Why Haiku?
Back in 1999 I was tired of windows and the problems it had, so I experimented with Linux and BeOs.
Linux won, because it had a more "dynamic" feel to it and I've used it ever since for my work (I'm a web developer).
Now today, I'm having a REALLY hard time with Linux, mostly because of the forced UI changes.
So here I am checking out Haiku with a feeling of nostalgy... I like the clean basic UI, that's a huge plus, but I'm left to wonder: What is the spot that Haiku tries to fill in the OS market?
Can you actually do anything with it, or is it just a nice "demo" ?
All the available software seem to be dead projects or very old versions of more popular stuff from other operating systems.
Sure it's fast, but so is my 2 months old laptop with a 10 year old linux distro, with Window Maker.
I'm trying to like Haiku, but I can't see the light .... ??!
Civilized discussion please.
Comments
Re: Why Haiku?
I had the same exertions but coming from windows world (still there)
I still see a place for Haiku in the media and small computer world. The net PC would have been great. Also old PC older than 2 month ;) more like 3 years :)
Yes Linux are there but that are mostly a striped OS. Haiku don't need to be stripped down it do has speed problems but those are known but need to have someone with the knowledge to handle.
Re: Why Haiku?
My personal impression is that Haiku offers a purely desktop centric OS where everything needed to provide a base desktop OS is integrated top-to-bottom. This is unlike Linux desktop distros where there's lots of difference in the userspace section of what makes up the desktop environment.
Now I actually like both approaches, I like the extreme flexibility Linux offers and I also like the top-to-bottom desktop environment integration which Haiku offers, both have their strengths and weaknesses.
Haiku's strengths are that like previously mentioned everything which is part of what one would consider a 'base desktop' comes straight out of the box and are therefore well integrated rather than separate parts which may or may not fit very well together (which is largely the downside to Linux flexibility).
The biggest problem Haiku has in it's poor software availability, this in turn is a result of it having a very hard time attracting developers which at this stage is crucial.
Now, one might think that with the huge amount of open source applications out there this would be easy to fix but in reality porting many of these 'staple' open source offerings like Firefox/Chrome, LibreOffice, Abiword, Inkscape, Blender, Gimp etc are not trivial, particularly due to the large amount of dependancies which are commonplace on *nix + X platforms but all need to be painstakely ported to Haiku, which is reflected in the available ports which I believe are mainly SDL based games which by comparison are extremely easy to port.
This leads to a shortage of the type of common foss applications people would expect to be available in just about any system and also severely limits Haiku's useability as a possible day-to-day system.
But there is no simple solution, there is only so much available manpower with the necessary know-how and time to spare and the only way to improve this situation is by getting more developers aboard which again is hard due to the lack of aforementioned application availability.
Thankfully there's Google Summer of Code which helps lure in new developers but from a project perspective they tend to be more about tackling system needs rather than application needs, which is understandable.
Looking beyond the Google Summer of Code code influx the real boon to Haiku is of course if some of these students find that they want to continue to work on Haiku once their project is complete as has been the case with some of the previous students.
There are other issues like hardware compability but in my opinion the lack of software is the big hurdle when it comes to Haiku having a wider adoption.
Re: Why Haiku?
I'm also kind of hovering around the peripery and looking into Haiku at the moment. What I'm looking for (and what it seems likely to provide for me, once various issues are taken care of) is a full-featured free and modern OS that is desktop-oriented from the get-go; Linux is a reimplementation/upgrade of a mainframe OS from the '70s into a server OS for the 2000s, and there's so much separation between the OS and the components of the GUI (and so many different variations of those components) that it feels very tacked-together, especially when each application uses a different widget toolkit from the last.
There's also the matter of the underlying OS just being too damn complicated for a desktop machine; ever had to hunt down one piece of a script sequence somewhere in a folder of hundreds of scripts buried somewhere deep in the filesystem, just to find out what's going wrong and figure out how to fix it? That kind of thing might be excusable in a server environment, but for a desktop?
Re: Why Haiku?
>> Can you actually do anything with it, or is it just a nice "demo" ?
Of course! I would advise against using it in a production environment as it isn't well tested. However, if you make regular backups you should be fine.
What sort of software do you use on a regular basis?
>> So here I am checking out Haiku with a feeling of nostalgy... I like the clean basic UI,
>> that's a huge plus, but I'm left to wonder: What is the spot that Haiku tries to fill in
>> the OS market?
I don't think it really tries to fill in any spot. There's a ton of operating systems out there. However, I'm not by any means a leader or represent the Haiku community so maybe those who are do have a plan for it in that aspect. To me, Haiku offers a freedom of choice. While Linux is a great operating system I believe that Haiku would be a great alternative for desktop environments (as previously mentioned). Not only does it have a GUI tightly coupled with the operating system (as opposed to X), it also offers some of the power of Linux through its POSIX compatibility (I'm hoping it is, anyways) and *nix-like command-line terminal. Also, you get GCC which is the base compiler and library package used by almost everything in the Linux world.
>> Now today, I'm having a REALLY hard time with Linux, mostly because of the forced UI
>> changes.
Without trying to suade you away from Haiku, nobody is forcing any UI changes on you :) Feel free to private message me if you want to rectify that problem. I'd rather avoid the topic on this forum but am definitely willing to help. For example, you can still run Gnome 2 on the latest Ubuntu. I use Gnome Shell but it tends to have a bad public image for whatever reason. However, a little bit of Googling (or DuckDuckGoing) might serve you better.
>> Back in 1999 I was tired of windows and the problems it had, so I experimented with Linux
>> and BeOs.
>>
>> Linux won, because it had a more "dynamic" feel to it and I've used it ever since for my
>> work (I'm a web developer).
Same here!
Welcome to Haiku!
Re: Why Haiku?