave it a new life making it pretty usable, even for browsing the web for content(not heavy social media sites). YouTube is possible with low resolution through other applications, not the browser.

I always thought it would be a good fit for the EEE - maybe I should dig mine out again!

TLDR;

- Implementation of DWARFv5 features in the Debugger by davidkaroly to support GCC 13-generated binaries.

- UI consistency improvements in Deskbar submenus and HaikuDepot, along with performance enhancements and bug fixes.

- Fixes for color handling in Terminal, buffer overflow in People, and crash issues in Icon-O-Matic and DebugAnalyzer.

- Command-line and UI text tweaks for better usability.

- Enhancements to the PCI bus manager for RISC-V and ARM machines, and updates to the FreeBSD driver compatibility layer.

- Fixes and improvements in file systems, particularly for UFS2 and ext2/3/4.

- Kernel updates for better thread scheduling, TSC calibration in virtual environments, and memory management efficiency.

- Build system optimizations and documentation updates.

- Progress on ARM, RISC-V, and PowerPC ports, including an upgrade to GCC 13 for RISC-V.

- HaikuPorts saw a flurry of activity with updates to many ports and new additions.

- Work on Xlibe, the X11/Xlib compatibility layer, to support applications like GNUplot and Conky, and discussions on Tk drawing glitches.

Also hints at a new Haiku release with focus on system stability and usability improvements.

I remember Haiku from the days where I read osnews instead of hacker news. Is anybody using Haiku here for more than just personal use?

OSnews was wonderful. I didn’t realize, but Eugenia posted after a 10 year hiatus back in July.

The early 2000s really took a toll on alternative commercial OS offerings. OS/2, QNX (on the desktop), BeOS, and others made that time interesting. There were even a lot of mobile OS options (Palm, early Linux handhelds, Symbian, Windows PocketPC/Mobile).

BeOS was always my favorite though. It’s amazing what Haiku has done, but sad that BeOS was shelved 20 years ago.

BeOS could have been OS X :)

Doubtful. I'm a BeOS fan, and used BeOS Pro v5 as a daily driver around 2000. Even Jean-Louis Gassée thinks (in hindsight) it would've been a bad idea [0].

If Apple had bought Be instead of NeXT, they would've have gotten Steve Jobs, who (arguably) saved Apple from bankrupcy, plus i{Mac,Pod,Phone}

At the time (1995-96?) BeOS was a (cool) tech demo, but wasn't a viable product. It had no developers and no apps. NeXT was mature. BeOS also didn't have critical things like - the ability to print, colour management, multi-user support, etc.. Apple could've added these to BeOS, but...

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-chose-...

As a BeOS user (and wannabe dev) in 1997/98, there were plenty of software developers and applictions available,

Final Scratch Pro was originally written for BeOS.

Tunetracker Systems[0] uses Haiku for its Radio Automation software; the used to use BeOS.

[0] http://tunetrackersystems.com/

https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/haiku/index.html

It's not a good idea to use an experimental OS in a business setting.

Maybe when it's polished an somewhat audited.

Also, it has very limited GPU/Hardware support.

Anyone use Haiku as their daily driver?

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