A great article about a number of things that make Haiku (and BeOS) unique. There’s a lot to cover here, so I’ll just take a random sample to quote here:
Really, the first feature a new user will notice, before even noticing packages (which I covered first as they were new to the Beta) is the Be user interface. It manages to remain fundamentally true to itself, while also being quite powerful.
The BeOS user interface was one of my favourite user interfaces ever created. There was something unassuming, simple, and straightforward about it, and it always looked very appealing and attractive to me. The Haiku developers and designers have managed to modernize the visual aspects of the user interface very well, and thanks to their beautiful icons and light modernisations in every UI element in the operating system, it still looks really nice today.
I have enough experience in this industry to know that the odds of lots of application developers picking up Haiku to create useful applications re slim, at best, but I’m just going to ignore my own (justified) skepticism and keep hoping magic happens here.
On a related note, the latest Haiku monthly activity report is out, and details the work done since the release of the first beta.
This is a great summary of some of the more nuanced aspects of these Operating Systems. I recently installed my retail copy BeOS R5 Pro on a PIII machine again, and it still blows me away with it’s performance. Windows 2000 takes around 2 minutes to boot on that box, BeOS takes all of 10 seconds. Back in the day BeOS ran rings around Windows 98 when it came to things like media playback.
They really are unique systems, and Haiku deserves to enjoy a large audience of people trying it out.
I have no experience of BeOS or Haiku but I feel I should point out that Windows 2000 takes an age to boot on all systems, several times longer than Windows XP, 98 or NT 4 (with DMA enabled) on the same hardware.
That’s fair. But back when I ran R5 a lot it was an order of magnitude faster than every other OS I tried in terms of speed to desktop. I’ll see if I can grab a video from one of my old PCs sometime.
[warning, personal experiences coming up]
* BeOS indeed booted very quickly, but all I ever did with it was run demo’s of rotating teapots and video’s that played inside page-flipping books.
* Linux booted far more slowly but was great for doing everything network-related, after you spend forever to get most of your hardware and GUI to work
* Windows (95/98) boot-time was in between BeOS and Linux but everything from tools/games/programs/internet just worked, until it would crash (several times per day)
* Windows 2000 just felt like the perfect combination of NT4’s stability but with much more consumer hardware and software-software and a basic but reliable and predictable GUI. This is the release that almost made sense for normal people to use computers without always looking over your shoulder for problems. The OS was still to heavy for the available hardware though
* XP just came on the market when hardware got fast enough to run it quite well and had enough optimisations to make it “the only OS that anyone needed”. It also stayed on the market far longer than other OS’s so it became faster and faster (relative to the available hardware) and eventually received SP2 that “fixed everything”
* Vista..almost the same story as 2000. Nice try but released too early leaving bugs, driver-issues and requiring hardware that wasn’t available causing lots of issues while being a good foundation in theory
* 7…just Vista done right, like XP was 2000 with the added benefit of time to fix the issues that Vista had
* 8, 8.1, 10. Good iterations on 7 that tried to build “mobile/modern” on top of “legacy”. I personally didn’t mind as I benefitted far more from all the improvements than suffer from any “start-screen-shock”
…but of course untill the Windows 7 days, plain old DOS (+Norton Commander) booted and worked incredibly fast but was only useful for rescue-environments and old Games
Haiku is similarly snappy compared to more mainstream OSes on certain hardware. My old Eee PC lasted years longer than it would have as a Linux machine because Haiku made it fly. If I can keep my old Thinkpad in good physical shape until the sound driver and GPU accel appear, that’ll be the second laptop of mine that Haiku has rescued.
BeOS boots faster. The rest is present in any GNU/Linux distro.
I used BeOS R5 until 2006 because of it was the only OS supporting a custom audio chip we used (developed in the late 90’s)
While it was a good media OS, I disagree about the UI being so great. It’s menu based (often deeply nested) to the degree that it got me a repetitive strain injury. Not all apps were good at keyboard shortcuts.
There’s a lot of features in BeOS and Haiku that make it a fantastic OS to use. Its nested menus are not one of them.
Though, compared to its competition at the time, it wasn’t bad. Remember the Windows 95 start menu?
The solution is easy though: allow fuzzy and recursive keyboard searching in the menus while they are open. That’s pretty much what win10 does in its start menu search and it’s optimal UX IMO.
I loved BeOS as it was so Amiga ish to use. It really should have been the successor to AmigaOS/Workbench for the next gen Amiga’s!
Jean was too busy trying to sell it to a company that still existed
What makes BeOS/Haiku unique is Sawteeth, the demoscene sequencer.
If anyone can record my track “Infinity”, and send it to me on Nerd Idol Medias:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSdSEeyszGZx8fTaB692sew
I can upload it and support the BeOS cause.