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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

I've always been confused as to what sort of niche Haiku is trying to fill. Is there that much of a demand for BeOS applications?

Maybe I'm just too young to know

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Since when does everything have to fill some niche? What about just trying to make a good open-source desktop OS, for fun, because they're developers?

I see this quite often on articles about Haiku. Everyone jumps on them like it's such a bad thing that they're working on something and it has no relationship to Linux.

It's a legitimate question. Haiku was being funded a few years ago and there has to be some kind of mission for a project like Haiku.

They have donations, but nobody has ever "funded" the project. Google's thrown a few $k their way ($5k this year) but I can't recall any other big name.

The mission has always been to reimplement BeOS R5 as open-source with some modernization.

I'm not trying to jump on them, I'd love to be able to spend my time on that. It's just that it seems to have significant mindshare, and funding, and usually that means its answering the requirements of somebody.

Maybe they're just here to help diversify the OS world, which in itself is a nice goal.

I've actually been using Haiku as my primary work OS for a while now. I don't need much software beyond a web browser and a text editor (increasingly true for many people I imagine) and Haiku offers some benefits over Linux in simple shell features like stack & tile window management. Check out the User Guide[0] for a sense of the unique features.

[0]: https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/contents.html

Could you be talked into doing a little writeup on what you've got running on it, any problems you've run into, that sort of thing? I think I'd like to try dual-booting or a VM, but I'm years out-of-date on the Haiku world.

I agree with thaumaturgy, I'd certainly like to hear from someone using it as a daily driver. I think around Alpha 1 or 2 I installed it on a spare box for fun, but never really tried much with it.

For the web browser, is there good support for modern browsers?

No, it has a built-in browser. Not sure what engine is behind it but it reminds me of the Konqueror days. There is no Firefox build that is reasonably current that I have seen yet (hopefully I'm wrong, please someone prove me wrong).

WebPositive is based on Webkit (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebPositive). I'm fairly sure you're right about firefox. The only version for beos (that I know of) is a port of firefox 2 (see http://haikuware.com/remository/view-details/internet-networ...).

There's work being done on making WebKit work[0].

[0]: https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/pulkomandy/2013-12-20_webkit_w...

It is a desktop OS that does not try to be another UNIX clone.

A nicer nix than Linux, freer than Mac, better desktop toolkit than either of the two.

Haiku's Not Unix (HNU?) ;)

It's almost as if you've never heard of hobbyist OS development.

Unfortunately it's not a popular pastime as it used to be.

$41,500 was spent paying developers to work on Haiku in 2013:

http://www.haiku-inc.org/funded-development.html

This is way past "hobbyist OS".

$41k isn't much, was split between two developers, and most every penny of that came from community donations.

Maybe it's out of hobbyist status, but this is still far far below how much Be spent developing BeOS each year.

Nobody is saying it's unreasonable amount or shouldn't have been spent, and I consider the money's origin utterly irrelevant. But it is not a trivial amount of money. Unless he moved recently, I believe Ingo Weinhold lives in Germany. His income for this year just from Haiku work exceeds the median German household income. I'm sure he's not working at market rate, but he could be said to be making a living off it.

My one and only point is that you can't say Haiku is just a hobbyist OS. That's simply not a reasonable answer to the question of what its purpose is. It's just dismissive and insulting to the person who asked the question.

I agreed with you that it's likely out of "hobbyist". But you said "way" out of hobbyist, and that's not true at all.

I think it is trying to be a simple and elegant desktop system. It requires nearly zero configuration and has a consistent look and performs well.

I get the feeling it aims to be an open source implementation of what the original Mac was meant to be (pre-OSX)... boot-to-desktop with no terminal layer spawning first.

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