And so Amiga/BeOS/Atari day continues! We’ve already reported that LibreOffice now runs on Haiku, so here’s a recap on the long road it has taken Haiku developers to get it working.
As many of you are already aware, LibreOffice is now available on Haiku. This has been a long journey that has started for me around 2014, when I was looking for things I could do for the project. LibreOffice port was one of those things. It seemed to need so much effort, most people didn’t even want to start. That’s understandable given people were busy developing the OS. However, it’s not the first time someone tried to do it.
I’m a bit of a spoil-sport here in that I’m not a particular fan of ports, and as an old BeOS user I greatly prefer software that’s been developed exclusively for BeOS/Haiku. At the same time, I obviously realise that’s simply not realistic for complex software packages such as office suits, and as such, relying on LibreOffice is by far the most optimal tradeoff in making sure Haiku can be used for office tasks.
I think that Calligra Office should be easier to port, be more leigthweight amd integrate better (Only Qt widgets, unlike LibreOffice, which is mix of many different widgets, programming languages and other strange/ancient technologies…)
Calligra has already been ported.
I’ve never recommended Calligra to anyone… and it’s compatibility with other office documents is a bit worse. As well as having a less familiar interface.
On the other hand I have recommended LibreOffice to many people… it has decent import/export support thought not perfect. And it has a familiar interface that isn’t hard to get used to.
I am glad someone has taken this up and ported it over. It’s a big step in helping people be able to use Haiku OS as an everyday OS.
The QtWebkit port is finally mature too. The browsers derived from that give you a Safari-equivalent experience (well, minus GPU accel) rather than Web+’s glitchiness.
https://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/Beta1-release-roadm…
So that’s YET another year of no beta, just a couple of months from now. This is comical.
I gave up hope on a beta a long time ago. At least it’s nice to see it’s still on some people’s mind.
Don`t worry. Beta is just a couple of months from now.
Keep in mind the git repositories for Haiku are still really active. We just have trouble getting big tasks done 🙂
https://git.haiku-os.org/haiku/
Was my favorite for quite awhile. I’ve tried Haiku several times over the years but I’ve always run into issues with it (I build out my own computers and sometimes they just aren’t compatible)… Maybe it is time to download again and try it on my current hardware. Can it boot/run from a memory stick?