Haiku’s latest monthly activity report is out, and it contains a lot of interesting points of progress. Since I can’t highlight them all, here’s one that I think is vital.
Korli continued his work on 32-bit applications support for x86_64. He now has most of the binary-loading, commpage, signals, and syscall system changes merged, though there are still a lot of pending changes to fix individual syscalls and then start applications in 32-bit mode.
There’s also a major new port: LibreOffice has been ported to Haiku.
I’m always impressed at Haiku. Most recently, I tried a recent nightly built on my little ASUS netbook, and it runs *perfectly*, flat out *better* than Linux or Windows, with every bit of the hardware fully supported. It’s just amazing the progress it’s made. Truly an example of the power of persistence: screw trying to rush it, take the time to do the job right, and it’ll get done.
What’s the name or specs of that netbook, if you don’t mind?
Except OpenGL or any accelerated API… so it isn’t fully supported persay even if it does work as well as a Laptop can with Haiku, for a Hobby OS it really does have a lot of hardware compatibility.
Even most netbooks at least had at least some OpenGL acceleration… and modern web browsers kinda need it to not be sluggish.
Edited 2018-06-09 06:27 UTC
QupZilla (now Falkon, but not released yet under that name for Haiku) web browser is also available for Haiku and has OpenGL acceleration.
It might have OpenGL acceleration (through QtWebKit/Qt WebEngine) but Haiku itself doesn’t have 3d acceleration drivers yet unfortunately.
Edited 2018-06-09 12:28 UTC
Not on Haiku, because Haiku does not have any kind of hardware acceleration on any hardware yet..
Do you mean that Wi-Fi also works? ‘Cause every time I tried Haiku in the past few years on a few different types of hardware, Wi-Fi was usually the only thing that didn’t work. I love the rest of Haiku though and would use it more or maybe even exclusively if Wi-Fi worked (in particular modern Intel Wi-Fi cards).
Edited 2018-06-09 11:38 UTC
Wifi works and revived my old Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop that does not work well with linux at all anymore.
Waddlesplash wrote that he’s working on porting the new WiFi drivers from FreeBSD 11, since the current Haiku can’t use the card in his own laptop (as of now Haiku uses drivers from FreeBSD 9).
A Chromebook version would be awesome as that machine actually needs a second OS (for working off line) and the lighter the better. However I think it’s not a trivial task for the Haiku folks to do this.
I think that they don`t work on booting Haiku on Chromebooks at all, noone say a word about that on disquss. I guess it`s not “non trivial” part, just they have better things to do now.
Edited 2018-06-09 20:10 UTC
Hah, completely forgot about Haiku. Almost beta for 15 years.
That’s what happens when only a handful of people are working on it in their spare time, just for fun. Rest of the warm welcoming OSS crowd never cared or forgot about it years ago, just like you.
I can’t wait for the new Web+ fixes to be pushed, it is the most crash happy web browser I have ever used.
I haven’t tried it for years so don’t have an answer, but back in the day Web+ used to be rock solid for me on BeOS.
Maybe some of the latest efforts to bring it up to date broke something! Browsers are a complex beast these days compared to what Web+ was in the days of BeOS.
He said Web+ and not NetPositive. NetPositive was a in house HTML reader mostly designed to read HTML documentation that came with the OS (according to the developers themselves, and Opera was the promoted browser for BeOS at that time and also what was used in the last official version of BeOS aka the BeIA)
Web+ is a modern webkit based browser written for haiku only and does not nor has it ever ran on BeOS.
Yeah, brain fart moment, I was thinking of Net Positive, got my wires crossed. Think I’m going senile as I get older!
You can always start working on a port of the newest Firefox Quantum or Chromium, if you want. “Patches are welcome” as they say.
It’s been significantly better the past few years on the nightlies. All it’s really missing to be usable for most things (even youtube!) is a good uBO/ABP equivalent blocker. Until that day, Qutebrowser works.