Even though Haiku may be considered a hobby project, it’s been in use professionally for a while now, by BeOS mainstay Tunetracker Systems. Recently, it also launched a Haiku distribution, which in turn also forms the base for their own products. In the most recent monthly activity report, the Haiku project mentioned that another company is planning on using Haiku in one of its products.
izcorp is another company is planning to use Haiku in a commercial product. Their line of studio recording systems is currently running BeOS and Zeta, but they are working on an update to Haiku. Ithamar is working with them to get their hardware fully supported, and the changes will be upstreamed to Haiku in the coming weeks. This includes several fixes to the USB stack, the intel_extreme driver, and there could be more to come.
The activity reports details a large number of the commits from last month, so it’s definitely worth a read if you want to know what’s up with Haiku.
Fascinating.
Both applications, involving sound media, could have been ported to Linux a long time ago. After-all, there are similar applications in the Linux world indicating the absence of serious technical hurdles with respect to the handling this media.
Yet, their creators/users preferred to update them for Haiku which is still in the alpha stage and has more limitations with respect to hardware support than Linux.
The cooperation will strengthen Haiku with improvements in the area of hardware support.
Media handling and manipulation appears to be an inherent strength of Haiku (originating from the foundation underlying BeOS). a few more like these will probably bring more attention, developers, and funds for the continued development of Haiku.
By the way, how many “hobby” operating systems are used for commercial applications?
What you should be asking is “Why were they not working on a Linux version”.
There could be a number of different reasons.
They may had preferred the licence Haiku-OS uses.
They may had thought that Haiku-OS being a smaller project would listen to their concerns better that the far larger Linux organization.
They may have even thought the Haiku-OS being a smaller code-base would be easier to understand/modify by themselves.
Personally, one main reason I have stuck to Haiku-OS and not gone Linux that the local (and please note I said LOCAL) experts on Linux have personally rub me the wrong way by telling me I am a fool to be writing code for anything other Linux.
I may not be that good a programmer, but I don’t want someone telling what I MUST write for.
GNU/Linux never put a lot of attention to UI and user experience, I remember a discussion some years ago between a Linux maintainer and his colleagues, regarding changes in the kernel scheduler to give a more responsive UI, Android suffers the same thing although lately has been “fixed” by hardware improvements.
Haiku is a great OS despite the fact that it died and had to be remade from scratch. Back when it was launched it was years ahead of everything else so it might still have a chance.
I disagree. GNOME 2 had a great UI and there were actually regular usability tests being done by companies like Sun. Then some people decided to throw all that knowledge away and the horrible GNOME 3 came to be, pushing the GNU/Linux desktop back a couple of years.
I use it. Doesn’t make it good, though. I’m glad MATE is around.
You’re missing the point: GNOME isn’t Linux and isn’t developed by the kernel guys. What the GP said is, with some changes in the kernel (low-level), the GUI (no one in particular, any of them) could be more responsive. Still, the kernel people prefer to prioritize for other use cases (they may have valid reasons for that).
This isn’t related to usability but performance.
The GP said “GNU/Linux”. That is not the kernel, the kernel is Linux so we can assume GP meant distribution.
As far as distributions go I think they make a great effort to offer a consistent experience out of the box. The issue is when you start installing apps that weren’t cherry-picked by the maintainers.
Most likely, the GP is a stallmanist, putting GNU/ before everything. But that is not relevant, he talks about a kernel maintainer and changes to the kernel scheduler. This is core kernel stuff, not related to the rest of the distro. If a distro want to touch that, they have to apply out of tree kernel patches, something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Fuck_Scheduler
Haiku and Linux are both great. We designed originally for BeOS for some the reasons mentioned by some of the other posters. As BeOS faded, we could have moved toward Linux, but given Haiku’s high degree of binary compatibility with BeOS, it was a comfortable choice to just do the slight retooling necessary to move to Haiku. It’s worked out well for us, and we also enjoy the long time relationship with many of the same coders and users from the BeOS community. Being as actively involved as we are gives some day-to-day practical insight into what could possibly be improved with the OS, codewise, so we also participate there as much as we can (nice to see iZ doing the same!), and those improvements get rolled back into the OS, another nice side benefit.
Relative to the media handling, you might enjoy seeing a new video I did just for fun, that piles the load pretty heavily onto Haiku. It’s the second one down on this page:
http://www.discoverhaiku.com
Dane
Thanks for explaining your choice of OS.
I think it is brilliant that projects such as Haiku can fill the needs of some commercial companies.
As for the question… why not use Linux. That answer is easy. Linux is a mess!! Lets just take a quick look at the sound servers. Just about every 6 months somebody else comes up with a new “greatest” idea, all others get abandoned and distros move like minions to this “new greatest” sound server. Yes, yes many of the new systems implement interface so software that doesn’t use the latest fashion can still work, but that adds latency. A big no-no for sound software.
I’ve switched to FreeBSD because of such issues in Linux. In FreeBSD they will rather continue development and improve the software to fulfill the new needs. eg: OSS4 supports all the features the new sound servers in Linux does (software mixing, per application volume etc). They don’t abandon existing software and start new every 6 months. Such changes is a pain for any serious software vendor.
The little I looked at Haiku, I was very impressed. Even the stock VESA video driver is unbelievably fast compared to Linux on the same hardware. Haiku is doing something right, and I wish them all the best.
What? ALSA has been the default sound framework on Linux since 2003 and it actually provides a compatibility layer with what existed before. Talking about sound servers, PulseAudio has been the de facto standard for a long time now. Can you name another one still being used, apart from the highly specialised JACK?
You try to say it isn’t a mess by mentioning the three most popular sound systems? Hmm…
Let’s compare that with Haiku.
Haiku has ONE media system. A tried and true design in use since the 90s. It offers real-time processing by design, is extensible by design, is resilient by design, and was completely rewritten without even losing binary compatibility – and without the benefit of the original source code.
Both JACK and PulseAudio are sound servers that run on top of ALSA. JACK exists purely for professional audio tools that require low latency, which isn’t provided by PulseAudio. You’re making up complexity where there is very little, while pretending extensibility doesn’t provide exactly the same.
Ever try to actually use those systems?
For brevity, I’ll omit all error checking… and just setup the system to permit playing a simple sound.
BeOS/Haiku:
ALSA:
Maybe a few more similar examples might help bringing developers to Haiku.
Not being a C/C++ programmer, I can still follow code examples and appreciate what it does.
From this horizon, it appears that Haiku, implementing object oriented concepts within the operating system, makes it easier to do this than Linux. After-all. Linux is a re-implementation of Unix – and by definition any object orientated programming concepts has to be grafted onto it.
There’s no doubt that developing software is (was) easier on Be.
But developers flock to where the users are. Hence you see more developers on Windows, less on Linux and almost none on Haiku.
– Gilboa
Just to make that clear Linux has only one audio system and that is ALSA. (OSS is dead)
You can if you wish more comfort add a pulseaudio soundserver ontop of it.
Or if you need professional level rerouting and low latencies add jack as soundserver.
Both of them sit ontop of ALSA.
All that glitter is not gold in Haiku too. In its devleopment it had two different sound systems. One was the native one the other one was an OSS based one. For what I know they still co-exists.
The difference here is that the API exposed to Applications is just one.
Talking nonsense doesn’t further your cause. Pulseaudio has been the standard audio system for years now and likewise has JACK been the preferred system for pro-audio. This hasn’t changed in a long time,
Oh yeah? How about you list some “serious software vendors” that are using FreeBSD for professional audio work and products?
I really like Haiku, I play around with it from time to time and even contributed a nice sum on this year’s fund raise.
The main issue for me with Haiku is the very vocal minority that somehow believes that trash talking Linux somehow makes Haiku better.
1. Linux has one major kernel based sound layer. Its called Alsa and its has been around since 1998 [1]. I personally have been using it since Fedora (Core) 2. (2004).
2. Linux has two user-mode sound servers. One for general use (PulseAudio) and one for low-latency audio work (Jack).
PulseAudio has been around since 2004 [2] and Jack has been around since ~2002 [3].
So, calling a sound layer that’s 17 (!) year old and two sound servers that are over 10 year old a recently developed mess makes you look like an uniformed troll (and I’m being *very* polite).
Given the fact that you’re not alone, and somehow each every Haiku story becomes to troll-fest against Linux, makes Haiku looks bad, which is sad.
I’d stick to talking about the *Good* things about Haiku instead of trying to talk about the bad things about Linux.
– Gilboa
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALSA
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JACK_Audio_Connection_Kit
Edited 2015-04-05 08:44 UTC
Because most on GNU/Linux tend to prefer the old UIs of yore and have little focus on what means to have a stable desktop system.
Hence why many have flocked back to Windows, moved into Mac OS X or went to alternative systems like Haiku.
Does GNU/Linux sound API of the month, already provide the required latency for audio processing?
Sure. JACK in Linux has probably the lowest audio latency of any OS. For a couple of years, now.
Ha, you make me laugh! Linux sucks at multimedia, it always has/always will, said it before/will say it again. I love Linux and use it myself but certainly NOT for any audio/video tasks. BeOS was built from the start with multimedia in mind and that is probably why Tune tracker systems and anyone else involved with professional audio work chose it. If they was going to choose any other system, it would not be Linux that is for sure.
What makes you say that? JACK gives you extremely low latency and allows you to route audio input/output between applications. PulseAudio gives you very good capabilities for regular users, so that’s covered as well. Is it lack of applications?
There are plenty of professional audio and video tools that use Linux in one way or another. It’s used in synthesizers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korg_Kronos), photo/video cameras (http://oss.sony.net/Products/Linux/DI/category01.html), and just about every kind of gadget you can buy. The desktop really isn’t all that important.
Linux is used in TVs, Cable and DSB boxes, audio systems, dvd and blu-ray players, radios, audio and video production equipment, Hollywood studio cameras. Linux is the top multimedia OS in the world.
Maybe one should ask the developers of Final Scratch and Gobe Productive what it took to port their application from BeOS to Linux?
One can almost program any application in any operating system. However, once an application exists, porting it from one system to another one is a different challenge altogether.
The examples given, such as DVD/Blu-Ray Players and Hollywood Studio Cameras, are hardware driven and would most likely involve developing custom/proprietary drivers as well as user interfaces. Even though the core is Linux, the user-visible portion is not a general purpose Linux distribution. This is a different context than taking an off-the-self general purpose system and running a multi-media centric application on it.
Well – I use the music program Bitwig using JACK, and with an little configuration I can use about 95% of the standard VST plugins/softsynths too. I can say it is perfectly possible to do professional audio production on Linux.
I use an dedicated sound device (M-audio Delta Audiophile 192k), and it works without any flaw using JACK on an standard Ubuntu 14.04 LTS system.
And yes – the developpers made an native Linux version as far as I know. This is NOT an application slapped on top of wine or something (again – as far as I know).
Take an look here: http://www.bitwig.com/en/bitwig-studio.html
Edited 2015-04-06 07:13 UTC
2001 called, they want their argument back. The Linux desktop is perfectly stable today and UI wise is is miles ahead of Haiku. If there is any UI of yore it’s the Haiku/BeOS one.
“Flocked”? Hahahahahahha…no.
2001 called again, they want their other argument back.
JACK has been the standard for low-latency audio in Linux for many years now.
Heck, any mainstream OS today can do out-of-the-box what BeOS did back then. It’s just not impressive anymore.
Uh huh… on a completely unrelated topic, there’s this company called “NewTek” that makes computer-based video production/switching software. They’re not a huge company, but they did have some minor success a few years back with a little product you may have heard of, it was called the “VideoToaster.”
You want to guess what OS their products currently run on?
(Hint: the answer is not “Linux”)
Well the VideoToaster isn’t around anymore, it was replaced by the TriCaster series.
Want to provide some proof of what OS is running there?
Indeed, completely unrelated to users supposedly “flocking” away from the Linux desktop.
I do have some vague memory of NewTek and VideoToaster but that was more than 20 years ago.
Lightwave 3D, their current product, runs on Windows and OSX. I’m not sure if you had a point in bringing this up.
LMAO! I was half joking about the Amigification of some of Haiku’s fan base in this thread. But, holy shit…
In 2001 I was a SuSE user.
You mean Unity, Fluxbox, XFCE, GNOME, KDE, AfterStep, WindowMaker, Blackbox, IceWM, XMonad…. ?
Normal users don’t want endless options on how their desktop looks like.
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html
This was an actual question, since I only use GNU/Linux for server stuff.
When you use any of the mainstream distributions, which is what a “normal” user would do, you get whatever the distro developers feel is the best default. This is usually Unity, GNOME Shell or KDE. All these other options exist for power users. In no way is a normal user ever going to have to make this choice.
This is a manufactured problem that only exist in the minds of people with an axe to grind.
Good work on the Haiku’s devs part.
Too bad about the amigafication of their fan base, given some of the posts in this thread.
That’s indeed pretty cool progress.
Sometimes I’m playing with the idea do go back to Haiku but then I realize that there’s really nothing compelling about it, other than nostalgia. Professionally it would just be one huge pain in the ass for a negative gain and for personal use..well, it would be the same. Not exactly the platform of choice for deploying to Heroku, working with Python and Ruby and using Steam.
Sometimes people have a hard time accepting that their favourite OS has transitioned into obsolescence.
Yeah. In a sense, it’s cool to see what people can achieve recreating a defunct OS just for the fun of it.
But on the other hand, trying to recreate a past that went nowhere seems like such a tragic waste of effort. Hobby software projects could very well be the sandboxes where the crazy ideas can be tried out, or given the proper chance. Alas, other people’s time is not mine to decide on what to invest.
In regards to the fan base, I have a hypothesis that there must be some universal CS law that states; whichever OS, a person really masters by age 25, automatically becomes the one and only proper OS from there on.
I dunno, I’m pretty happy that I moved on from Windows 95.
Not really.
I made the switch from being an OS2 developer, to Win32 (WinNT 3.51/4.0) by the age of 25, and switched from Win32 (Windows 2K) to Linux (RedHat 7) by the age of 30.
… I do agree that once you reach the age of 40, your changes of switching OS (development, workstation) are slim-to-none. (Same goes for switching an editor. You’ll have to prey VI out of my cold-dead-hands).
Most 40 year olds switched from Windows to OSX and are quite happy about it.
I liked BeOS. It was better than win98 and Linux at the time. It was fast, programmer documentation was cheap.
But development went slow after Be’s focus shift.
Linux became usable after a while but you still had to pick the “right” videocard (nvidia) because ati was always troublesome. So I used Linux daily, that went well until ubuntu decided to start again with unity so I bought a mac. Three years later unity still doesn’t do things they way I like them but at least it works with the onboard graphics in the i3/5/7
OT question: If Unity doesn’t suite you, why not simply switch distribution or even, switch to non-Unity Ubuntu distribution?
– Gilboa
I concur that the older one is, the more challenging switching of operating system (and applications) for daily use becomes. Navigation of the user interface becomes a muscular memory after a while and un-learning it takes much effort.
Windows is the default in most work places and because of this is much entrenched. Nevertheless, the “tiny” changes introduced in Office (Ribbon Interface) caused much grief because many automatisms had to be painfully un-learned.
I assume this is nothing compared to what a developer is facing with the hundreds, if not thousands, of interface and system calls involved in making an application possible…..
In theory developers should be more adapt to changes, as they are supposed to live in a rather fluid environment (especially Windows developers with the ever changing MS tool-kit) but in reality, I find that developers over the age of 30 are just as entrenched as office users.
They are used to tools, they are used to type of changes MS puts in the tools, they are used to MSDN, etc.
As my company is a Linux shop, most of our employees switch from Windows to (Fedora) Linux. While young ones (25’ish) do it in days, older ones (40+) suffer far more.
– Gilboa
I get this idea (and still use vi from time to time).
It does however seem to me that I will take on new stuff but the threshold for doing so is higher and the scrutiny more harsh.
It does also help that stuff (e.g. programming languages like C++) change when I’m not looking!
The reasons are many, you’ve built your own tool set, you’ve got a set of scripts you drag around with you, etc.
In the end, I cannot picture myself going back to developing under Windows (I do develop cross-platform POSIX/Win32 code, but from Linux…) as the it will take far too much effort for very little – if any – gain.
“Alas”? You actually believe it’s a bad thing that other people can decide how to use their own time, “even” if it’s not how you would prefer they spend their time?
Yeah, I can’t imagine ANY possible reason why Haiku developers wouldn’t jump at the chance to be part of a community where that attitude is the norm…
Your post is like an ode to miscomprehension. Bravo!
Dont forget that there is a low latency kernel for linux that exists for these tasks and also the capability to tweak kernel to fit your needs with null money
The last update to Haiku was 2 years ago? Eh? I could of swore this project was brimming with activity because you hear about it frequently.
When will 3D accelerated graphics drivers arrive? My understanding is that everything uses a generic VESA driver with a slow software renderer for games?
Edited 2015-04-06 17:52 UTC
What is nightly builds?
Search the website before making such silly statements.
See: https://download.haiku-os.org/nightly-images/x86_gcc2_hybrid/
or
http://download.haiku-os.org/
There is an update even one or two days on average.