Today, we bring you the first installment in a series of short interviews with lead/prominent developers of many “smaller” operating systems. In this new series, dubbed “Five Questions”, every interviewee will answer the same five questions about the project they are part of. The series will be kicked off by Axel Dorfler, the prominent Haiku developer.1. What are Haiku’s strong points?
Axel: Since we didn’t release anything yet, I can only talk about what its planned strong points are; and those would be: ease of use, transparency (you should be able to understand the system without too much effort), good and useful defaults, everything “just works” (or doesn’t, depending on the level of hardware support 😉 ). Of course, it will also inherit all the BeOS strong points like advanced media handling (this time with lots of codecs, too), and its database-like file system, low latency, and a responsive and appealing user interface.
2. What are Haiku’s weak points?
Axel: That depends on what you’re expecting from it; if you are comparing it to Windows or Mac OS X, you’ll no doubt see lots of weak points – if you’re just comparing it to BeOS, it might be the perfect OS for you.
Compared with the mainstream operating systems, you’ll always have a weak point in supporting the latest hardware, especially hardware accelerated OpenGL. Also, the BeOS API is not complete measured by today’s standards; you would expect to see built-in XML support, database access, etc. And while it’s simple to get most of this via 3rd party libraries, there will be no official API for this in the first Haiku release.
From a user’s point of view, the most apparent lacking things will be proper multi-screen support, multi-user capabilities, and localized versions. Of course, we intend to work on these problems in subsequent releases. Some things like the coordinate-less layouting of user interface widgets and the localization are already being worked on, but will only be provided as a private (and experimental) API in our first release.
3. What applications are sorely lacking from Haiku?
Axel: From what the occasional user would expect, I think we’re mostly lacking Flash support. But depending on your needs, you will find missing or outdated and no longer maintained applications in all categories. Needless to say we have a lot of good software available, mostly thanks to the many open source projects out there, and also because we are binary compatible to BeOS. Personally, besides a better browser, I only missed a more powerful office software when I wrote my master thesis.
4. If there were two features you could magically get from other operating systems, what would they be and why?
Axel: I guess something that covers our weak points :-).
5. What project, feature, or application currently in development for Haiku excites you the most, and why?
Axel: What currently excites me the most is that we’re, after all those years, actually almost self-hosting – which will give Haiku a huge development boost once we’re there. That means a stable enough environment for you to actually develop Haiku on Haiku, including network access. At that point we’re also planning to have our first alpha release. We’re working hard to reach that point sometime this year.
Thanks to Axel Dorfler for taking the time to answer the five questions.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
This is a great idea, but — although it left me with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside — it was a little light on substance. Perhaps an additional question (or 12!) would make things a little more interesting.
For example, I’d love to hear something along the lines of “What one feature does your OS have that most readers may not know about?”. Maybe even a little soap opera, like asking developers why their OS is better than some similar OS for a given task. I know this would start flame wars, but I am supremely curious to find out how some of these OSes compare to each other. After all, if they were all about the same, there wouldn’t be so many of them
Bravo and keep it up. I look forward to more of these interviews in the future.
Hey!!!! how can i put an avatar???!!! thanks!
(for me) this is the first time an alpha release is seen predicted.
I guess the whole (ex)BeOS community is holding breath to get that. I’m sure a release like that also will be a big boost for the development.
After we were able to taste BeOS briefly (during free v5 times), we’ll now be able to have the “real thing”.
It’s ironic that the real thing is an open source clone.
I have a sixth question: Will Haiku even boot on modern machines anytime soon? I have three fast multicore laptops (amd and intel), and Haiku doesn’t boot on any of them. According to the good folks in #haiku, there are either issues with smp, or something timing related on fast machines. Even when I disable smp, the darn thing won’t run for long.
Now, that’s fair… this is pre-alpha stuff. However, my concern is that most devs seem to do most of their development on emulators. As comfortable as that might be, it is a catastrophic practice. It means all devs work mainly on the exact same “hardware”, and tons of chipset specific bugs, etc doesn’t show up. And even the core devs, including axeld apparently, doesn’t even have proper hardware to test things on (no 64-bit smp, etc)
Could someone please send these guys some test hardware? Not that I think they even ask (they should – other os projects have been successful in that)
I think they should test on as much hardware as possible.
BTW developing using a Virtual Machine is correct IMHO; The VM provides a sort of generic HW, and many developer can focus on developing new features and fixing bugs without having to deals with drivers or strange hardware.
I know hardware support is critical, extremely critical. But I think it would be really important to have an full working os and after dealing with different kind of hardware.
It may sound like chicken and egg problem because you cannot have a working os without hw support.. but really if the programming resources are not infinite you must choose what’s more important.
my 2Cents.
To answer the sixth question: that’s the plan. And while using emulators is great for testing and developing, it’s not a substitute for the real thing.
In fact, I have a Core 2 Duo, a Pentium 820D, a Pentium-M, a dual PIII, an Athlon XP, a PIII, and a standard P4 (with “hyper threading”) to test Haiku with. Despite current AMD hardware, it’s a pretty extensive test park for a single room.
Needless to say, Haiku runs on all of these machines more or less fine, also with SMP enabled. When getting closer to the first release, we’ll try to make sure it will run on as many hardware as possible.
‘Just wanted to say “thanks” for all you’re doing with Haiku. You guys have made alot of progress in the last few months, & it’s exciting to hear about the possibility of an alpha by the end of the year.
Thanks again !
What happened to the Haiku link ? It goes to ftp://username:[email protected]/
Also, Waltercon 07 has been announced.
Edited 2007-07-04 08:56
The best thing would be to summon the interviewed developers to monitor the comments for their respective news items for a couple of days.
In these Unicode days it’s about time people start getting this right. It’s O umlaut and not plain O in Dörfler.
This was a really weak article… with no content.
Well…With all do respect, what did you expect?
This is more to get a developer’s feel for and general information about a ‘smaller’ OS.
I actually liked it. Yeah, it was kind of basic…but I learned a few things.
I do wish web journalists would stop using the word ‘interview’ when what they mean is ‘(e-mailed) questionnaire’. With an interview, there is interaction; the interviewee’s answers affect the interviewer’s succeeding questions; with questionnaires, you so often get “as I said earlier…” because the questions don’t take into account preceding answers.
{/rant}
but apart from that, I too look forward to more of these questionnaires re smaller operating systems. Provides a nice little overview of goals, status etc. Can’t wait for Haiku R1.
I do wish web journalists would stop using the word ‘interview’ when what they mean is ‘(e-mailed) questionnaire’. With an interview, there is interaction; the interviewee’s answers affect the interviewer’s succeeding questions; with questionnaires, you so often get “as I said earlier…” because the questions don’t take into account preceding answers.
Erm, a questionnaire is just as much an interview, just a different form. I actually study journalism at university, and interviewing is a large part of that. On top of that, I have studied psychology and interviewing is in important part of that too.
And I didn’t say “short” for nothing. These are not in-depth interviews, and anyone expecting something like that after reading the headline and introductions needs to get their peepers checked.
Edited 2007-07-04 18:45
perhaps as part of your journalism studies, you also learned the concept of a “straw man”. I made no comment as to length or ‘in-depthness’. Merely the lack of interaction one expects in something referred to as an “interview”.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=define%3A+straw+m…
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+interview&btnG=G…
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+questionnaire&bt…
everything depends, a lack of a feature could be a strong point for other people.
By example multiuser support for me is a strong point, as i never use it, and on linux and windows it caused me more headaches than benefits
It’s only there for banners and shit and uses up all your CPU in OS X anyway.
Good series Thom, I’d like to see more of this on OSNews. This is very unique, very relevant content that you’re not likely to find anywhere else.
Let’s see more like this in the future.
Thanks for the interview, quite an intreseting read.
A few more questions to the Haiku team.
>>appealing user interface.
I think it looks alot like R5, and it was fresh in the year of 1999 but now its 2007 and probably 2008 with the first public release. Will there be any redesigns of the user interface before R1?
A few suggestions (Easy task)
1. I would love be able to use black(darker) menus with white text. This was a limitation in R5. (Menu color preflet had a check for colors (r+b+g) < 300 I think. Will this be a limitation in Haiku?
2. You can have black menus today in Haiku (because the preflet doesnt have the above check, but you can’t change the text color, will this be in R1)?
Also when changing colors of menus, I think it should be system wide. Scrollbars, parts of tracker (NavigationView isnt changed for instance)
3. Custom Icon size. How hard would it be to have 1 or 2 bytes that describes the Size of the icon on the desktop window? Linux has this and I think its a really nice feature. Tracker just needs to support it.
4. I would also like to have custom mimetype groups with color/font attributes. For example: display all mp3s with bold, compressed as blue etc. Would really help me find things in tracker.
Will there be a graphical debugger provided by Hauku.inc or is that up to thirdparties to write one?
Anyhow I think you guys have done a wonderful job. So thanks.
Edited 2007-07-05 07:34