I stumbled on Haiku a few years ago and found the project very exciting.
I see myself as a future end user and have been looking forward to installing Haiku on an old PC and using it for checking e-mail, copying digital pictures from my digicam, downloading podcasts and general web surfing.
So thanks to all the people involved in the project through the years.
So my question is, is there a sense from the people in the project about how many people there are like me out there? People who check the Haiku site from time to time to see where the project stands and are looking forward to the day they can download something that will be easy to install on old hardware?
Again, I understand this project is the result of a lot of hard work from a lot of people so I don’t want to sound impatient or ungrateful in any way.
I’m just wondering how long the virtual line of customers waiting for Haiku is.
Not a definite measure of the number of lurkers, but FYI the website has about 2K registered users. It’s interesting to see that in the last 30 days we had about 44K unique visitors, which (most probably) means that the majority of the people coming to haiku-os.org are not registered, indicating that there are definitely more lurkers out there. It would be interesting to know how many people are registered to the various Haiku mailing lists.
I’m a lurker. Signed up just to answer. Been using Zeta for a few years and watching Haiku periodically. Once Zeta went under, I’ve been checking on Haiku every day. I check the news on the homepage here and read the mailing lists. I recently set up a cross compiler in linux and have been building and installing haiku on real hardware. My mouse and keyboard don’t work through my KVM switch so I haven’t done much with it. I’ll eventually start using it more and more.
I’m another Haiku Lurker - I used BeOS R5 and Zeta 1.2 regularly until crucial things like network sound cards no longer worked despite trying to make careful choices about upgrades. Also Gobe no longer copes with my wordprocessing. When the Alpha release comes (for which I’m waiting impatiently) I will try it. Hopefully by then my Audigy HD sound card will be supported (currently not in the OSS port despite being recognised.)
I’ve been lurking for the past year or so. I’m looking forward to a moderately stable version which I can install to my hard drive in a multiple-boot configuration; I’m not interested in a virtual version of the OS. Aside from that, I would enjoy being a contributing developer once I can do development in Visual Studio (in Windows), rather than some clunky linux environment. I’ve worked with 'nix systems doing simulator development for Nasa, and I’m not a fan; I’m at least 10X as productive with the VS IDE.
Certainly, once a compatible build package becomes available. If you haven’t worked in one of the more recent versions of Visual Studio you’ll be impressed by how efficient it can be - and there’s a free version for non-commercial development (and it’s not like the pay version is ridiculously expensive). There’s a bit of a learning curve involved, but it is the IDE of choice for professional development. The Windows operating system is another matter entirely - I appreciate being compatible with most of the rest of the world, but am not thrilled by the complexity resulting from preserving reverse compatibility with older versions, nor do I care for the .Net world of managed code. 'Nix is a mess for other reasons. Haiku, built upon a clean C++ hierarchy, strikes me as an ideal environment to work in … eventually.
I’m a lurker and I’m alright, I work all day and I sleep all night. Been watching for years as this project progresses. I wish it was faster but hey there isn’t a ton of money paying these guys. I bought 4.5 and 5.0 versions of BeOS, sure wish it would of continued but at least its not dead yet. I’m really waiting for a precompiled and some sort of distributed complete package before I try this as a OS again. Looks very promising keep up the good work. Had to reset my password to post, its been like 3 years since I signed up here it was still openbeos.
Haven’t had BE installed on anything in YEARS, but still check bebits and here for news. I did try a vmware image last year sometime and it was cool to see the progress of Haiku.
Another lurker here too! I am a long-time user of BeOS. I have the purchased versions of BeOS for Intel from version R3 right from the beginning up to Pro Edition 5.0. In fact I still have the original box, cds, manuals, boot floppies and invoices from R3, R4, R4.5 and 5.0! The invoice for R3 shows April 14, 1998 and I paid $69.95. Be had actually messed up my order and inadvertently charged me twice. After an email exchange they credited my account and promised to send a Be T-shirt (I never did get that T-shirt!) The upgrade to R4 cost $25.00 plus $2.55 for shipping and handling.
I keep meaning to contribute to Haiku but end up finding some excuse (recently finished my graduate degree in Information Technology Science). BeOS has always seemed to be the OS that worked the best, felt the most responsive and was light years ahead of the competition at the time (for example, BFS and file attributes-there’s nobody doing that now to the integration that BeOS had then). But as Be Inc fell, I was unable to stay productive using Be and switched to Linux. I hope that Haiku can bring this OS back to a usable level.
I too check here, Bebits and Haiku News to keep up with what’s going on. I actually have R 5.3 loaded on a partition and an older version of Haiku on another but really don’t do much there. Hopefully, one day I’ll be able to use Haiku as my primary OS again.
I’m a lurker as well. I am interested in BeOS/Haiku. It has a LOT of potential. I hope it just stays closer to the “what BeOS would be like now if they hadn’t gone down” instead of “Lets become just like linux” Haiku already is using gcc and bash. Maybe it’s a good thing idk.
I’m a lurker. I’ve been trying to figure out how I can help as well as i’m not a programmer. I can help with web and graphics types of projects. The website email links (kits) didn’t seem to work the last time I tried them.
BeOS used gcc from the first x86 release, and bash since back in the days of the BeBox. Haiku is all about BeOS, and it does pick up where they were going when they went under - it’s going to be a lot easier to make network applications work on Haiku, especially, than it was on BeOS 5.
What BeOS would be like now? Well, who knows - in that parallel universe, Be has a 7 year head start. But at least we’ll never have to start over like that again.
Sorry about that, I thought the kit groups had an email address. I realize now looking at the page they have mailing lists. http://www.haiku-os.org/about/teams
Don’t know if I count as a lurker or not, as I do post every so often. I check this site and haikuware daily, and install a new image weekly. I am also looking forward to an eventual alpha/R1 iso. Keep up the good work!
