Comparison of Haiku, BeOS and Windows XP and Windows XP theme for Haiku

Hello. I’ve got Haiku with Windows XP Bliss wallpaper and taskbar on bottom like in Windows XP. Is Haiku a clone of BeOS and can i customize Haiku to use Windows XP theme?

Hey there, Haiku is inspired by BeOS, but we are not a carbon copy of BeOS. Haiku is open-source whilst BeOS (except for some software like Tracker) is closed source.

Haiku does have a theming system which I believe you can customise to make it look like Windows XP by changing the colours of windows, window titles etc. Unfortunately, I haven’t tried this theming system out yet so hopefully, someone else will be able to step in and answer your question.

Thanks!

But i can’t change the start button image and some other things that are different in Windows XP. How to make Haiku fully look like Windows XP?

As I said, I’m not very familiar with the Haiku theming system so hopefully someone else can help you :slight_smile:

It’s not really possible to make Haiku completely look like windows XP, the closest you can come is an aproximation, as an imitation, perhaps you can download the Thememanager application and check if someone has already made a theme that looks similar to windows XP (e.g the color scheme… maybe the interface style or decorators)

In general haiku has (for themeing)
Decorators: these are used by the appliction server to draw window borders, window tabs, close buttons etc. Those can be reimplemented to change their style (one example is already included in the Appearence prefferences)

Controllook: this is used by the application server to draw the ui elements themselves, this includes scrollbars, buttons, etc.

Fonts: you can change the 4 default system fonts

and finally: colors, you can change the color constants that applications use as basis

In the future the hard to use colors dialog will probably be removed from pref/Appearence though, it may move to ThemeManager from haikudepot though, it’s an application you can download to manage themes and share themes for Haiku (in the sense that, the OS only has primitves you can theme, but doesn’t do any themeing itself)

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For something close to XP (it’s an open source clone of Windows XP itself, still in alpha though), try out ReactOS :slight_smile:

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Can you create Windows XP Luna for Haiku with real XP Start?

You need to implement BControlLook (buttons, check boxes, menus and other controls) and Decorator (window border) interfaces to get Windows XP look on Haiku. Windows XP themes are stored in *.msstyles files that are really a DLL with resources. Most of theme elements are represented by raster bitmaps. Maybe you want to implement Haiku theming interfaces by rendering *.msstyles files.

Some instruction how to make themes for Haiku: LAB: Make ControlLooks & Decorators in Haiku | nhtello.

Sample code: GitHub - unarix/haiku_darkstyle: Haiku-os ControlLook & Decorator for darkFlat, moonFlat and lightFlat UI mode..

It is too unstable compared to Haiku. It often crashes, wiping registry and/or whole file system and become unbootable.

Actually it is possible (I explained how above), but need a lot of work depending how close you need to mimic Windows XP.

Oh, i did a way but it made Haiku to look closer to Windows Longhorn. A theme uses Windows XP wallpaper and Windows Longhorn shell.