Over the last year, I have been slowly pushing patches upstream to Vagrant introducing native Haiku support. Vagrant is an open-source tool to build and maintain portable virtual development environments. Essentially, Vagrant lets you deploy and rapidly customize a Haiku virtual machine with programmatic scripts.
Since we now have a new stable release, I have prepared some updated R1/beta1 images to play with under an official Haiku, Inc. account.
If I understand this correctly, this is the easiest way to setup a Haiku development environment. As someone who intends to snag up a decent used laptop to fully dedicate to Haiku, I will do whatever I can – no matter how little – to entice people to create applications for Haiku.
Haiku itself isn’t resource-hungry, but some of its most useful programs (especially the ported ones, like browsers and office suites) are. From my experience, the basic requirements for smooth usage are dual-core 2.6 GHz and at least 4 GB RAM, 3+ GHz and 8+ GB RAM would be better.
In my opinion, this “resource hunger” is not exactly a bad thing. Haiku is a modern desktop OS, so it’s OK for it to have requirements of a modern desktop OS. The low-end is crowded with Linux and BSD systems anyway, the competition there is too high, while at the high-end there are only two major players. More than that, Gassee aimed both Mac and BeOS at high-end market, (he left Apple because he disagreed with their decision to enter the budget market), thus it would be OK for Haiku, as the spiritual successor of BeOS, to aim at the high-end too.
Bottom line: Haiku deserves the best hardware available
Edited 2018-11-29 10:50 UTC
I fully agree, Hardware only has a finite lifespan and most people who would consider Haiku I would imagine have End-of-Life-d their low end systems a long time ago anyway.
Wait…WHAT? Sorry but my utter bullshit alarm has gone into overdrive. 3Ghz dual core and 8Gb minimum for a smooth experience? On what planet?
I have sitting next to me two Aspire One A150 netbooks circa 2009. 1.6Ghz Intel Atom processors, an Intel GMA, 1.5Gb of single channel RAM /shared/ with the GMA, and the worlds most notoriously terrible for speed built in “SSD”.
And Haiku on those due to the SSD is the only OS that absolutely flies. “Ported browser”, music playing and all. It’s a twenty plus year old minimal OS port. Where on earth did you invent that spec from?
I’m using Haiku as my primary desktop OS for about half a year now. Uptime of weeks. Haiku is installed on 240 GB SSD, the CPU is 2.6 GHz dual core, 4 GB RAM. I think I know what I’m talking about. Haiku itself is fast and modest; programs ported to it are not – and that’s not Haiku’s fault, but the OS itself is useless without programs.
is the only OS that absolutely flies. “Ported browser”, music playing and all.
Looks like your browsing preferences are… Well… Howd’ya say “petite”? Right now (I’m at work) I have 288 open tabs in Opera; besides, there are Edge, Chrome and Vivaldi running, all of them have tabs too. 18 office suite programs; presentations, word processing and stuff. This is what an OS should be capable to cope with.
Haiku runs as a breeze until the browser starts. But I can’t say that Haiku provides a _smooth_ user experience, when its most stable browser eats all of the 4GB RAM available at mere 8 tabs. Haiku gets nowhere near of what I’m used to; it starts to lag with only Calligra suite and only 6 tabs in Otter browser open and playing Youtube.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this is NOT Haiku’s fault. But this is a part of Haiku user experience.
It’s a twenty plus year old minimal OS port.
No, it’s not. Haiku is a modern OS, developed from scratch, that visually resembles and has API compatibility with another, closed-source, proprietary OS from 20 years ago. There’s nothing in common between them aside from API compatibility and UI features. Haiku is not a new release of BeOS, and not a port of BeOS, just as ReactOS is not a port of Windows, despite the binary compatibility.
Edited 2018-11-29 12:06 UTC
You… Do understand the word “port”, right?
Yes, I do. Porting, by definition, is adapting a program for execution in an environment which is different from the one this program was created for. Bringing QtWebEngine to Haiku is porting; writing an OS from scratch, even if it looks and behaves like another OS, is not.
> Now, don’t get me wrong, this is NOT Haiku’s fault.
Actually it is. The browser misbehavior is due to problems with the Haiku network stack and libraries. Linux, FreeBSD, and DragonFly BSD all have much faster and more capable network stacks if that’s a primary concern.
No, the network stack is good. The problem is in the browser’s engine: Haiku still doesn’t have a modern browser engine, native or ported. We have QtWebKit, which is the base of virtually all existing Haiku web browsers (except for links
), but we don’t have QtWebEngine (yet; the port is being actively worked on).
Besides, libraries are not a part of the OS, therefore even most buggy libraries, even if they were written by the OS developers, are not a reason to blame the OS itself.
Edited 2018-11-29 22:45 UTC
Well, that can be. For example if I wrote an OS that didn’t support select() and forced a library to fall back to polling, the performance of that library would suck no matter how much work you did on it.
But I get your point.
Hm, IIRC wasn’t at least the …arghh-its-name-escaped-me,-main-menu/program-launcher-of-BeOS made open source and continued under Haiku?
It’s the other way around – OpenTracker was developed separately and could replace original Tracker of BeOS.
It’s a reasonable spec if you want the entirely software rendered browser to be snappy… Web+ is a modern browser not a 20 year old one.
For the rest of Haiku even old PII hardware can run most of it just fine given enough ram.
Edited 2018-11-29 20:05 UTC
Some of that is lack of hardware acceleration… once OpenGL drivers start working, then we’ll eventually get acceleration in web browsers, video acceleration etc… and slower netbook hardware will be more reasonable to use (it works fine as it is, just a bit slower than on Windows/Linux).
I’ve ran it decently on an AMD A4-5000 1.5Ghz quad core… but the lower single threaded speed is noticeable when browsing. For other uses it’s plenty fast, such as basically any native BeOS / Haiku application…
The slowest machine I’ve ran it on is a HP T5720 which has a Transmeta Efficieon CPU, there you really need to use Netsurf (which is very snappy there) instead of more modern browsers.
Edited 2018-11-29 20:01 UTC
Yeah I was a bit disappointed that my old SandyBridge system, which is generally serviceable on BSD/Linux/Windows couldn’t run Haiku properly because of a lack of a modern Intel HD video driver.
Looking forward to trying it again later down the road when that materializes.
I’m just as curious about what security considerations Haiku may have integrated in the wake of the many hardware based vulnerabilities re/discovered this year?