I have been using Haiku on metal (the only system on an Acer Aspire 7738G) as a main driver for university and office work, for a few days.
In that short timespan I have encountered a ton of bugs and crashes, many of which I cannot properly report because I cannot screenshot anymore (Kernel panics), or applications don’t terminate during the bug so I cannot dump memory or write a log, and it just happens so frequently I’d spend hours a day writing reports.
List of issues I have encountered so far:
Vision crashes repeatedly whenever I try to change the settings, or just randomly while joining a server. Unusable.
Only half a dozen mails downloaded from various folders when I put in my mail account, and the inbox isn’t polled at all. Had to use a third party program to get mails to work
MediaConverter causes a kernel panic when I try to convert from WAV to OGG or FLAC
Taking a screenshot of the time window once caused my applications to not properly close anymore, and there is a window-shaped rectangle in the middle where graphics “drag” (no buffer updating).
Ligatures do not work anywhere except LibreOffice, which has a custom font rendering system anyway.
Cannot connect to a Bluetooth speaker on my bluetooth laptop; I find the speaker, I connect to it, but the button does nothing half the time, and the other half it shows an incoming connection by an invalid device, and then causes a kernel panic. Can’t save the kernel panic either because it freezes entirely and lines render based on where my pointer is.
When a debugger is debugging a program that refuses to close, I am softlocked and have to hard reset the laptop because the debugger keeps the system from rebooting, and the program cannot quit. Only the Team monitor helps here.
Now, I know that the answer to this is “Haiku is in beta, please report all bugs you find!”, and I agree with that, and I will report all bugs I find from now on, but I am still wondering: is anything wrong with my system or my configuration that you’d know could cause such bugs?
I love the concept of Haiku and the work everyone puts in this; and I WANT to use this as a daily driver, but all of these constant issues drive me mad and make it borderline unusable. Worse is, nobody else seems to encounter them.
I will take out my frustration productively and just start contributing, reporting issues and working with devs on this instead. But I wonder if I am alone with this experience and I did something wrong, or my laptop is simply unique in being broken. Do these issues sound familiar?
I am not surprised at these issues, since the involved components are pretty much incomplete or needs a big overhaul. You might want to search the bug tracker, upvote/comment related tickets or open a new one.
Regarding the ligatures, Haiku’s text view component does not support rich text or plain text with ligatures yet.
For some reason I have had zero problems with either WebPositive nor Otter, I can even use the bloated script-laden online course websites for my university without problems. I can truly say that web browsing is probably the component that I had zero problems with so far. Also sound, sound works great too, better than on many Linux systems I have used (ahem, PulseAudio).
That seems strange to me, why wouldn’t it? it’s basically picking a different glyph if two code points together have a seperate glyph in the font, many non-ligature looking constructs rely on this, it depends on which font you pick, anyway.
ligature implementation in Freetype requires use of Harfbuzz. Use of harfbuzz requires modern GCC so this is not possible as long as app_server is compiled with gcc2 for 32bit systems. We should probably change that (if not already done? I lost track of things ) and use gcc8/11 for app_server.
Then we can integrate harfbuzz in it and have better support for ligatures, but also some alphabets that require ligatures to do anything useful.
I suspect at least some of the issues are hardware related or we’d all see them.
Maybe one of the devs can spot something if you uploaded your syslog (/system/var/logs/syslog) somewhere. Possibly even enter KDL by pressing ALT+PRINT+D and enter “ints”, take a photo, and leave KDL with “co”. (It may take some seconds to return to the system, I suspect paperwork at the borders…)
screenshot causing things to hang, and Debugger causing things not to close are all very strange issues, and I would have to suspect potentially related. It sounds like there is some strange lockup issue that is occurring in the kernel, based on these symptoms. The MediaConverter panics / app_server crashes may somehow be related
Could you open one ticket with a syslog and as complete a description as you can make of the hangs/softlocks, and another ticket with a picture taken of the MediaConverter crash?
Also, if you are on R1/beta3, can you upgrade to a nightly build and see if anything is different here? (The nightlies have a bunch of bugs fixed already, but more importantly they have more kernel assertions enabled, so maybe whatever the problem is will manifest itself more clearly there.)
Thank all of you (can’t quote everyone) for the advice, I will try to recreate the crashes again, but it’s weird; it’s been impossible for me to repeat some of the crashes despite tracing back my steps. If it happens though, I can try all of the advice.
I’ll take some time out of my day for a debugging spree later.
