At last, R1/beta1 is nearly upon us. Only two non-“task” issues remain in the beta1 milestone, and I have prototype solutions for both. The buildbot and other major services have been rehabilitated and will need only minor tweaking to handle the new branch, and mmlr has been massaging the HaikuPorter buildmaster so that it, too, can handle the new branch, though that work is not quite finished yet.
So essentially all that stands between us and the release itself is a lot of testing, and more testing, and polishing all the little bits and pieces we’ve neglected along the way. I’ve already begun drafting the release notes, and the i18n translation tools have been synchronized with master, so even though the string freeze hasn’t happened yet, the bulk of the translation work can begin.
I’m excited.
I feel like the motto of the Haiku project should have been “It’s never good enough for Beta”
Just to be clear, I mean that they have very exacting standards, not that the project isn’t good enough to be in beta already.
Though one could be excused for thinking that a working video acceleration should be on the list of features for a beta release…
Open up your favorite text editor and get writing then!
If it were that simple, Haiku devs would have done it a long time ago…
To be fair it isn’t really needed for 2D things as Haiku’s software rendering is very good.
Where Haiku needs acceleration is 3D stuff that it doesn’t support really yet (You can run OpenGL via software but it’s slow).
To be fair it’s been far beyond what BeOS was for sometime now… release or no.
New infrastructure is always being implemented with the latest GCC, Rust support is coming along, New software and QT ported software like LibreOffice and QT webkit browsers. With the rust port may eventually come Firefox.
I was a huge fan of Amiga in the 80’s.
I was a huge fan of Be in the 90’s.
I’ve mucked around with several OSes, but none of them quite captured my imagination like Be or Amiga.
I miss it and will install Haiku on an old computer for kicks, but it’ll be just for fun. If it had come out even ten years ago… I might still be using it.
Great work by the team, and AMAZING dedication after all of these years!
Yea, It was the best operating system back in the late 90’s. The only thing it really lacked, for my needs was .. Microsoft Office. Which sucked. I did as much as I could in BeOs, then reluctantly rebooted to linux, did as much as I could there, then as a last resort went back to windows for Office. I couldn’t find anyone that would sell me Gobe office at a price I could afford back then, so I was stuck. It was my primary choice for c++ development, and watching TV, listening to music.
Well it has a decent port of LibreOffice 6.x now… so that should be mostly fixed at least.
Scribus works for desktop publishing.
I’d want KiCad too… but that isn’t likely as the toolkit bits are there for Wx to work (WxQt could work).
Other than that it needs accelerated APIs, and that shows in browser performance its just laggy on my old slow hardware… the OS is pretty snappy otherwise.
That’s not really true. Fonts are rendered badly, scrolling locks up every second and quite a few crashes.
It’s a start, but truth is there’s no useful office alternative yet.
Edited 2018-08-21 13:35 UTC
https://docs.google.com …?
Eh, if only there was a solid browser…
(though Haiku is getting there)
MS Office Online works fine on Haiku, either in the default browser (WebPositive) or in QupZilla (now Falkon). GDocs might work as well (but I don’t use G-stuff, except for Android and YouTube so I don’t know how well it works).
It’s been really close for a decade though. Great if it happens, but I’m dubious.
Yep. Haiku is the embodiment of the phrase “Perfect is the enemy of good”.
(hmmm, I’m pretty sure there’s a haiku poem in there somewhere…)
Sometimes that works out, though. Avoid success at all costs, and always keep reaching to be better.
“Sometimes, things work out.
Avoid ‘success at all costs’;
Always keep reaching.”
There’s your haiku.
Wed 13th Dec 2017:
Haiku’s first beta is possibly maybe not too far off:
http://www.osnews.com/story/30127/Haiku_s_first_beta_is_possibly_ma…
Or we could just announce when the beta has been released and not the Real Soon Now
But now there is published a timeline/roadmap for it:
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/waddlesplash/2018-08-19_r1beta1_releas…
August 25 will be published the first release candidate!
September 10-18 will be published the final release.
That are very concrete dates and not a vague “possibly maybe not too far off”.
True, but I’ve followed this project for a decade in hopes of getting something released. Let’s see if those dates hold.
Dates almost never hold. As a former webOS and BB10 user, I can tell you that out of experience. Never mind Fedora, which (almost) always misses their own deadlines.
Great, so wait until it is released and then publish a story, that would be news.
In the meantime no more Real Soon Now stories
Finally
Actually
Really
….close
The haikers are doing it.
I am doing BSD these days though, but still a coherent philosophy is needed:
https://medium.com/@email_46476/ynnyx-is-no-trinity-o-s-4e6d72140ba1
Peace.
Edited 2018-08-21 20:08 UTC
And worth the waitingtime. Been following this since like the first drafts. Been q witness to the name change, and now the time is finally here. Or rather close.
Os/2 is also resurrected and Amiga is getting a lot of attention these days. Things are finally getting back to multiple choices. I hope. Will be a blast if the future reverts back to a time with choices and a time were computing had a wider choice. The future is exciting. You have RaspberryPI plus all the other SBC’s, you have Basic computers that you can build on your own, there is a new recreation of the Amiga500 motherboard, there is the AMY machine, there will be a standalone Vampire-V4 and more is on the horison. And then there is the standard everyday modern PC and Mac’s for ordinaery mainstream work. Though computing as a hobby, looks like it is going back to its root’s now. Yeah…. The future is bright for all of us computer hobbyists that like to play with hardware and not so much gaming.
Now we only need that darn x86 version of AmigaOS.
Same here. I learned about it from travisg after discovering NewOS and I’ve been keeping up with it ever since. I look forward to seeing how the system has matured since the Alpha release.
Is the x86 version of AROS not close enough to the original for you?
AmigaOS popularity was actually much due to Irix, which many demomakers were inspired by, which was a realtime graphics system. In these days, it means BSD well configured = our times Irix + more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGpU3DicbLQ
Peace.
WTF?.. Are you aware you are getting downvoted every time because of this moronic “peace” ending which is neither here nor there?
I’d wager that vast majority of Amiga owners haven’t even heard about Irix…
Not for me, as it lacks the AmigaOS 4 GUI I came to love on my 2014 AmigaOne 500 (which I still have, but haven’t touched in over a year, although I really should boot it up again as I love AmigaOS 4 dearly!). But other than that, AROS is a great project!
Nope. It is not. Shure Aros is great, and MorphOS is great, yet they are not AmigaOS. It is the same regarding Dosbox vs. a real 486. It is not the same.
I still run my Amiga’s, my C64 and one of my many 286/486/Pentium based MS Dos 6.22 machines on weekly basis. So yeah. Aros is not good enough for me.
Uhh… I still have a BeOS 5 setup somewere.
AROS is arguably closer to classic AmigaOS than… AmigaOS 4.