The beauty of each desktop centric OS is the whole platform, the set of SDK languages, the respective frameworks for exposing the OS and hardware features that make the desktop experience unique, and IDE developer experience.
If it is to run desktop agnostic apps, then anything can do.
I ended up reading the Wikipedia page on BeOS for some nostalgia and it mentioned Haiku. Glad to see BeOS still around in some form — definitely was ahead of its time!
It blew my mind. Things we take for granted now like multiple QuickTimes running at the same time, all the massive concurrency... Live searches of the filesystem via journaling... All way before its time (or at least, way before it appeared in mainstream OS'es).
What I wonder is, is Haiku more efficient than other available OS'es at Intel (or other, like ARM) CPU utilization?
Great stuff. We need an open-source operating system 100% focused on the desktop.
It seems like a very performant and simple OS (which is a welcome alternative compared to macOS) but these are pretty glaring problems for a user starting out. For a project that's been around for over a decade, that's a little bit of a red flag.
Also dunno why WebPositive wouldn't do anything for you. It's still a little buggy, but it usually works well enough for my purposes...
We need something that even senior citizens can use to replace Windows XP on a system they can't afford to upgrade. Just the basic word processing Internet surfing and email.
ReactOS is progressing as well.
OSFree the OS/2 rewrite seems slower but using the M4 kernel with DOS and OS/2 personalities.
My personal experience from large scale transition from Windows 7 to Linux Mint at work indicates that people ABSOLUTELY can use Linux - the UI is (unlike Win10) stable and things do not move around, settings don't change themselves on upgrades. And, importantly, updates can be set to be silent and automatic.
I am probably one of the biggest naysayers of Linux as a desktop platform, so keep that in mind when I ask: What's wrong with Linux for this use case?
If all you need is an internet kiosk, Linux is fine. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that's been the Linux Desktop's targeted use case for about a decade now because their cultural attitude is that anyone who isn't a C greybeard needs to be bottle fed.
My other grandmother has been on Chome OS for almost as long. Which has been another great option. I do wish that Google had better support for installing/running full Chrome OS on more generic hardware. I find it's just about the best option all around for the novice computer user.
The way I see it, it is nostalgia. Which has its value. For ReactOS, it also provides backwards compatibility and essentially is a FOSS and free as in beer Windows implementation. However, there are also progressive OSes such as Nix, Tails, Qubes to name 3, or microkernel-based OSes. These are where the innovation lies.
They have something that boots, but I am not sure if it can run OS/2, DOS, Windows code yet.
I wanted to donate $5 but their donate button is broken.
[0] https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/python3/haikuports/3/6/7/-...
I didn't know about Haiku up to 2013 I guess where I had a bug report for my download manager https://github.com/Alir3z4/yoDownet
It's a really interesting OS
Linux is getting good at drivers and "just works", but it still isn't there. I fear how hard it will be to get haiku running
It Just Works and contrary to certain other IDEs it uses Mavens pom file directly instead of translating it to some other (even hehe) less ideal format.
(Recently though Visual Studio Code has been a so big part of my developer life because of Dot Net Core, and Netbeans was so late and unclear about their 9.0 release that I tested just using VS Code for Java as well. It worked reasonably well. But now that Netbeans 10 is released I'd probably go right back if/when I go back to Java.)
I’m more than happy if the former two are done and dusted and my experience with BeOS and since on the former two has been pretty good. If something is pretty but not functional, people won’t use it. If something is functional but not pretty, it’ll get used nevertheless.
People might say it’s a false dichotomy but GNOME 3 and early Windows 8 are substantial examples of the opposite.
Windows 95 wasn’t pretty in any traditional aesthetic sense but by god was it ever functional and cohesive and successful despite basic bitmap faux-3D. Nobody cared.
But I do think you're right in that if BeOS had survived, it would not look like that in 2019. It's probably time for Haiku to start evolving the UI/UX to keep current as the spiritual successor of BeOS.
The style is part of its appeal.
I think if they could get patches upstream for chrome and node, which would allow electron, that could open the doors for a significant increase in usable end user applications. The article's demonstration on progress for Java applications is very impressive on its' own.
Aside: being able to use user tweaked UI/UX would be nice in general, but would probably be a break from the BeOS origins. I used to run a shell replacement on Win2k and XP era, but I liked win7 so much I stopped using it (don't even recall the name right now).
In the end, there's no cause for rudeness here. While I don't think I'd be able to use Haiku currently, it's nice to see progress here. I'd also be interested to see a window manager for linux that followed the Be/Haiku aesthetics as I think a lot of people would appreciate it. Personally I really like the dock/taskbar in Win7 and 10, though I prefer the Win7 start menu. I run mac, windows and linux regularly (mac and windows daily, linux at least once a week on elementary).
If Haiku was a Linux Window Manager, I would use it in a heartbeat.
It's a bit of a stretch, but you could argue the comment goes against this guideline:
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
