After the release of the second beta a few weeks ago, Haiku continues its steady pace of improvements and fixes. A few highlights from the work done since the beta release:
Korli also worked on improving support for modern x86 CPUs, including the xsave instruction, and enabling use of AVX which requires saving more CPU registers during context switches.
[…]A new version of HaikuWebKit has finally been released after help from KapiX and X512 to fix the remaining bugs. It uses a lot less memory, crashes less often, and has better support for modern website. There is ongoing work for further updates and improvements.
There’s a lot more in there, so if you have beta 2 running, be sure to update it.
when did it all start? I feel like 20 years ago.
Almost 20 years ago, yes 🙂 2001 year exactly
I hope they get support for my network cards before Release 1. I have a ThinkPad T440p and E550; wifi works in neither. They both work in FreeBSD and Haiku uses that network stack, so hopefully it will be solved soon. If so I will probably blow OpenBSD away on the E550, as it doesn’t work as well as on the T440p, and install Haiku over it.
Yeah I know, no GNOME rants, eh? Shocking.
What do you mean by no GNOME rants?
I just need to wean myself off ranting about GNOME, that’s all. Thom will get it 🙂
from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/a-decidedly-non-linux-distro-walkthrough-haiku-r1-beta2/
Haiku is an interesting project—but it’s hard to imagine it turning into something fully modern and usable.
[…]
Haiku is burdened with a design principle demanding decades of backward compatibility, and has a very small developer team compared to most distributions.
[…]
The release notes for Haiku R1/beta2 describe it as “feature complete” but still containing known and unknown bugs. I don’t think most reasonable people who aren’t personally invested in the project would agree with that description—after nearly twenty years of development, it still feels like a pet project with gaping holes that may never be closed.
Yeah, I think they should have given up on binary compatibility with BeOS a long time ago.
I don’t think something has to be a Linux killer to be a reasonable project – all the BSD’s have their limitations in comparison to Linux, but they’re still viable alternatives for that subset of people who use them – and some people use them “just because” they’re closer to a “real Unix” than Linux, at least in their opinion. Not to mention that some people use Linux “just because” it’s free software and/or not Windows.
Besides, systemD hasn’t exactly turned Linux into a Windows clone, and the basic design of Linux is about twice as old as Haiku. Not to mention that modern Windows has its roots in VMS, which has its roots in even older DEC operating systems; or that 64-bit Haiku is incompatible with 32-bit Haiku, so going forward the designers are free to do as they please. If Haiku gains a critical mass of developers, who cares how long it took?