Comment by bmurphy1976

5 hours ago

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

  • +1

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

  • 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.

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.

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?