Haiku is a community-driven continuation of BeOS, a discontinued operating system for personal computers. It is binary-compatible with BeOS, but also supports contemporary systems, protocols, hardware, and web standards. - wikipedia
Then I installed Haiku on my XPS13 under KVM/Qemu. Everything runs blazingly fast. I’m thinking of maybe using that install for organizing my photos. The metadata functionality built into the BeFS is great for that.
I must say that I am really impressed.
That is not to say that they aren't focusing on performance gains, just that they have ensured the user experience is the top priority.
Honestly... my problem with Apple laptops isn't the hardware, it's the crappy version of XNU/Darwin/NextStep that comes with them. I would buy a Mac if it came with HaikuOS and supported all the peripherals. But what is the chance of that?
FWIW... I still have a powermac with "real" BeOS on it. Haven't booted it in several years. I did look at HaikuOS running on an X86-64 VM and for the tasks I gave it (compile a few package, run emacs, serve a web page or two) it worked like a champ. I think the developer docs could use some help, but maybe I should volunteer to help them out.
But it all hinged on someone coming up with an exploit and releasing it free to the community ignoring any bug bounty. True altruists. And apple is good enough at whack a mole and paying people $100k that this sort of effort died out. Most low hanging fruit all picked and patched already. It is no wonder that ios innovation has also stalled out now that there isn't someone to copy good ideas from any longer.
The hardline opposition like China, Russia and North Korea all have contingency ecosystems they'd rather promote than force Apple to comply with an arbitrary featureset. The EU, for all the good it has done, will have to contend with the US refusing to extend FVEY intelligence to states that resist cooperation.
My original statement should have read Nine Eyes or Fourteen Eyes, but the point stands. The US can play hardball behind closed doors and make these nations regret regulation even if it's a good policy.
Here are some more impressions: https://kconner.com/2025/03/09/haiku-os-study-path.html
The window manager might look a little old-fashioned, but it seems solid as a dev workstation.
Hard to tell if this is a major breakthrough or just an incremental improvement.
My only qualm is how HaikuOS, and AmigaOS for that matter, fail to carry over their aesthetics to a high-resolution/HiDPI world. I see gradients, overly-empahsized embosses in the UI screenshots. They lack the serene feeling of their user interfaces from 25 years ago, and feel like DVD menus now. I used to feel the same about KDE, but it has since moved on from flashy rendering AFAIR.
What I mean isn't to adopt a completely flat design, which I also dislike, but for instance, Windows 11's UI seems easier on the eyes than Haiku now.
I also know that UI is hard, no question about it. All the good luck and best wishes to the team.
Who referenced capitalism? And do anarchists, socialists, communists, et al., never question the usefulness of a thing either?
Capitalism, in its most pure form, puts profit before anything else in any form of work
So your parent may've taken the 'is it useful' comments to mean 'if not, why even exist' but I got the sense they're more from people who are considering an install, even if just in a VM.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
You might want to read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture
Your peers on this website are not principled, fun-loving Freenode/Libera geeks. HN is the Linkdin of underground social networking.
We can do things just for the fun of it. Woz made the Apple computer basically as a toy, nothing more. And that's cool.
Sorry guys - Haiku is a great idea, but it needs to become a real operating system semi-advanced users can use daily. And it hasn't been at that since years.
Linux works.
https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/ruby/haikuports/haikuports...
No it doesn't.
Which distro?
Linux is an OS kernel, not a full operating system.
I still need to know which distro to choose before I install it.
No need to do that with macOS or Windows, but Linux is always a problem.
I want to resurrect an older Mac mini with an installation of a Linux distribution, but choosing a suitable distro is the first step I struggle with. Only thing I know is that it won't be an Ubuntu setup. :-)
I do run Linux-based systems in various forms already: OpenWRT on the router, an older Debian VM —which I just messed up a few days ago by trying to uninstall a wallpaper package which took down the whole desktop environment for some reason— and Raspbian on the PI.
But on some days I feel maybe I just should go for FreeBSD. But it may have similar (to a lesser extend) issues like Haiku with proper up-to-date software, especially in the web browser department? I previously dabbled with Haiku and this was its main issue. The OS itself is pretty nice though.
Maybe getting into FreeBSD for a bit would be a fun little project.
I personally always install LTSC because there's no ads and less bloat, but sometimes random things don't work. This isn't a problem with Android, but Windows is always a problem
A clever developer making things work on his or her own hardware, is not quite on the same level as daily driver. (Granted, Linux would also have to run on M1 Macs. But I mean this more on the issue of same-hardware or comparable hardware level.)
But it isn't ready for any kind of real mainstream daily driver use, no.