Haiku

I tried for years to get this operating system to run on my hardware. Last year I succeeded.

Only...there was no software. The system ran beautifully. But I had no web browser that was supported. All the software seemed to be ports from Linux and didn't seem to take advantage of Haiku's advantages.

I had a good speedy operating system that booted almost immediately to the desktop. But nothing to do when I got there.

BeOS back when I tried it in the V5.0 days had software written for it. There weren't multiple options for everything but there was variety. There was usefulness in the radio broadcasting software, the video editors that worked even on my POS box back in 1998/99. When the PE was released I'd hoped that would result in even more software becoming available. But no, it was shut down not too long after that. (I'll skip the whole YellowTab fraud saga.)

The situation seems even worse these days. It's been almost thirty years. Time to let go.

Occasional Haiku user here, running directly on hardware. "Works" on my ThinkPad X1 Yoga 3rd Gen (which is an 8th Gen Core i7 device).

To get it working I have to type "continue" at the two kernel panics on startup due to spurious / overzealous Thunderbolt PCI warnings. I also needed help from an Action Retro video to figure out how to setup the UEFI BIOS files on the correct partitions on the bootable Samsung USB stick I use. But it works enough that I can boot into it straight off USB when I want a break from Windows & Linux. They finally added support for the WiFi in my particular ThinkPad. There's basically no bluetooth support, so if you want a wireless mouse and keyboard, something like the Logi Pebble 2 bundle with wireless USB dongle works well.

Haiku has a Go 1.18 port now that mostly works, so that helps. A lot of Qt software has been ported across, though obviously the ideal would be truly native BeOS software.

The main thing I find Haiku lacks is a decent email client. That really prevents productive work for me. There's Claws Mail, but it has enough bugs that I didn't even find it usable, nevermind reliable. There's also some memory or networking issues they haven't tracked down. When I'm using terminal sessions, network responses often have dropped bytes in the output.

Actually the thing I'm really lacking is Claude Code. I ended up building my own minimal TUI API harness / client on Haiku to try and get work done. Haiku's web browsers (like WebPositive) sometimes have problems with the Claude website. I've been wanting to use Claude to help write more Haiku / BeOS software and fix various OS issues - a couple of weeks ago I used the Claude API and $30 API credit to make a USB UAC 2 audio driver for Haiku that works with Focusrite Scarlett devices (both playback and recording). But Haiku's AI policy means I can't contribute those fixes back. Though I understand their desire to keep the source pure and free from any potential copyright liability concerns, especially as they release it under an MIT license.

It's a shame that Be failed. I think they were a victim of Microsoft's aggressive anti-competitive activities in the late-1990s, combined with Apple deciding to bring back Steve Jobs via the acquisition of NeXT (making Apple a serious competitor in the same segment that Be was targeting -- multimedia and realtime applications). Ultimately, they prevailed in winning about $24M from Microsoft, but that was after the company had shut down. I presume the winnings went to Palm. Super cool to see Haiku continuing to develop. No doubt agentic coding is making it far easy for enthusiasts to improve and maintain projects like Haiku and I look forward to seeing where this project goes. You never know...

There's an interesting fork that recently cropped up. It takes the Haiku user space and places it atop the Linux kernel.

Vitruvian OS: https://v-os.dev/

Been following this for so many years. The previous project lead Michael Pripps (?) was really inspiring.

It is amazing the project keeps going.

I would love to see if they can get boot times down to a couple seconds.

BeOS was my dream from childhood. Haiku is amazing, especially because the original BeOS only existed for five years, while Haiku has been going for 24 already. What stamina!

haiku reminds me of the powerpc macs from 1998 that small bar at the bottom that pulls out. It has that sort of colorful appeal to put it on a colored clear plastic imac or emac you know the orange vanilla motif i remember using.

Ah, haiku. I like a lot of the ideas it has, and wish someone would make a hybrid of some of its ideas with an actual unix

I always wondered what is the motivation behind Haiku. Is it a recreation of BeOS for the sake of recreating it, or is it practically usable for daily use?

I've only played with Haiku in a virtual machine for like twenty minutes. It seems cool but I didn't use it enough to really develop a strong opinion. I do wish someone would put some serious money into an OS that isn't Windows and isn't just "implement POSIX".

If I ever become a billionaire, I'm going to throw a boatload of money into an seL4-based desktop operating system.

BeOS was the best looking OS I've ever seen, even to this day. I loved everything about the looks.

This has been around for years. I don't understand what the news is?

Best OS from all niche os category!

tier one: linux, windows, freebsd tier two: openbsd, netbsd tier three: haiku tier four: all others

One of the few OSes where my wifi and sound just worked out of the box :)

Its totally usable DESKTOP fOS.

What was the technical brilliance of BeOS? If I remember the story, Be provided incredible multitasking multimedia performance at a time when resources seemed too constrained and other OSes couldn't match it.

So how did they do it? And does Haiku use the same tech under the hood or does it forus on matching the user experience?

here! a way to play this on copy.sh so that people can play this in their browser: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=haiku

The problem with Haiku is that it is unable to leave the perpetual beta situation.

On Linux I can use perl, ruby, python, php, julia - you name it. Good luck thinking you can do this on Haiku, as-is.

Edit: I should say that I like Haiku, but I used it many years ago, and the situation with regards to programming still has barely improved here for the most part. They are building literally a dream OS nobody will seriously use.