Comment by pmkary
14 hours ago
I'm so happy. Haiku to me, is visually the most beautiful operating system out there. The icons, apps, designs. If there be anything that can ever steal the spotlight from Mac; it would be Haiku. And the OS is perhaps the one and only one that remains a tool in the old sense. All other operating systems are now service and signups and telemetry and notifications; this is the last resort remaining for the rest of us. I only wonder sometimes when it is going to become usable. With LLMs I'm wondering can't they be put to find the stability issues and make the solving faster?
What really sets Haiku (and the preceding BeOS) apart is that it's built for the express purpose of being a desktop operating system. As good as desktop Linux has gotten it still suffers from servers being the chief use case for Linux-based OSes, seen in quirks such as how poorly it handles running out of memory (not as big of a deal in the server world, particularly in the container era; just tweak your setup and reboot your containers). It's not bogged down with corporate IT needs either.
The last time we got an OS that was as purely desktop-end-user-oriented with no competing influences was Classic Mac OS, which had serious technical issues.
The problem is, Linux is improving too quickly for Haiku.
I have been looking forward to running Haiku as a daily driver for years. And it is almost there. It may even be good enough now for many people. Modern browsers really help.
But I was amazed recently when I put Haiku on an old laptop that was already running Linux. I remember Haiku being so lean and fast and multi-tasking so smoothly. But honestly Linux felt faster on this machine. The memory usage was about the same (a real shock to me). And I missed being able to use containers. So, I ended up putting Linux back on.
This bummed me out because I have been a Haiku fan forever and it has never been better. But when I tried to use it, I could not convince myself there was any benefit (other than diversity). And the reason had nothing to do with applications or drivers.
> The problem is, Linux is improving too quickly for Haiku. Ain’t it the truth. It’s really great now the snowball is fully in flow down the mountain with Linux. But at the same time it’s sad that there’s little time for anything else. We are a bit of a victim of our own success. We beat the drum in the 90s that Linux needs to win and now that it won what does it really mean. Free and open source to do anything but at the same time, why in the world use anything else. We have come a bit of a Chromium in that regard (or it became us?)
Cosmoe and VitruvianOS are two different approaches of "Haiku" you may find interesting.
Cosmoe works at the application toolkit level, allowing to build and run BeOS/Haiku apps on Linux. The toolkit is then implemented using Linux classic APIs.
Vitruvian is Haiku on the Linux kernel (with some extra modules).
https://gitlab.com/haydentech/cosmoe https://v-os.dev/
There are Haiku/BeOS-style window manager/GTK themes if that suits your needs better.
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> such as how poorly it handles running out of memory
What is interesting, FreeBSD last time I used it, had far ,pre simple predictable kernel OOM killer. Anyway, I always either switch off swap on Linux machines or install EarlyOOM.
I guess this depends on how you see things. Windows was meant to be a desktop OS and crashed all the time. Probably still does, but the wise have abandoned that burning ship.
Linux, however, rarely crashes on a desktop, and when it does, it is usually due to a graphic card driver that doesn't want to work there.
Windows crashing all the time? I haven’t experienced crashes since WinXP… Or when trying beta drivers and overclocking. As a day to day windows and OSX user, I’ve had more stability issues with OSX than Windows.
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Even before the more recent enshittification, Windows has long suffered from prioritization of corporate/enterprise needs over those of end users, rendering various parts of the system more complicated than they need to be. This is visible going back to 3.x/9x; the versions of Mac OS (and BeOS) of the same vintage are more friendly and approachable on several fronts.
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> If there be anything that can ever steal the spotlight from Mac; it would be Haiku.
I looked at the Haiku slideshow and I'm not seeing this. It looks like an eye sore, desktop environments familiar of the 90s. Even early OSX is a massive improvement (as it was to the NeXT desktop).
Don't get me wrong; Mac is light years ahead. What I mean is the level of harmony and design integrity the Haiku has. I doubt that any corporation can ever have even the team that used to make the icons of Tiger/Leopard era. The scrollbars of the Leopard or the whole Aqua. But given their team size and small scale of Haiku; this is one amazing job. The apps, the website, the icons; the documentations... all are in harmony and you don't find it anywhere else.
All of that has been straight copied from BeOS, which was a real corporation worth millions of dollars and in the cutting edge of technology at the time.
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I agree, it's arguably clean, and definitely an improvement over Windows 98 era GUI, probably also XP era. But the world has moved on. Even KDE looks better today.
I honestly don't get this, what have we gotten since that's a considerable UI improvement? Bigger paddings? Flat UI?
IIRC you can even configure custom colors, have dark mode, etc. It might look dated with the gray color scheme but that's really the only thing I can guess would look dated to someone.
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Looks like Windows 98. Which is of course a compliment.
I mean, Linux is still pretty squarely in service of the end user.
>All other operating systems are now service and signups and telemetry and notifications
What are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense.