Spent the afternoon with Haiku OS on real hardware the other day. I generally check it out once every year or two via virtual machine. It’s not secret BeOS was my start in the alternate OS rabbit hole and it really informed a lot of my computing preferences and ideas early on. Be Inc’s collapse really has a lot to do with why I stay with FLOSS platforms today.
While booting it up in Virtual Box I saw that had ported the entire Qt Creator suite which surprised me. I’ve been learning Qt; and Haiku’s Qt implementation is essentially native and so I decided to see if I could dial up a small demo app real quick. I kept having issues with the virtual NIC and virtual display though; and quickly noticed my actual GPU and WLAN device were supported… so real hardware it was.
All in all it was surprisingly useable. Like Haiku seems to be getting to a point where I could see myself using it again. Though probably not as my primary machine.
- I expected Haiku to have a Caligra Office port but the LibreOffice port surprised me. Back when I used BeOS, several attempts at Open Office ports peculated and were all doomed to failure. A lot had to depend on it’s over reliance of Java even in it’s build system; and that was a time before Open JDK.
- When I left BeOS for good, I actually wrote down the criteria for my return. Back then it was: A maintaned office suite with modern file formats, a java port, a modern browser with javascript. Haiku mostly hits these.
- Little did I know Java would be of vastly less importance to me later.
- At first glance Otter Browser seems like the best browser the platform has. It’s actually pretty capible. I cam across very few sites it couldn’t load. Though the more complex ones had performance issues. It’s extension system also remains unuseable to me. BeOS once had a functional Mozilla and Firefox port, but pre Haiku they were stuck on an old libc and old gcc version. So that port bitrotted. Modern Firefox requires a lot more middleware these days including rust support.
- The BeOS native webkit based WebPositive browser the OS ships with is cute, but falls apart pretty quick under stress.
- Haiku remains a single user affair like it’s predecessor. BeOS was always odd like that. Even back then it’s filesystem is posix style permissions and has owner/group attributes.
- BeFS was also way ahead of it’s time; but lacks a lot of things in some areas we consider standard. Encryption being a big one.
- A lot of Haiku and BeOS’s most interesting features kind of go unused if you mostly stick to ported apps; and native apps seem increasingly far and few between. Like the TranslationKit API was basically gstreamer for documents. Which is freaking brilliant. But if your using libreoffice / caligra office / otter browser for most of your document needs. What is the point?
- This kind of highlights a big need for atleast a small number of “killer” apps. Though it seems to me that all of BeOS’s killer apss from back in the day are pretty dead now. SoundPlay by far was such a big deal; id still like to have it now, GoBe Productive, etc, etc. All of BeOS’s must have apps were proprietary; and are therefore now dead.
- Didn’t see anything capible of caldav calendaring.
- No syncthing port or nextcloud client.
- No Frotz or Gargoyle in the repositories.
- RetroArch with all the cores is available.
- Psi+ with OMEMO support was a pleasant surprise.
- I lived in NetBSD for a long while struggling to find any good OMEMO support that would compile for me.
- Port of the official Telegram client surprised.
- BeOS native and specific file sharing app BeShare and it’s associated file sharing network is still up and has files.
- Worms Armageddon port I downloaded off BeShare doesn’t get very far before crashing due to unknown reasons. Which is a shame. I used to play that a bit back in the day. The port was pre-release quality I believe. One of those things where they paid a porter to port it, but the project got scuttled towards the end.
- Couldn’t find the Civ CTP II port. It’s a really good port. I owned that at one point. Think I gave it away during my last move.
- Worms Armageddon port I downloaded off BeShare doesn’t get very far before crashing due to unknown reasons. Which is a shame. I used to play that a bit back in the day. The port was pre-release quality I believe. One of those things where they paid a porter to port it, but the project got scuttled towards the end.
- Had to disable Advance Power Management in the installer’s boot menu to get it to install, but the OS was fine with power management after installation.
- It HATED my system clock. Kept interpretting the system clock as being 20+ years in the future. Even when it was set to record time back to the system in GMT unix style. I ended up just having it and KDE Neon sync from network servers and let them battle it out at the beginning of each boot.
- This might be a Coreboot thing. Though ive not noticed such a problem on any other OS on my machine so far.
- The whole thing felt solid and responsive and fun. It felt very much like BeOS. It really made me think the project can still carve out it’s own usefull nitch.
