Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024 | Hacker News Reader

Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive in 2024

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124 pointsrcarmo115 comments

Loved BeOS, and love HaikuOS. But a "daily driver" it is most certainly not. Don't be fooled.

Having contributed to the project, I still agree. In my mind it’s perfect for retirees who don’t need zoom or mobile syncing. The browser is quite good imo as is the email client. I really like that it’s (by default) a single user environment-ideal for an old laptop.

I have to imagine the Venn diagram of retirees and people who are interested in trying more obscure operating systems, has only a sliver of overlap.

Though I may end up in that camp one day. I did quite a bit of that between graduating from college and getting my first job.

Retirees built every long lasting technology we use everyday, and even invented some too. ;-)

Those pioneers make up the sliver of the Venn diagram.

The majority of them probably aren't interested in trying BeOS as a daily driver, either. More likely they'd use Windows, MacOS, or Linux. Maybe a BSD.

I know that the industry is littered with the skeletons of "kitchen PC for Grandma" that lets a senior connect to the grandkids, set a timer for those apple pies, and do some light surfing, and that it will never work on the slurry-filled Internet that Grandma's kids actually built in their day jobs - but with each passing enshittification of the home user PC experience, the siren song of a simple single user OS that is reliable, fast and secure grows louder.

As a retired grandparent I was delighted to see that software I worked on in the 1980s was recently used to crack a Quantum-resistant cryptosystem candidate ( SIKE -Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation) in minutes.

https://mathematical-research-institute.sydney.edu.au/news/q...

( Magma is a 1990s- second gen version of Cayley from the 1980s- )

Can you explain more about setting a timer for apple pies?

Well, there are many seniors doing great work and staying up to date on all kinds of new tech and so on. But one glance at the media directed at mass market seniors and you can also see that people believe there is a huge market for simplified devices and technology. Consumer Cellular, jitterbug phone, life alert necklaces, the list goes on.

All thru the 90s and 2000s there were attempts to make a PC into a home hub. I think even facebook tried around 2018 iirc. It would be something that you put on the kitchen counter and that serves as a recipe database, conferencing machine, and a useful kitchen helper: such as, setting a timer to go off to tell you that its time to get the apple pie out of the oven.

The UI for such a thing needs to be simple and bulletproof. Windows and Linux dont meet that bar. I think iOS comes close. In another timeline, it could have been BeOS.

That idea is exactly what killed Be. Well, one of the things, anyway.

10 years later the iPad filled that roll and continues un-challenged nearly 14 years later.

I have to try Haiku, but the last time I used BeOS everything effectively ran as root. Not that Unix-style user permissions are the epitome of OS security, but at least an RCE vulnerability in the browser doesn't allow for persistent root or whatever.

It's a bit different, in that it's a single user system for the most part, whereas the Unix and Linux family are typically geared toward multi user environments.

haiku devs are working on some form of multiuser support

I mean, it depends on your threat model, but https://xkcd.com/1200/ applies; for a single user machine what's the difference between the user and root?

I have to type a password to perform actions as root, for one.

You probably have to type a password to perform actions as your normal user, unless you've disabled the login screen for your system. But if you do enter that root password, what exactly can you do that you couldn't do as your own user that actually matters? Sure, root can ex. inject drivers to the kernel, but that's just an intermediate step. The real damage is typically in running a keylogger, getting access to your online accounts, sending DDoS traffic for a botnet, etc. - all actions that can be done with just your non-root user.

I am not an expert, just remembering what I saw. I tinker with it a little (and am writing this in a Haiku OS VM, through Falkon.)

There is a daemon running when I call `ps` that I see is called package_daemon. I think it is this one: I think it has exclusive access to a set of directories where software and such is installed. There is no sudo, su, etc. because you don't need it. hpkg files are loaded by the package daemon into the correct paths.

I looked at this a few months ago just to get what it is doing. It has to have some security model that protects certain paths at least. This looked like it.

leave it to Action Retro to lie and mislead viewers...

Are they known for that? They deleted a perfectly respectable comment of mine yesterday and I’m a bit wary.

They tend to overhype everything for clickbait titles on YouTube.

That might be an issue with YouTube's automated system though, not necessarily the channel admin's.

If it works on ones computer I dont see why it couldnt be daily driven depending on your needs. It has a webkit based browser, and a native emacs port, thats pretty much all i use day to day :P

No 3D acceleration.

What are you doing on a daily basis that needs 3D graphics?

Video games, video playback, video encoding, video effects, desktop window effects and compositing, high res scrolling (I use an 8K display).

> video playback, video encoding, video effects, [...] high res scrolling (I use an 8K display).

Are those 3D graphics?

> desktop window effects and compositing,

Does Haiku use those? If not, it seems irrelevant.

> Video games,

That's the one that I'll agree with, but is depends what we mean by "daily driver"; I was thinking of what would be needed to do productive work, and that possibly restricted by what kind of work you're doing, not the ability to run literally all use cases. So I agree that it's probably not a good choice for somebody who does 3D modeling, but it's probably fine for somebody who writes web back ends.

> Are those 3D graphics?

Not exactly but all hardware accelerated rendering today is done using the same APIs as 3D graphics. You would use OpenGL (or any other API) and basically render everything without the third dimension. There is no hardware accelerated graphics API for 2D graphics specifically anymore, they are all built on top of 3D graphics.

I love how the same thread cites a lack of full-disk encryption as a dealbreaker for daily-driving without criticism, but 3D graphics is immediately questioned.

To be fair, the audience here considers computers to output a black screen with gray or white text. That's 2D graphics of the most basic form.

Also, it's actually fairly unintuitive to even most computer nerds and professionals that desktop compositing, decoding and rendering video, etc. are all handled as 3D graphics behind the curtains these days.

To be clear, I'm happy to also question FDE. In both cases, I can see why some users would need it on a regular basis but I also don't see it as a hard requirement for all users.

Playing video games is very common and requires 3D acceleration for most games. It's not some niche requirement.

Are there many 3D-accelerated games ported to BeOS?

There's wine, but then again there's also 3d acceleration now (limited to some AMD cards).

Web browsers and such do also leverage the gpu for rendering.

Rendering javascript bullshit.

Seriously; set up a xeon vm without a video accelerator, vnc in, and try using it as your daily driver web browser. 128 cores weren’t close to enough the last time I tried (6 years ago).

Early 2000s it was my daily driver. But man.. I used the filesystem like it was indented.. All my files had attributes. Unfortunately none of the metadata was supported on other platforms. Lots of wasted energy :) I loved BeOS

   I used the filesystem like it was indented.

What does `indented` mean here. Not familiar with this usage.

Almost certainly they meant to write “intended”.

Ha! I feel like a dork now. After dinner haze.

lol.. I meant that intended :). BeOS made heavy use of extended attributes. Everything was a file, and you could add attributes. With modern filesystems, this is also possible, but what made BeOS so special is that the attributes were a core feature of the OS.

The file manager Tracker (Finder / Explorer) allowed you to select any attribute as a column name. The filesystem indexed all attributes, so it was blazing fast.

For example, all emails were stored as regular files (like Maildir). They had attributes for things like: MAIL:from, MAIL:when, MAIL:subject etc.

It's a different from using a separate indexing service like Spotlight.

Did you ever use Scott Hacker's CD ripping script?

It got the track info from cddb, added the attributes to both the mp3 files and the BFS extended attributes.

I don't remember if I was ripping CDs at that point to be honest. I know my mp3s were all tagged and also used attributes. I think the playback position was also an attribute.

I attempted to use Haiku as my daily driver about a year ago. Only four things really put the kibosh on that:

1. Lack of native / built-in support for full-disk encryption

2. Lack of a day-to-day usable web browser

3. Lack of the apps I regularly use on Linux and Windows (or good enough equivalents)

4. Lack of stability on the hardware I was using (Framework 11th Gen)

It looks like at least one of those is no longer an issue, thanks to Falkon. It also looks like there's been a lot of progress on getting Wine working and stable. If overall stability is sufficiently improved, then giving it another try might very well be in the cards, even without FDE.

Other then that how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

If your daily driver is only web and email you can drive anything.

FDE still a stopper, in this post-Snowden world.

Can't afford to do much on a machine that doesn't meet that bar.

If you’re only using it for web then booting into a “live CD” is good enough.

Arguably live CD and encrypted removable storage which stays with you at all times is probably harder to defeat than most FDE.

Haiku Activity and Contract Report, October 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38273608 - Nov 2023 (12 comments)

Progress on running Haiku OS on VisionFive 2 RISC-V dev board - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35843775 - May 2023 (20 comments)

Haiku's (Kernel) Condition Variables API: Design and Implementation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35690656 - April 2023 (16 comments)

Haiku package management - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34879304 - Feb 2023 (52 comments)

Haiku beta 4: a thing of beauty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34338487 - Jan 2023 (38 comments)

Haiku R1/beta4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34109349 - Dec 2022 (139 comments)

Lots more listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111732...

In terms of foundations and principles Haiku OS is more of a coherent platform that anything on the Linux desktop attests to be at the moment. In terms practicality, hardware support and a size of software ecosystem it is still very minor compared to Linux, which I find unfortunate.

These two things are linked.

This statement got me thinking. How do you mean? I wonder if you're thinking what I'm thinking.

A solo developer or a small team can create a very focused, consistent product. But once the masses of people are drawn to it, both as customers and as contributors, maintaining a hold on it as a visionary is difficult. Id argue that squeezing too hard to maintain that hold can strangle the project. A perfect idealized initial design and initial vision can drive consistency further along the timeline, but this is an ideal. We create something, then we give it to the world to be consumed. Haiku is still in its cocoon. It is unclear what would happen to it should it achieve the focus of the hivemind. It is unclear if the development team would even like that.

With a recent, working port of Wine, there's no shortage of software to run on it.

All desktop OSes are, as they are thought as a whole stack, not jigsaw puzzles.

That is what made Android/Linux and ChromeOS/Linux attractive to the masses, they offer the structure, for users and application developers, that GNU/Linux has never managed to structure across the endless list of flavours on Distrowatch.

I really enjoyed using BeOS 5 during its heyday.

At some point/place I heard it was going to have a ribbon type thing flow down menus. This would help follow stuff in deep drill downs. Really wish someone had done it.

https://store.kde.org/s/Opendesktop/p/1080563/

Personally, I think this OS has promise if it could get more modernization. It’d be nice to have another OSS GUI with some leanings into UI/UX.

Edit-modernizations like cross compatibility with linux, would be my guess. Think linux subsystem with gui support? Wonder what else…

Edit2-maybe throw in some modern stuff like swift (the apple language), zfs/bcachefs, and definitely a way to leverage already extant drivers.

BeFS is its own awesome thing. Sure, ZFS integrity and portability is nice, but the speed and metadata of BeFS is great.

Sure, but adding metadata to zfs would probably be easier than modernizing BeFS. Just in general as FSes are very worthy of being a project unto themselves. Thinking of low lying fruit to get maximum value easily. BeFS doesn’t have to go anywhere either.

Dominic Giampaolo (the author of BeFS) did essentially that with Spotlight (also the author of Spotlight) on HFS & APFS (also the author of APFS).

I remember hearing about Haiku about a decade ago, and I played with it in a virtual machine, and it seemed neat, but I'm not 100% sure why it buys you over anything else. This could just have been the virtual machine, but it didn't feel any faster than any other OS really, and the UI was fine, but kind of unremarkable to me.

I'm not saying all this to crap on the project; is there actually an advantage to using Haiku in 2024 over, say, Linux?

An os that nobody is writing zero day exploits for ?

Yeah, and everyone is looking for the next "distraction-free!" setup, so I suppose it might accomplish that to some extent as well.

It boots really fast. And the UI on some linux DEs feels laggy at times. This shouldn’t have the decades of cruft making the GUI lag.

What Linux GUI are you referring to? The only one I could think of were the first versions of Gnome 3, but that is pretty smooth nowadays.

Gnome. Still.

Of course modern web dev is not helpful.

In 2023, Haiku got Emacs and Vulkan support that makes it much more attractive to me than in the past. But I still feel very reluctant to use something without the industry support that Linux has.

Does that mean they have some accelerated video drivers now? Last I checked (maybe a year ago) there were none at all.

(Haiku developer here.) There is one hardware accelerated driver, for Radeon Southern Islands; but it's third-party, out-of-tree, and not particularly simple to set up and get running. So, not really.

Thanks for the response. Is there much hope for this to change at some point? I would love to eventually use Haiku on actual hardware, and the lack of video acceleration is the main thing that discourages me from giving it a go.

Well, there's nothing preventing it from happening if that's what you mean. It's just a difficult thing to do, and requires effort (and expertise.)

I might take a crack at porting the KMS/DRM drivers from Linux eventually, but it's not near the top of my TODO list.

Once you start gluing various ported Linux applications onto these alternative OSes, they start to lose their distinctiveness and raison d'être. If you are using Qt/KDE apps, anyways, what does Haiku really bring to the table other than a smaller footprint?

I never programmed for BeOS back in the day, but my understanding was that half the advantage of it was its consistent clean ground-up API for building multimedia applications. I'm not sure how well that has aged, tho...

Haiku's "raison d'être" is to be a fully-fledged desktop operating system for general use. So, if there aren't native applications to fulfill daily tasks, then Linux ones tend to get ported.

Anyway, as for the question "why Haiku, if it's just ported Linux apps?" well, because Haiku is a much more cohesive system than any Linux distro. Even if every app you are running on it is from Linux (besides Tracker and Deskbar), the entire system underneath those applications remains tightly integrated.

Emacs runs in haiku OS. So most of my requirements are satisfied.

Around 2000 a fully functional BeOS Personal edition was included in a PC Magazine CD. It was fun to try other operating system (I didn't even had to create a partition, something hard to do considering our PC had just 8GB of DD). It was much faster than Windows 98, although didn't have much applications.

I tried to use it as my mail client, I loaded it up and configured it, but it wasn't working. I did some very basic troubleshooting but couldn't find anything wrong and after a few web searches couldn't figure out how to find relevant logs to see what was broken.

I gave up and moved on.

Haiku looked amazing and beautiful in 2009 when I first learned about it. Today it looks dated like Windows 95.

Disagree strongly. I find its appearance 10X more visually appealing than any modern UI (win/mac/kde/etc). They’re all incredibly wasteful of space and chunky. Also, designers ruined OSX by making it flat and joyless.

They not just waste space but at the same time break some of the UI. Recently it took me half a minute to drag a window into view on Mac OS because aside from a few pixels every single part of the window "title bar" was actually some button or widget. I wish mainstream operating systems implemented DWM's shortcuts for window dragging/resizing, those are amazing: holding the key and left mouse button makes the window draggable anywhere, and right mouse button instantly resizes the window so the bottom right corner is at the mouse cursor position.

And I hate auto-hiding, narrow scrollbars so much. Scrollbars have exactly two purposes: show the scroll progress and allow faster scrolling than with the wheel/gesture. Both are effectively prevented by it going invisible.

There was a time when I found the Windows 98 UI a bit "old", but honestly in the long run it aged better than almost everything that came after.

The interface peaked in Windows 2000.

XP and beyond were a mistake, UI/UX wise.

Irix, OS 8, and perhaps Enlightenment are high water marks for me. I can see people’s affinity for 2000 though.

I wish modern operating systems looked like Windows 95, I think this was the one time Microsoft got their user experience right, except for the things that were forced on them by backward compatibility concerns, e.g. "in-band" filename extensions that were awkwardly hidden by later versions of Windows.

Haven’t tried either, but there’s https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 and https://serenityos.org/

https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 has a theme for GTK+4 with classic widgets, they work quite well w/ the new "responsive" mobile-friendly apps. Unfortunately you'll need to replace your GTK+ user config outright to use it because the new version has no support for themes.

That’s to a certain advantage though. There’s a nostalgic pining for simpler cleaner OS aesthetics. See the vaporwave and Frutiger Aero trends, and the interest in SerenityOS.

Aero was not simpler or cleaner. Ditto with KDE3 with Keramik. Usable and with clear widgets? Yes, but not simpler. Simpler, clean and usable were Mac OS 7-8, Windows 95-2k, or BeOS.

Also, lots of vaporwave confuses the 80's and 90's, often made from people which either they weren't there or they were too young.

To me the years from1996 and 2004 share lots of traits, (being Mac OSX almost the pinaccle of late 90's technologism and optimistic futurism), and early 90's were culturally almost an extension of the late 80's. Both in trends, music, movies... things began to change with Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, and so on.

To me, the appeal of Frutiger Aero is more in the proto-solarpunk marketing (skyscrapers surrounded by verdant fields under sunny blue skies, dolphins leaping) than the actual UI. Though hard to hate on the Wii Shop Channel.

Bluecurve from Red Hat is a nice bridge between the '90s and late '00s era, as far as design languages go.

I could not disagree more about Windows 95 looking "dated". It's one the clearest, simplest, and easiest to parse UIs I've ever seen.

Buttons look like buttons. Scroll bars are thick and clear. Draggable objects are obvious.

It's a huge shame that we've gone only backwards since then, IMHO.

Sometimes I wonder what kids will consider a 'button' since their first few years will be touch screens, magic corner trackpads, and no-show clickers in MightyMice.

Do TV remotes even have physical buttons any more?

Last Christmas, one of the most popular toys we sold was Pop-Its, which is nothing more that a plastic sheet of buttons.

I am not worried that the kids will grow up not understanding the concept of a button.

https://www.target.com/s/pop+it+fidget+toy

TV remotes do still have buttons.

Also, there are still on/off buttons and volume buttons on phones. Video game controllers still use buttons. Car radios and car A/C and heaters still use physical buttons.

> Car radios and car A/C and heaters still use physical buttons.

Depends on the car's year, make, and model. It could be touchscreen only.

That's fair. I haven't yet seen a car with only a touchscreen and nothing else, but I wouldn't be surprised by the existence of such a car. I don't actively keep up with new cars.

Tesla doesn’t have buttons for the aforementioned functions

I hate Tesla as much as the next guy, but all Teslas have buttons for temperature and audio controls - they're on the steering wheel.

Enable "high contrast mode" in macOS.. buttons look like buttons and some more things.. The normal mode is way too flat / low contrast.

I'll probably catch heat for this, but I think Windows 95 was the pinnacle of UI/UX design, and much of what we've done since have been regressions.

I agree. You knew visually what everything did. A button was a button and was noticeably off or on and things like that. I would put classic on for my XP UI I love it so much.

It was a very explicit interface. It was not as sexy as a 3D composited one, but it did not play peek-a-boo. Scrolling through a list, like downloads on a web page, you would see 20 or 30 line items, not two or three. It also worked on a slow CPU without a GPU. We have lost something since those highly-optimized 2D interfaces, from the same era as Super Nintendo Mode 7 affine transform and After Dark/Xscreensaver 2.5D graphics.

I can’t stand things that are hidden until I mouse over or click on them. Just draw everything and let me scroll

I disagree, but only slightly, Windows 2000 was my personal favorite, especially for its version of Windows Explorer.

The one area where I think 98 and 2000 regress from 95 is that they introduce "web content" in applications that are not web browsers - specifically, random objects respond to single-clicks instead of double-clicks, and blue underlined (and sometimes not even underlined) hyperlinks start to appear.

There was no reason to do that.

Active X desktop crap could be disabled with some Registry tweaks.

It wasn't just on the desktop, though. It was in the Explorer, in Office apps, and various other places.

One convention we lost was that text fields have sunken white background and other areas of the UI are generally grey. UI now uses bright white in most places, eventually causing the world to invent dark mode.

It's really gone backward.

We lost any concept of shading and borders, which has made modern day user interfaces absolute hell to navigate because everything melts together and looks the same.

Windows 9x/NT4.0 Explorer was the pinnacle of graphical user interfaces.

One regression that really annoys me: in recent KDE themes, the default "active window" and "background window" titlebar colors are indistinguishable. So you have no clue where all your input events are going to go.

And if you actually set them to reasonable colors, certain applications do weird epileptic things (looking at you, Firefox!)

There's a "flat" decorator which makes things look more 'modern', if that's what you want: https://github.com/unarix/haiku_darkstyle#darkflat

(Available in the Depot; install "haiku_extras" package.)

Is it possible to run Haiku somehow on a Mac Mini M1, or does it require underlying Intel architecture?

x86/x64 only https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta4/

Is there some kind of x86 emulator that will do the trick?

Try UTM mac.getutm.app/

"Installing Haiku on Apple silicon Using UTM"

https://codingitwrong.com/2023/08/05/installing-haiku-on-app...

cpp was a poor choice for the system but Haiku is cute. The dev team should figure out 2D/3D acceleration and this thing will fly. 64 bit edition has finally abandoned BeOS compatibility and looks really promising as a quick tiny hobbyist OS.

cpp is probably inherited from beos.

How well would this run on a 22” 2017ish iMac?

When I tried Haiku 3 years ago, it hanged regularly.

I loved BeOS. In the 90's it was my main OS including at work. When Be announced that BeOS will be gone, and Be too... I went to Linux. And never looked back. Started with a RedHat Linux 5, tried Debian, but could not get Debian to work with the dial-up modem, so went RedHat 5, then 6 and all those that followed until Fedora went out.

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