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175 pointstosh89 comments

Occasional Haiku user here, running directly on hardware. "Works" on my ThinkPad X1 Yoga 3rd Gen (which is an 8th Gen Core i7 device).

To get it working I have to type "continue" at the two kernel panics on startup due to spurious / overzealous Thunderbolt PCI warnings. I also needed help from an Action Retro video to figure out how to setup the UEFI BIOS files on the correct partitions on the bootable Samsung USB stick I use. But it works enough that I can boot into it straight off USB when I want a break from Windows & Linux. They finally added support for the WiFi in my particular ThinkPad. There's basically no bluetooth support, so if you want a wireless mouse and keyboard, something like the Logi Pebble 2 bundle with wireless USB dongle works well.

Haiku has a Go 1.18 port now that mostly works, so that helps. A lot of Qt software has been ported across, though obviously the ideal would be truly native BeOS software.

The main thing I find Haiku lacks is a decent email client. That really prevents productive work for me. There's Claws Mail, but it has enough bugs that I didn't even find it usable, nevermind reliable. There's also some memory or networking issues they haven't tracked down. When I'm using terminal sessions, network responses often have dropped bytes in the output.

Actually the thing I'm really lacking is Claude Code. I ended up building my own minimal TUI API harness / client on Haiku to try and get work done. Haiku's web browsers (like WebPositive) sometimes have problems with the Claude website. I've been wanting to use Claude to help write more Haiku / BeOS software and fix various OS issues - a couple of weeks ago I used the Claude API and $30 API credit to make a USB UAC 2 audio driver for Haiku that works with Focusrite Scarlett devices (both playback and recording). But Haiku's AI policy means I can't contribute those fixes back. Though I understand their desire to keep the source pure and free from any potential copyright liability concerns, especially as they release it under an MIT license.

It's a shame that Be failed. I think they were a victim of Microsoft's aggressive anti-competitive activities in the late-1990s, combined with Apple deciding to bring back Steve Jobs via the acquisition of NeXT (making Apple a serious competitor in the same segment that Be was targeting -- multimedia and realtime applications). Ultimately, they prevailed in winning about $24M from Microsoft, but that was after the company had shut down. I presume the winnings went to Palm. Super cool to see Haiku continuing to develop. No doubt agentic coding is making it far easy for enthusiasts to improve and maintain projects like Haiku and I look forward to seeing where this project goes. You never know...

Be was pretty close from being acquired by Apple instead of NeXT. It was also founded by an ex-Apple employee (Jean-Louis Gassée).

MacOSX would be really different today if it were based on BeOS instead of NeXT...

No beachballs

I strongly suspect Apple wouldn't be here had they picked Be.

What NeXT brought was exceptional developer tools, not to mention Steve Jobs.

No Steve Jobs likely would have meant no iPod, iPhone, etc.

The butterfly effect gets insane with that one, but it's kind of an interesting alternate future to think about.

Probably much worse. First because (and I say this is a BeOS fan at the time) it was a single-user system without much security. Second, because it's likely that Apple would have sunk further without Steve Jobs.

They knew Microsoft was monopolistic. They should have planned around it by making an x86 BeBox. (Which still would have failed because they didn't have the marketing budget.)

They were never going to compete with Microsoft even if MS hadn’t screwed them (which MS definitely did). At the time, MS was invincible in the enterprise market. Be’s only path to success was with Apple. Jean-Louis Gassée was negotiating the buy-out with Apple but he wanted more than Apple was willing to pay and Jobs was the key acquihire at Next, before people started talking about “acquihire” as a concept. Unfortunately, Apple wasn’t going to acquire both Be and Next.

Be made inroads in radio and sound production; though I don't think they knew it.[0]

There was a market starved for a stable, high quality and responsive operating system that would run on the x86 hardware that was abundant everywhere. Windows wasn't it, yet; recall this is years before XP, and Windows 98 was an unstable mess while NT was slow.

0: https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/27-tune_tracker/

Tune Tracker is sill(?) around, they moved to Haiku a long time ago.

It looks like it just moved to Mac earlier this year(!?)

I recall that they had one OEM who wanted to install BeOS as a preinstalled option Hitachi), but then Microsoft threatened to raise Windows license prices in retaliation.

A little search gives a reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20131109045719/http://www.intern...

To that last point, they do not accept any AI code to be used in the project.

I get it, many times I have seen stuff that is function all but very slow, considering Haiku can run fine on a Pentium 2, I can see why they wouldn't want that.

When they had to shift to x86 there was more to it than MS being jerks. At the time, hardware companies would write the device drivers for Windows, but nothing else. If you were an alternative OS you had to provide your own. And since the commodity x86 world was such a clusterfuck of barely compatible hardware, Be had to spend a ton of effort just keeping up with that noise.

Linux had a similar problem but had the advantage of open source. Random people would cobble together support for things and stick it online.

I tried for years to get this operating system to run on my hardware. Last year I succeeded.

Only...there was no software. The system ran beautifully. But I had no web browser that was supported. All the software seemed to be ports from Linux and didn't seem to take advantage of Haiku's advantages.

I had a good speedy operating system that booted almost immediately to the desktop. But nothing to do when I got there.

BeOS back when I tried it in the V5.0 days had software written for it. There weren't multiple options for everything but there was variety. There was usefulness in the radio broadcasting software, the video editors that worked even on my POS box back in 1998/99. When the PE was released I'd hoped that would result in even more software becoming available. But no, it was shut down not too long after that. (I'll skip the whole YellowTab fraud saga.)

The situation seems even worse these days. It's been almost thirty years. Time to let go.

Not my experience. I tried to install on an old Asus Eee and everything worked on first try.

There's a web browser (Web Positive) that works good enough given the available resources on this machine.

The system itself runs very nicely on this hardware. I tried to install Linux there first but I wasn't able to find any 32 but distro with GUI that would fit on 4GB eMMC.

Now I have a neat small machine that supports what I need from it and I'm thinking of putting it on some more powerful HW.

What do you do with it? Genuinely curious!

I think you're directionally right but the bit about the web browser confused me. Haiku ships with WebPositive. You'll remember NetPositive from the R5 days. That's one of the few things Haiku does have.

As of a year ago there was an up to date Firefox port, not sure if they kept it up to date however.

> But I had no web browser that was supported.

This might be a new development, but there's like 3 different forks of Firefox that are packaged. See: `pkgman search firefox`, or something like that. I used Floorp, and it worked well, especially considering it was running with 4 gigabytes of RAM on a VM on a system that already had a bunch of applications open.

There's an interesting fork that recently cropped up. It takes the Haiku user space and places it atop the Linux kernel.

Vitruvian OS: https://v-os.dev/

I wonder how they implement is_computer_on() under Linux?

(https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_Sys...)

In the simplest way. More interesting is the result for is_computer_on_fire()

https://github.com/VitruvianOS/Vitruvian/blob/0e4c6e33ab235b...

Cheating. Not involving the kernel at all.

Why does it return a double?

Per the BeBook:

> Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on fire.

I was wondering about the significance of the returned value 0.63739. Best explanation I found was this HN post [0]: "Referencing a US telephone keypad, it spells NERDY"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29292424

Test the API kernel calling convention when dealing with 64 bit IEE754 doubles on a 32 bit CPU, especially when dealing with MSB vs LSB processors.

Also, a long time ago (pre 486DX), processors did not have FPU circuitry instead it was a FPU coprocessor. When dealing with a kernel context switch, you'd have to copy all registers to a stack. With a coprocessor, you'd have to make sure those registers got copied as well. Which was slower with coprocessors ... So for a time some real time kernels did not allow context switching of FPU. To support that, you'd get the performance hit.

These days its all integrated so you dont have to worry about it ...

on fire

> The following functions, types, and structures are used to convey basic information about the system, such as the number of CPUs, when the kernel was built, what time it is now and whether your computer is on fire.

That’s sometimes a handy diagnostic if it’s a remote, headless system.

BeOS was my dream from childhood. Haiku is amazing, especially because the original BeOS only existed for five years, while Haiku has been going for 24 already. What stamina!

Same here

Sorry for being negative here:

What is the motivation for recreating Be? What would you hope to obtain that you cannot just by using, say, a customized Linux Mint?

If it's just historical/nostalgia/challenge, I get it. But people seem to believe there is something else too, and I'd like to know what that is.

It kind of looks nice visually. Other than that I do agree with you. I got tired of waiting. Linux spoiled me. I need things to work these days. Linux works.

It's one of the last single-user focused operating systems. Its design from kernel to UI is intended to make the system accessible to the user sitting at the desk. It was _extraordinarily_ fast and stable on even modest hardware of the era, and its software toolkit was a delight to use.

Even now, using it feels like the system is bereft of bloat and cruft. It's a system _for the user_ that doesn't assume that the user is technically incapable.

> Its design from kernel to UI is intended to make the system accessible to the user sitting at the desk.

What does this translate to, in some amount of technical detail?

Minimalist and consistent UX, incredibly responsive applications, simple and logical organizational structure, with _excellent_ documentation and developer tools for the era.

You boot straight to a desktop, and there's no ads, alerts, pop-ups, pop-unders, noisy task apps, sidebars, widgets, and other engagement seeking focus destroyers. Every app has a reasonably consistent UX and presents as much necessary and relevant information as it can, without tedious wizards or aggressively hiding information behind folds or submenus.

I was asking what they did differently in the programming.

I mean, barely anything you mentioned in this reply to do with the kernel.

BeOS was way, way snappier to use on the same hardware than Linux (or Windows) no matter how much you trimmed down your (GUI) Linux.

IDK what scheduler voodoo they were doing, but it was awesome.

Only things I've seen that achieved something similar were QNX/Photon, and (though with the benefit of way stronger hardware and a ton of "cheating" by suspending applications) some (mostly early) versions of iOS.

I'm not sure I have any use for Haiku today, but I definitely wish for a world in which computer GUIs didn't feel so damn slow and janky and pre-occupied with whatever it's got going on internally rather than what I need it to be doing right now.

Also, I wish some kind of tagging system for filesystems had taken off well enough that I could rely on it, even cross-platform and when copying files between filesystems. Entire programs could just be file tags. Other programs could just be a thin GUI over tagged files. It sucks that didn't end up becoming a standard and reasonably cross-platform-compatible thing.

Where FUSE is "supported" cross platform, maybe you could store the tags in an SQLite database that gets dragged along for the ride whenever a file gets copied from FUSE to FUSE. Ie, usbdrive to local fuse mouht shadow copies the SQLite db as an extended attribute sort of thing.

Hmm.

fully agree, that would be awesome.

linux does at least have extended filesystem attributes. the dolphin filemanager from KDE makes use of them to support tags and comments. it's not ideal (tags are a comma separated string) but it is usable. adding tags is a bit painful though. i resorted to add and them through the commandline.

More generally, I think there’s a good deal of ways of improving user experience with a single purpose dedicated desktop OS like BeOS that is out of reach on general purpose OSes like Linux.

Actually, I think with Linux there may be a bit of a double penalty on desktop use with how much more attention the server use case gets compared to everything else.

> What would you hope to obtain that you cannot just by using, say, a customized Linux Mint?

When things are coded right, Haiku / BeOS is blazing fast (every single thing runs in a separate thread), and resource usage is tiny. I think the OS only uses about half a gig of RAM? When the apps are coded right, there's a feeling that this is how our modern computers could have been, free from bloated software and using the full speed of the machine. And when shutdown only takes a couple of seconds, it makes you wonder what the other OS's are doing.

Of course the reality is not that. Display drivers & video codecs on Haiku often don't have the right hardware acceleration, most of the software you need is now Linux ports rather than BeOS native. But Haiku sometimes feels like a calming OS. Because it's so small and quite modular, it feels like an OS you can still potentially get your head around.

I like how Action Retro has pointed out that installing a fresh Haiku system is often faster than booting a Windows or macOS system.

As I said in another comment, I've only played with Haiku in a VM for not very much time, but I am a huge supporter of operating systems that are willing to break out of the codified mediocrity we've labeled "POSIX"; I suspect that we might be leaving a lot of performance on the table by constantly trying to POSIX compliant all the time.

> a fresh Haiku system is often faster than booting a Windows or macOS system.

Faster than booting w2k in a vm, on a modern cpu, at least in my tests.

I have said that Haiku feels like it is simultaneously in the year 2040 and 2000. I glimpse from the past of a future we didn't get.

Like Foundation is in 50000 and 1942.

Resource efficiency is a huge one. If you are familiar with the Via Nano: it's a SLOW x86_64 chip (sometimes used in thin clients) that feels about half as fast as older AMD 64 cpu. Haiku feels great on a Via Nano, and it's really storage-space-efficient. Linux distros are slower, and use more storage space (especially important for using an OS on a thin client PC).

Linux is just the kernel, the ecosystem is make up of half a dozen desktop managers, windowing systems, API toolkits, sound servers, file systems, package hits etc. There is an abstraction layer between all these systems. Multiuser, whether you need it or not.

Haiku is a unified system, so native apps have one windowing system, one desktop environment, one API, one media kit, one file system etc. There are less layers for data to travel, hence it will always be faster. Also Haiku targets desktop users (single user system, for better or worse), while Linux in all honesty targets servers and embedded with desktop a distant 3rd use case. Haiku package management is a generation ahead of Linux.

Finally, BeOS/Haiku core architecture is built from modern 90's designs, while Linux started as a clone of Unix (deep in the bowels of Linux there is a TTY terminal block device).

Finally, BeOS had a cool factor (and their fanboys) that Linux never had. Dual CPU from day #1. Blinkenlights. Geek port. Playing videos on a face of a cube. is_computer_on(). Linux is sooo boring in comparison.

BeOS was the best looking OS I've ever seen, even to this day. I loved everything about the looks.

There's almost nothing written about Haiku's security [0]. Am I missing something?

I also don't understand this:

> Our infrastructure contains sensitive personal user data, and we aggressively keep this information private on a need-to-know basis at all times.

What do they mean by "infrastructure" here? Do they mean each installation or their site, bug tracker and so on (the usual interpretation of "infrastructure")? Why would it contain sensitive personal data?

From the FAQ and about pages I gathered that Haiku is just supposed to be simpler, more uniform in design/vision and less bloated than Linux, but nothing specific about why anyone should choose it. If I'm happy with my Linux DE and so on, why would I choose Haiku?

[0] https://www.haiku-os.org/about/security

(Haiku developer here.)

> Am I missing something?

Haiku's not nearly as well-tested for security as most other OSes. We have a lot of the basic features (ASLR, NX bit, safety checks for kernel/userland data copies, some use-after-free detection in malloc, etc.) but things haven't been seriously audited or pentested the way other OSes are. We fix security bugs when they get found, but not too many people are looking for them that I know of.

> What do they mean by "infrastructure" here?

The web/internet infrastructure: software depot (has accounts for people to post ratings/reviews), forums, bug tracker, code review, etc. And it contains all the usual "sensitive personal data": IP addresses, email addresses, some private communications, and so on.

> If I'm happy with my Linux DE and so on, why would I choose Haiku?

Well, I guess the question is, are you really happy with your Linux DE? Because every time I've run desktop Linux, I have to spend what feels like 5-10% (or sometimes more) of my time fixing things that randomly break, or otherwise don't do or behave the way they're expected to, usually by finding some obscure configuration file and changing some random option.

On Haiku, since the system is designed and developed by one team, it all goes together in a way that Linux DEs can't really achieve. The downside is that, of course, we can't reuse much of the Linux's work (we have lots of Linux software ports, but the base system is all us), so we have a lot more to do than your average Linux distro, and so we're quite a ways from general feature parity with the Linux desktop (but the gap does decrease year over year, at least in some areas...)

What was the technical brilliance of BeOS? If I remember the story, Be provided incredible multitasking multimedia performance at a time when resources seemed too constrained and other OSes couldn't match it.

So how did they do it? And does Haiku use the same tech under the hood or does it forus on matching the user experience?

Best OS from all niche os category!

tier one: linux, windows, freebsd tier two: openbsd, netbsd tier three: haiku tier four: all others

One of the few OSes where my wifi and sound just worked out of the box :)

Its totally usable DESKTOP fOS.

Lots of love to freebsd,openbsd,netbsd but I am curious why you placed freebsd at tier one and not others like openbsd/netbsd.

I feel like I like openbsd more from security perspective with things like pledge() etc.

Also how is the driver situation for freebsd and compared to linux and other bsd's?

Im pro NetBSD but freebsd have mkst developers and adoption rate. its business tested

I would love to see if they can get boot times down to a couple seconds.

I always wondered what is the motivation behind Haiku. Is it a recreation of BeOS for the sake of recreating it, or is it practically usable for daily use?

IMO For some it is practically usable with an ever-growing repository of new and familiar packages. HaikuPorts has over 4500 packages.

For the longest time there was not a modern browser that could run, but now there are multiple chromium-based and firefox-based options.

It appears to be usable for daily use for some people, in that enough of a web browser works that you could mostly get by. It would be hard to say it is really practical, nor that it has a convincing path to being practical in the way that say ReactOS does.

People still find plan9 usable for daily use. The major barrier these days is indeed a web browser. I suspect even there you can get 95% of the way to that goal with a "browser" that is actually a linux VM.

For most Plan 9 users, the lack of a web browser is a feature, not a barrier. 9front features VMX on supported Intel machines so one can run a Linux VM using then connect using VNC.

Most people working on kernel/osdev do for the sake of recreating it :)

i can't speak for the project's maintainers and their motivation, but it is workable as a daily use OS if your hardware is supported and you are willing to use the still beta firefox port.

But compared to Linux, why would I want to use Haiku these days?

To explore a different OS.

For one, it's not being actively targeted with new daily exploits.

Can't speak for the project members or main users, but as an alternative OS nerd who actually used BeOS R5 on a 300 MHz Pentium II in-period I see Haiku as having two different "purposes" depending on version.

The x86-32 version (and hypothetically the never-complete PowerPC version), as I see it, exists (or would exist) for binary compatibility with legacy BeOS systems. The AMD64 version on the other hand is a hobby OS demonstrating a path not taken where personal computer operating systems remained separate from server operating systems.

Also, like others, these days I can do basically everything I need to do on a computer other than gaming as long as I have a browser that supports the modern web and a SSH client so Haiku is absolutely fully usable on the right hardware.

And even then, there's a webssh client you can setup to run in the appropriate context that you need.

I've only played with Haiku in a virtual machine for like twenty minutes. It seems cool but I didn't use it enough to really develop a strong opinion. I do wish someone would put some serious money into an OS that isn't Windows and isn't just "implement POSIX".

If I ever become a billionaire, I'm going to throw a boatload of money into an seL4-based desktop operating system.

Been following this for so many years. The previous project lead Michael Pripps (?) was really inspiring.

It is amazing the project keeps going.

Ah, haiku. I like a lot of the ideas it has, and wish someone would make a hybrid of some of its ideas with an actual unix

That's the thing, it was the most novel OS of the time.

Even the OS we use today are all based on some kind of Unix, except for Windows that trace their legacy to VMS through Windows NT.

BeOS on the other time was written from scratch in the 1990's.

Yeah, novel things are needed for innovation. Just see how much Linux and other modern unices have taken from plan 9. I made my comment because while I like some of the things (the filesystem, it being written in C++, and parts of the kernel) I still vastly prefer an actual unix or unix clone instead of something completely different with a posix-ish coat of paint

i believe your wish has been granted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48124834

haiku reminds me of the powerpc macs from 1998 that small bar at the bottom that pulls out. It has that sort of colorful appeal to put it on a colored clear plastic imac or emac you know the orange vanilla motif i remember using.

here! a way to play this on copy.sh so that people can play this in their browser: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=haiku

The problem with Haiku is that it is unable to leave the perpetual beta situation.

On Linux I can use perl, ruby, python, php, julia - you name it. Good luck thinking you can do this on Haiku, as-is.

Edit: I should say that I like Haiku, but I used it many years ago, and the situation with regards to programming still has barely improved here for the most part. They are building literally a dream OS nobody will seriously use.

> On Linux I can use perl, ruby, python, php, julia - you name it. Good luck thinking you can do this on Haiku, as-is.

Then write code to make it work. Complaining about nothing just wastes time.

Situation might have improved since then, they have Go 1.18 now for example.

But I agree on the perpetual beta feeling though, and if you're wanting to get actual work done then Linux is the only way, if you don't want Windows / Mac.

Okay, so it looks like python3 and perl are both available out of box (at least, I don't remember installing them in my VM but it's possible that I did).. ruby and php are available in HaikuDepot.. julia is the only one on your list that's not there

There's a ton of packages built already and more that you can build yourself (needing a bit of effort)

Sometimes a project is largely whimsy and I don't think that's a bad thing. People don't "seriously" use 9front either, it kinda exists because there's a group of people who just want to make a unique thing.

I do somewhat agree on the beta label issue, but I would just put up a ymmv warning label and call it a day.

Beta it may be, but there's a good amount of software and programming language support. The 64-bit version is amazingly stable, even on the nightly version.

wondering : apart from the aesthetics, is there still some technology from beos that would be still considered an improvement compared to what today's OS provide ?

This has been around for years. I don't understand what the news is?

Posting stuff that has been around for years makes it possible for today’s lucky 10,000 [0] to learn about that stuff.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Thanks, I am part of the 10k

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