I was a huge BeOS fan back in the day, and bought the Intel version when I had a Pentium ][ computer. I was so excited for OpenBeOS (now Haiku) after BeOS got acquired, but it's been something 17 years, and it looks they're still just a release candidate for 1.0.
Back then, BeOS did some amazing stuff compared to Windows, but technology has come a long way since then, and I'd rather be using MacOS, Windows or a Linux Desktop like Ubuntu than Haiku.
The one thing that makes Haiku intriguing and promising in my eyes is the fact that its developers want it to be a first class desktop/laptop OS above all else with no server/mobile/other kitchen-sink-isms muddying the water. There’s nothing like that out there today, save for maybe macOS (which is more desktop focused but still suffers from the various multipurpose compromises brought from its *NIX heritage).
I'm not convinced that at present this is a meaningful benefit especially compared to the increased resources available for say linux. The one good example that I can think of cpu schedulers seems to be solved by running a kernel with alternative patches.
Haiku doesn’t have to worry about this problem at all. It can simply implement the most effective and good-experience-conducive end to end design possible for its window management and compositing since it’ll never ever be a headless server.
In today's terms, that sounds a lot like an iPad (with an attached keyboard) or a Chromebook.
Haiku runs circles around Ubuntu MATE on these devices; it may seem equivalent on benchmarks, but the UI just _feels_ much zippier and apps load quickly.
Doubtful. After seeing a few Haiku posts over the past few days I downloaded it and gave it a try. There's a lot of promise, but it's pretty darn glitchy (e.g. DHCP client works occasionally, mail client sees mailboxes but doesn't fetch messages).
I'm in the opposite camp though. I'd love to find a viable alternative to macOS.
I've finally found a consistent way to reproduce the DHCP glitches, so I might be able to spend some time debugging that. The mail client is another issue; for now you're probably better off avoiding it. (There are third-party mail apps in the depot, so maybe try one of those?)
Glad to hear you can see the potential, though! :)
TuneTracker (http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/index.html) ships commercial radio broadcasting systems that run on Haiku.
What chipset is that? I just merged new drivers for the Intel PRO wireless chipsets and Intel "Dual Band" chipsets; so if it's one of those it might work out of the box now.
> a modern web browser
Well, WebPositive can play YouTube and mostly works on major sites ... but yes, this is a difficult problem.
Rust and Servo are already good for massive multithreading, so that should fit into the Haiku expectations pretty well.
