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Comment by bmurphy1976 | Hacker News Reader

bmurphy1976

How usable is Haiku OS in practice?

It's a delight to use, if a little esoteric at first. After the experiment phase, the software ecosystem comes up fairly limited. But I recommend visiting.

Here are some more impressions: https://kconner.com/2025/03/09/haiku-os-study-path.html

What kind of hardware do you run it on? Has driver support been an issue?

I briefly emulated it with UTM (QEMU) on macOS; the host was an M1 series chip. This story is the first indication that I might run Haiku on that machine's bare metal someday.

I run it on an old Optiplex that is a 3rd gen i3. No issue with drivers but that comes from its old (well seasoned) age.

The window manager might look a little old-fashioned, but it seems solid as a dev workstation.

I was trying to set up an install for my HS age some to learn programming this summer with minimal distractions. I was surprised to see IntelliJ runs and they’ve integrated GNU core utils. A hello world program ran fine.

Haiku is surprisingly usable in practice with Firefox, Falkon, and other browsers available. LibreOffice is there too.

There are not that many native applications. But there are a number of GTK and Qt apps that have been ported (like GIMP).

It depends what you need from your OS.

It’s effectively a different kernel and window system for GNU at this point. Tons of GNU ports. Most targets cannot run original Be software for the obvious reason.

On M1 on specific? or on any platform in general?

The platform itself. Like, can it run Firefox? Can I actually do normal stuff in the browser like watch a YouTube video or join a Zoom call? Can I run VSCode? Can I run Docker?

It is not a Linux distro. It is not a Linux at all; it is a completely different, independent OS. It is not a Unix at all: it's an independent ground-up C++ OS that implements a lot of POSIX-type APIs to make it easier to port Unix apps.

Docker is literally a Linux native tool that is for Linux only. The only way Docker works on anything that isn't Linux is by running a Linux VM, containing Alpine.

It is not a Linux and no you cannot do Linux things with it like run Linux containers, because to run Linux containers you need Linux and this is not a Linux.

I am trying to emphasize this because your question seems to be asking "what kind of Linux is this?" and this is a category error.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake

Or, as ESR originally put it, it's an X/Y problem:

https://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem

Yes, a Firefox port became available recently. I don't know if it can run Zoom. I go out of my way to avoid Zoom if I possibly can.

> The only way Docker works on anything that isn't Linux is by running a Linux VM, containing Alpine.

Sorry but this is demonstrably false. Not only is Alpine not a requirement in the slightest, Windows Server's own containers work as a backend for Docker just fine.

Sure, but you can't run your Linux containers in them. But you can on FreeBSD. Which was my point.

Lack of applications is my main problem

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