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antics9 23 hours ago [-]
This weekend I installed Haiku on my old Thinkpad X40. It’s fast and surprisingly stable. Emacs, VLC works like a charm. Computer to slow for web browsing. The BeProductive office suite is a masterpiece of application at a 9MB download; although not open source.
Then I installed Haiku on my XPS13 under KVM/Qemu. Everything runs blazingly fast. I’m thinking of maybe using that install for organizing my photos. The metadata functionality built into the BeFS is great for that.
I must say that I am really impressed.
HerbManic 23 hours ago [-]
Haiku is a good example of prioritising the user experience over benchmarks. Under the hood, broadly speaking, it is running at about 60% the speed of Linux on the same system. But in action it feels so much quicker than anything else.
That is not to say that they aren't focusing on performance gains, just that they have ensured the user experience is the top priority.
tecleandor 23 hours ago [-]
Oh, now you say that, I could install it on a very old VAIO I have around...
OhMeadhbh 23 hours ago [-]
Was just explaining to my offspring about how Apple was looking to buy Be Inc. back before Jobs returned and they allowed themselves to be bought by NeXT. Sort of a fun complete-circle: Be ports BeOS to PowerMacs, Apple passes on buying Be, Be Inc. fades into the distance, HaikuOS kicks off, 20+ years later they port HaikuOS to Apple hardware.
Honestly... my problem with Apple laptops isn't the hardware, it's the crappy version of XNU/Darwin/NextStep that comes with them. I would buy a Mac if it came with HaikuOS and supported all the peripherals. But what is the chance of that?
FWIW... I still have a powermac with "real" BeOS on it. Haven't booted it in several years. I did look at HaikuOS running on an X86-64 VM and for the tasks I gave it (compile a few package, run emacs, serve a web page or two) it worked like a champ. I think the developer docs could use some help, but maybe I should volunteer to help them out.
levl289 19 hours ago [-]
> it's the crappy version of XNU/Darwin/NextStep that comes with them
What's the issue(s)?
OhMeadhbh 17 hours ago [-]
Performance, memory efficiency, some security nits (but compared to Leenucks, it's not that bad), bug fix cadence (there's a bug I filed against NeXTStep 2.2 in 1993 that was finally fixed in 2015), support (they keep changing their mind whether the command line tools are supported.)
commandersaki 10 hours ago [-]
Is there a resilient market for people using NeXTStep in the 21st century?
LeFantome 3 hours ago [-]
I imagine he means it was fixed in macOS.
m463 21 hours ago [-]
I wasn't familiar with haiku os, so:
Haiku is a community-driven continuation of BeOS, a discontinued operating system for personal computers. It is binary-compatible with BeOS, but also supports contemporary systems, protocols, hardware, and web standards. - wikipedia
guyzero 1 days ago [-]
Sad that we'll probably never be able to run this on M1/M-series iPads.
asdff 24 hours ago [-]
So sad to me how combative Apple has been towards open source software over the years. The peak of the jailbreak era was imo peak mobile development too. So much innovation and rapid iteration. Anything seemed possible and anything really was possible if you put your mind to it and built the thing. Pretty much any good idea apple integrated into ios has been shamelessly copied without attribute from that crucible of creativity that is the jailbreak community.
But it all hinged on someone coming up with an exploit and releasing it free to the community ignoring any bug bounty. True altruists. And apple is good enough at whack a mole and paying people $100k that this sort of effort died out. Most low hanging fruit all picked and patched already. It is no wonder that ios innovation has also stalled out now that there isn't someone to copy good ideas from any longer.
mghackerlady 23 hours ago [-]
It sucks because for a while, at least in the second jobs era, they seemed to at least hesitantly support foss. They collaborated with KDE, released darwin as free software, and contributed to GCC and then very heavily to LLVM. MacOS, for a while, used an open source init system (systemstarter for a while, then launchd)
cute_boi 24 hours ago [-]
I am sure government can regulate such things like they can force Apple to open up their walled garden.
asdff 23 hours ago [-]
It would be refreshing if anyone in government cared about such things.
bigyabai 23 hours ago [-]
Which governments, though? The US loves these "NOBUS" companies, enforcing Google and Apple's walled garden is part of their agenda.
The hardline opposition like China, Russia and North Korea all have contingency ecosystems they'd rather promote than force Apple to comply with an arbitrary featureset. The EU, for all the good it has done, will have to contend with the US refusing to extend FVEY intelligence to states that resist cooperation.
solumunus 23 hours ago [-]
The four other eyes are most likely already excluding the US at this point given that sharing intelligence with the US almost certainly means sharing it with your enemies.
bigyabai 23 hours ago [-]
I doubt that. Most of those governments still rely on US-made software and US-designed hardware, so the NSA's Sword of Damocles is always dangling over their head whether or not their cooperate. The Canadian Sikh murders seem to indicate a level of US-Canada intelligence cooperation that still operates well.
My original statement should have read Nine Eyes or Fourteen Eyes, but the point stands. The US can play hardball behind closed doors and make these nations regret regulation even if it's a good policy.
solumunus 23 hours ago [-]
The four eyes are most likely already excluding the US at this point.
lostlogin 11 hours ago [-]
One pair of those eyes is New Zealand. Our PM would do anything Trump asked and there is a track record.
Sadly, it’s down the the other 3 pairs of eye.
carlosjobim 21 hours ago [-]
I'm sure "the government" (almighty, praised be it's name) is very interested in regulating an industry in order to supplicate your extremely niche hobby.
But faith can move mountains. Maybe you have to sacrifice some goats to the government to have your prayers heard?
jmusall 24 hours ago [-]
My hopes are high that the EU will be able to do this some day (unless it's fully enshittified first -- see chat control, age verification etc.)
HerbManic 23 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jak0 23 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bmurphy1976 1 days ago [-]
How usable is Haiku OS in practice?
LeFantome 17 minutes ago [-]
Haiku is surprisingly usable in practice with Firefox, Falkon, and other browsers available. LibreOffice is there too.
There are not that many native applications. But there are a number of GTK and Qt apps that have been ported (like GIMP).
It depends what you need from your OS.
easeout 23 hours ago [-]
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.
The window manager might look a little old-fashioned, but it seems solid as a dev workstation.
freedomben 23 hours ago [-]
What kind of hardware do you run it on? Has driver support been an issue?
easeout 23 hours ago [-]
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.
HerbManic 23 hours ago [-]
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.
jonhohle 1 days ago [-]
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.
BirAdam 18 hours ago [-]
It’s effectively a different kernel and window system for GNU at this point. Tons of GNU ports. Most targets cannot run original Be software for the obvious reason.
altairprime 1 days ago [-]
On M1 on specific? or on any platform in general?
bmurphy1976 22 hours ago [-]
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?
lproven 10 hours ago [-]
It is not a Linux distro. It is not a Linux at all; it is a completely different, independent OS. It is not a Unix at all: it's an independent ground-up C++ OS that implements a lot of POSIX-type APIs to make it easier to port Unix apps.
Docker is literally a Linux native tool that is for Linux only. The only way Docker works on anything that isn't Linux is by running a Linux VM, containing Alpine.
It is not a Linux and no you cannot do Linux things with it like run Linux containers, because to run Linux containers you need Linux and this is not a Linux.
I am trying to emphasize this because your question seems to be asking "what kind of Linux is this?" and this is a category error.
Yes, a Firefox port became available recently. I don't know if it can run Zoom. I go out of my way to avoid Zoom if I possibly can.
ranger_danger 7 hours ago [-]
> The only way Docker works on anything that isn't Linux is by running a Linux VM, containing Alpine.
Sorry but this is demonstrably false. Not only is Alpine not a requirement in the slightest, Windows Server's own containers work as a backend for Docker just fine.
lproven 6 hours ago [-]
Sure, but you can't run your Linux containers in them. But you can on FreeBSD. Which was my point.
makz 23 hours ago [-]
Lack of applications is my main problem
1 days ago [-]
OhMeadhbh 23 hours ago [-]
Was recently looking at the FuriPhone (linux phone that runs Debian) and now I'm thinking it would be a fun project to port HaikuOS to it.
fsflover 22 hours ago [-]
Doesn't it have closed drivers making porting hard? Perhaps you could consider porting it to Pinephone?
OhMeadhbh 20 hours ago [-]
Not sure. I thought the FuriPhone's advantage was that they were making it in conjunction with the ODM so you didn't have to use halium to call into Android. But a quick google search tells me I'm mistaken. Maybe I was thinking of the FairPhone?
I would consider the PinePhone, but my experience with it left me cold. And they EoL'd the Pro and the original PinePhone is fairly anemic by modern standards. I'm not sure it could run HaikuOS at acceptable speed. My memory was the PinePhone also had some land-mines with respect to drivers, but it's been several years since I touched mine, so I could be mistaken.
I'll probably have to spin my own hardware again. I really dislike writing drivers from scratch.
fsflover 12 hours ago [-]
How about Librem 5 then? All its drivers are free, too.
OhMeadhbh 1 minutes ago [-]
I have issues with the Librem community. But... if you like them, I certainly won't dis you (or them.) I don't think they're bad people or bad developers, they just have a style that sets my teeth grinding. That's a me problem and not a them problem. There's only so many times I can be insulted for liking BSD licenses instead of GPL.
This is to see what the distro is like, not to see if it’s stable on apple silicon
1 days ago [-]
19 hours ago [-]
QuercusMax 22 hours ago [-]
Is it only M1 macs, or are other M-series supported too (or maybe they were previously)?
Hard to tell if this is a major breakthrough or just an incremental improvement.
lproven 11 hours ago [-]
AFAIK only M1 -- but yes, it's a major achievement: AFAIK this is the first bare-metal Haiku on Arm.
jpfromlondon 11 hours ago [-]
I'd like to know this too, especially the ipad.
sedatk 1 days ago [-]
Using BeOS was a fantastic experience in 1999, and it's sad that it hasn't caught on. I'm rooting for all OSes that bring different perspectives to the OS world instead of being another textbook Unix variant.
My only qualm is how HaikuOS, and AmigaOS for that matter, fail to carry over their aesthetics to a high-resolution/HiDPI world. I see gradients, overly-empahsized embosses in the UI screenshots. They lack the serene feeling of their user interfaces from 25 years ago, and feel like DVD menus now. I used to feel the same about KDE, but it has since moved on from flashy rendering AFAIR.
What I mean isn't to adopt a completely flat design, which I also dislike, but for instance, Windows 11's UI seems easier on the eyes than Haiku now.
I also know that UI is hard, no question about it. All the good luck and best wishes to the team.
lproven 11 hours ago [-]
> Windows 11's UI seems easier on the eyes than Haiku now.
I feel the exact reverse. I find modern flat UIs ugly and hard to operate, which makes them more tiring.
Neat! Not sure why the comments on this post are immediately asking if it’s useful. Not everything has to be immediately useful to exist. Kill the capitalist in your head.
nozzlegear 1 days ago [-]
> Kill the capitalist in your head.
Who referenced capitalism? And do anarchists, socialists, communists, et al., never question the usefulness of a thing either?
asdff 24 hours ago [-]
The difference is those groups promote culture for culture's sake. Capitalism does not. Culture is only promoted if there is profit to be made off promoting it. As such what culture exists is severely inorganic and dependent on market forces rather than being some proxy of the actual ideaspace of the community.
nozzlegear 21 hours ago [-]
You've structured this statement in a way that makes it unfalsifiable: if culture is organic and thriving, it's because capitalism hasn't touched it; yet if capitalism has touched it, then it must be inorganic and inauthentic. You're doing a "No True Scotsman" on culture as a whole, defining real culture as something that excludes any evidence capitalism could've produced it.
There are plenty of counterexamples for culture within capitalist society (forgetting for a moment that it's bizarre to conclude that capitalist culture doesn't count as culture if market forces touch it): hobbyist communities, open-source software, Wikipedia, fan fiction, folk traditions, religious practice, academic subcultures, internet memes, the entire DIY/punk schtick, local theater, oral traditions. All of those are orthogonal to market forces.
thinking_cactus 19 hours ago [-]
I think there are many things people mean by "capitalism". I think a system where people buy and trade stuff, getting income from their job is basically fine and almost a given.
Some people mean "capitalism" to mean: a state should be minimal, everybody should be doing everything in their power to seek profits and become maximally rich, becoming rich is simultaneously the utmost absolute charity you could do, and also the utmost personal happiness such that you shouldn't lift a finger for anyone else (of course, unless to particularly impacts yourself). That's the corrosive part I think. I think hypercapitalism (or money is my God) might be a better name for this, or some other term.
There are a number of associated malaises: along with believing money is the ultimate measure or virtue, come the belief that poor people are worthless (or worth much less), that being "productive" (generating profit or income) is the most important thing in life, that consumption of goods and services (i.e. things you buy with money) give you ultimate happiness (you just have to pick the 'right things' to buy), that any technological development is always perfectly good and can do no harm because it increases productivity, and that civil participation is unnecessary because the market sorts everything out. To name a few.
mghackerlady 23 hours ago [-]
well, to be pedantic, stalinist tendencies of socialism (and leninist inspired movements as a whole), tend to prioritise culture as a way to communicate the ideals of the party.
Capitalism, in its most pure form, puts profit before anything else in any form of work
asdff 23 hours ago [-]
It isn't as heavy handed as people might have assumed. I can't find the exact quote now but there is one from a filmmaker saying they had more creative freedom under the USSR than the US. In the USSR there were some things you couldn't talk about directly but subtext was often fine. In the US there was that going on as well, but you also had the need for the film to make money and merchandize other downstream products and businesses that lead to a loss of absolute creative control in favor of supporting these efforts.
mghackerlady 23 hours ago [-]
I believe it was George Lucas talking about some soviet friends
asdff 22 hours ago [-]
Thanks. I was even going to mention how George made some decisions in star wars arguably to further toy sales.
Matl 1 days ago [-]
I mean it's not hard to understand where the author is coming from. It seems like these days even a hobby project has to meet some kind of 'is there a market for it' threshold of justifying its existence.
So your parent may've taken the 'is it useful' comments to mean 'if not, why even exist' but I got the sense they're more from people who are considering an install, even if just in a VM.
unethical_ban 19 hours ago [-]
For those unaware, modern day capitalism is often marked by the drive for profit-generating utility in all things. The original comment was probably light hearted in saying some things can be done for fun.
Computer0 23 hours ago [-]
Bro you're not killing him...
nozzlegear 21 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I understand the reference
Computer0 17 hours ago [-]
The phrase "Kill the Cop in Your Head" originated as an anonymous protest slogan during the May 1968 uprising in France.
nozzlegear 16 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I don't think I've ever heard the phrase and had no chance of getting it lol
1 days ago [-]
1 days ago [-]
cybercatgurrl 20 hours ago [-]
these are likely the same people who would be first to line up to see if they could use it to help them with rent seeking. capitalism really stifles the imagination
torstenvl 24 hours ago [-]
> Kill the capitalist in your head.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
It's just a name, after all. More accurately, this site would be titled VC Incubator News.
stuaxo 1 days ago [-]
And how boring it would be if that's all it was.
carlosjobim 21 hours ago [-]
How much venture capital is incubating Haiku?
SirFatty 8 hours ago [-]
"What a depressing thing to read..."
You should get out more...
Your link is not, in any way, a response to my comment.
mghackerlady 23 hours ago [-]
Are you telling me hacker news isn't just for advertising vibe coded slop services as a get rich quick scheme? Impossible, why did claude put it in my marketing.md then? (/s in case it isn't obvious)
bigyabai 24 hours ago [-]
HN isn't reddit, for better and for worse. This is the "Orange Site" that gave us Sam Altman, defends monopolies and shits out thousands of net-negative SaaS startups that leech off Open Source software. Manufacture of depression is one of YC's byproducts that everyone loves to ignore while berating Flock and 9 Mothers like they spontaneously popped into existence.
Your peers on this website are not principled, fun-loving Freenode/Libera geeks. HN is the Linkdin of underground social networking.
dgellow 10 hours ago [-]
Given that you’re saying that in a discussion thread about HaikuOS, allow me to doubt it. I’ve been active with this account for more than 13 years now and do continue to find enough of the hacker ethos for me to engage with
noja 1 days ago [-]
This is unexpectedly one of the saddest comments I have ever read here.
sunaookami 1 days ago [-]
The "everything needs to have a purpose and make money" mentality here is very exhausting.
blks 1 days ago [-]
For fun.
_Microft 1 days ago [-]
Because they can.
QuercusMax 22 hours ago [-]
I'd love to hear your critique of an art gallery
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
We could say the same for most of the comments on this site, including yours and mine.
HerbManic 22 hours ago [-]
There are so many projects that come up here that have the tag line of "This is such a stupid idea that I just had to do it!".
We can do things just for the fun of it. Woz made the Apple computer basically as a toy, nothing more. And that's cool.
unethical_ban 19 hours ago [-]
You need to put the sarcasm tag on things these days, no telling who might actually mean what you said.
SirFatty 8 hours ago [-]
I meant what I said. People here seem to have a very narrow definition of useful.
nothinkjustai 1 days ago [-]
Are you useful?
fragmede 1 days ago [-]
That's the scary part about AI and the transformation it'll have on society. The answer to that question for all of us, soon enough, will be no, not useful enough vs an AI. Then what happens?
nothinkjustai 24 hours ago [-]
Maybe, but it’s not gonna be because of LLMs
ConanRus 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
Yet I still can not use ruby on it ...
Sorry guys - Haiku is a great idea, but it needs to become a real operating system semi-advanced users can use daily. And it hasn't been at that since years.
Linux works.
Tiberium 1 days ago [-]
What do you mean by that? It seems like there's Ruby in the packages:
> it needs to become a real operating system semi-advanced users can use daily
No it doesn't.
OhMeadhbh 23 hours ago [-]
It's completely okay for people who are not you to have requirements and preferences that are not yours. If you don't like HaikuOS, don't use it.
1 days ago [-]
rvz 1 days ago [-]
> Linux works.
Which distro?
Linux is an OS kernel, not a full operating system.
I still need to know which distro to choose before I install it.
No need to do that with macOS or Windows, but Linux is always a problem.
binaryturtle 1 days ago [-]
I have no idea which distro to choose actually. Too much choices and it's not clear why one should be better than the other. For some distros it feels more like it's one-man projects for bragging rights. It's also a bit hard to put trust in that.
I want to resurrect an older Mac mini with an installation of a Linux distribution, but choosing a suitable distro is the first step I struggle with. Only thing I know is that it won't be an Ubuntu setup. :-)
I do run Linux-based systems in various forms already: OpenWRT on the router, an older Debian VM —which I just messed up a few days ago by trying to uninstall a wallpaper package which took down the whole desktop environment for some reason— and Raspbian on the PI.
But on some days I feel maybe I just should go for FreeBSD. But it may have similar (to a lesser extend) issues like Haiku with proper up-to-date software, especially in the web browser department? I previously dabbled with Haiku and this was its main issue. The OS itself is pretty nice though.
aniviacat 1 days ago [-]
I've tried a few distros in the past and have now settled (on NixOS for servers and tinkering, and Fedora for just-working). But I've never tried a BSD and would also be curious how using one would turn out.
Maybe getting into FreeBSD for a bit would be a fun little project.
mghackerlady 23 hours ago [-]
FreeBSD is infinitely better than any flavour of Linux if you can do what you need to on it. Great performance, superb documentation, the software just works for the most part (an update in the libc isn't going to break any of the base packages, for example). It takes a while to get it set up, and it can be picky about hardware, but I totally recommend
gatane 19 hours ago [-]
The BSDs still cannot run docker
lproven 10 hours ago [-]
No, because Docker is a tool for running Linux containers.
You can use the Linuxulator to run Linux binaries on FreeBSD, including entire distro userlands in Jails. You can use Podman to build and manage OCI containers with Docker-compatible commands.
In other words: you as making the classic XY mistake.
FreeBSD has jails and a great hypervisor. Also it can do podman iirc
jonhohle 23 hours ago [-]
You should just go FreeBSD, but expect to have to learn along the way. My FreeBSD install is about 20 years old and still going well. It started as an Athlon 80GB NAS and has grown into 16-core and 12TB with Linux VMs for LLMs on a dedicated NVME. It would be nice if more worked natively on FreeBSD, but the things that work work great.
unethical_ban 19 hours ago [-]
One of the good uses of AI is having a reasonable tutor if you know how to ask the right questions. Surely you can name 2-3 major distros with large user bases. Debian, Fedora, Opensuse.
Fedora KDE is a great distro. Then lookup its network configuration backend, systemd basics, package manager basic commands and you're off to the races.
OsrsNeedsf2P 1 days ago [-]
Which Windows?
I personally always install LTSC because there's no ads and less bloat, but sometimes random things don't work. This isn't a problem with Android, but Windows is always a problem
1 days ago [-]
OsrsNeedsf2P 1 days ago [-]
On VMs*
GranPC 1 days ago [-]
No, they got it booting on bare metal a few posts down.
OhMeadhbh 23 hours ago [-]
Though I think it also boots in a VM if that's your preference. Also very cool that it's on real hardware.
ndiddy 1 days ago [-]
If you scroll down, the poster got it running on real hardware.
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
Can we use that as daily driver?
A clever developer making things work on his or her own
hardware, is not quite on the same level as daily driver.
(Granted, Linux would also have to run on M1 Macs. But I
mean this more on the issue of same-hardware or comparable
hardware level.)
altairprime 1 days ago [-]
One can reasonably infer that, since this is a discussion thread rather than a formal support announcement, that this is not yet a formally-supported configuration.
selectodude 1 days ago [-]
I’m not sure anybody can use Haiku as a daily driver, regardless of platform.
SyneRyder 1 days ago [-]
Depends on your needs. On Intel and for some minimal uses, it probably can be a daily driver. There's some days where I've used Haiku exclusively. Not many, and probably days when I went without checking my email, but it has happened.
But it isn't ready for any kind of real mainstream daily driver use, no.
iAMkenough 1 days ago [-]
Who is “we” and why do they matter in this context
Then I installed Haiku on my XPS13 under KVM/Qemu. Everything runs blazingly fast. I’m thinking of maybe using that install for organizing my photos. The metadata functionality built into the BeFS is great for that.
I must say that I am really impressed.
That is not to say that they aren't focusing on performance gains, just that they have ensured the user experience is the top priority.
Honestly... my problem with Apple laptops isn't the hardware, it's the crappy version of XNU/Darwin/NextStep that comes with them. I would buy a Mac if it came with HaikuOS and supported all the peripherals. But what is the chance of that?
FWIW... I still have a powermac with "real" BeOS on it. Haven't booted it in several years. I did look at HaikuOS running on an X86-64 VM and for the tasks I gave it (compile a few package, run emacs, serve a web page or two) it worked like a champ. I think the developer docs could use some help, but maybe I should volunteer to help them out.
What's the issue(s)?
Haiku is a community-driven continuation of BeOS, a discontinued operating system for personal computers. It is binary-compatible with BeOS, but also supports contemporary systems, protocols, hardware, and web standards. - wikipedia
But it all hinged on someone coming up with an exploit and releasing it free to the community ignoring any bug bounty. True altruists. And apple is good enough at whack a mole and paying people $100k that this sort of effort died out. Most low hanging fruit all picked and patched already. It is no wonder that ios innovation has also stalled out now that there isn't someone to copy good ideas from any longer.
The hardline opposition like China, Russia and North Korea all have contingency ecosystems they'd rather promote than force Apple to comply with an arbitrary featureset. The EU, for all the good it has done, will have to contend with the US refusing to extend FVEY intelligence to states that resist cooperation.
My original statement should have read Nine Eyes or Fourteen Eyes, but the point stands. The US can play hardball behind closed doors and make these nations regret regulation even if it's a good policy.
Sadly, it’s down the the other 3 pairs of eye.
But faith can move mountains. Maybe you have to sacrifice some goats to the government to have your prayers heard?
There are not that many native applications. But there are a number of GTK and Qt apps that have been ported (like GIMP).
It depends what you need from your OS.
Here are some more impressions: https://kconner.com/2025/03/09/haiku-os-study-path.html
The window manager might look a little old-fashioned, but it seems solid as a dev workstation.
Docker is literally a Linux native tool that is for Linux only. The only way Docker works on anything that isn't Linux is by running a Linux VM, containing Alpine.
It is not a Linux and no you cannot do Linux things with it like run Linux containers, because to run Linux containers you need Linux and this is not a Linux.
I am trying to emphasize this because your question seems to be asking "what kind of Linux is this?" and this is a category error.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake
Or, as ESR originally put it, it's an X/Y problem:
https://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem
Yes, a Firefox port became available recently. I don't know if it can run Zoom. I go out of my way to avoid Zoom if I possibly can.
Sorry but this is demonstrably false. Not only is Alpine not a requirement in the slightest, Windows Server's own containers work as a backend for Docker just fine.
I would consider the PinePhone, but my experience with it left me cold. And they EoL'd the Pro and the original PinePhone is fairly anemic by modern standards. I'm not sure it could run HaikuOS at acceptable speed. My memory was the PinePhone also had some land-mines with respect to drivers, but it's been several years since I touched mine, so I could be mistaken.
I'll probably have to spin my own hardware again. I really dislike writing drivers from scratch.
Hard to tell if this is a major breakthrough or just an incremental improvement.
My only qualm is how HaikuOS, and AmigaOS for that matter, fail to carry over their aesthetics to a high-resolution/HiDPI world. I see gradients, overly-empahsized embosses in the UI screenshots. They lack the serene feeling of their user interfaces from 25 years ago, and feel like DVD menus now. I used to feel the same about KDE, but it has since moved on from flashy rendering AFAIR.
What I mean isn't to adopt a completely flat design, which I also dislike, but for instance, Windows 11's UI seems easier on the eyes than Haiku now.
I also know that UI is hard, no question about it. All the good luck and best wishes to the team.
I feel the exact reverse. I find modern flat UIs ugly and hard to operate, which makes them more tiring.
It is not just me:
https://grumpy.website/
Who referenced capitalism? And do anarchists, socialists, communists, et al., never question the usefulness of a thing either?
There are plenty of counterexamples for culture within capitalist society (forgetting for a moment that it's bizarre to conclude that capitalist culture doesn't count as culture if market forces touch it): hobbyist communities, open-source software, Wikipedia, fan fiction, folk traditions, religious practice, academic subcultures, internet memes, the entire DIY/punk schtick, local theater, oral traditions. All of those are orthogonal to market forces.
Some people mean "capitalism" to mean: a state should be minimal, everybody should be doing everything in their power to seek profits and become maximally rich, becoming rich is simultaneously the utmost absolute charity you could do, and also the utmost personal happiness such that you shouldn't lift a finger for anyone else (of course, unless to particularly impacts yourself). That's the corrosive part I think. I think hypercapitalism (or money is my God) might be a better name for this, or some other term.
There are a number of associated malaises: along with believing money is the ultimate measure or virtue, come the belief that poor people are worthless (or worth much less), that being "productive" (generating profit or income) is the most important thing in life, that consumption of goods and services (i.e. things you buy with money) give you ultimate happiness (you just have to pick the 'right things' to buy), that any technological development is always perfectly good and can do no harm because it increases productivity, and that civil participation is unnecessary because the market sorts everything out. To name a few.
Capitalism, in its most pure form, puts profit before anything else in any form of work
So your parent may've taken the 'is it useful' comments to mean 'if not, why even exist' but I got the sense they're more from people who are considering an install, even if just in a VM.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You might want to read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture
You should get out more...
Your link is not, in any way, a response to my comment.
Your peers on this website are not principled, fun-loving Freenode/Libera geeks. HN is the Linkdin of underground social networking.
We can do things just for the fun of it. Woz made the Apple computer basically as a toy, nothing more. And that's cool.
Sorry guys - Haiku is a great idea, but it needs to become a real operating system semi-advanced users can use daily. And it hasn't been at that since years.
Linux works.
https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/ruby/haikuports/haikuports...
No it doesn't.
Which distro?
Linux is an OS kernel, not a full operating system.
I still need to know which distro to choose before I install it.
No need to do that with macOS or Windows, but Linux is always a problem.
I want to resurrect an older Mac mini with an installation of a Linux distribution, but choosing a suitable distro is the first step I struggle with. Only thing I know is that it won't be an Ubuntu setup. :-)
I do run Linux-based systems in various forms already: OpenWRT on the router, an older Debian VM —which I just messed up a few days ago by trying to uninstall a wallpaper package which took down the whole desktop environment for some reason— and Raspbian on the PI.
But on some days I feel maybe I just should go for FreeBSD. But it may have similar (to a lesser extend) issues like Haiku with proper up-to-date software, especially in the web browser department? I previously dabbled with Haiku and this was its main issue. The OS itself is pretty nice though.
Maybe getting into FreeBSD for a bit would be a fun little project.
You can use the Linuxulator to run Linux binaries on FreeBSD, including entire distro userlands in Jails. You can use Podman to build and manage OCI containers with Docker-compatible commands.
In other words: you as making the classic XY mistake.
https://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem
Fedora KDE is a great distro. Then lookup its network configuration backend, systemd basics, package manager basic commands and you're off to the races.
I personally always install LTSC because there's no ads and less bloat, but sometimes random things don't work. This isn't a problem with Android, but Windows is always a problem
A clever developer making things work on his or her own hardware, is not quite on the same level as daily driver. (Granted, Linux would also have to run on M1 Macs. But I mean this more on the issue of same-hardware or comparable hardware level.)
But it isn't ready for any kind of real mainstream daily driver use, no.