“Be had more than 100 employees and $25 million in the bank at one point. Full-time engineers and a bunch of committed commercial developers (Adamation, BeatWare, Gobe…). With all of that, BeOS barely stood a snowball’s chance in hell. Without any of that, without any hope of developing momentum — EVER – it’s all so much less than zero. It’s very hard for me to understand why there are still people hanging out in the ghost town.”
“Look, sometimes we do things in this life for irrational reasons, for love. If you love BeOS and don’t care about the apps or the practicality, then by all means use it, be happy, it’s “all part of life’s rich pageant.” Just don’t start to think BeOS is going to have some kind of renaissance, or take over the world, or provide a means for developers or users to make money. Love is the only remaining reason to use the system. And maybe that’s reason enough.”
Scott Hacker interview in Beyond Magazine
I guess that’s why I’m here. I loved BeOS, and that’s why I continue hoping that one day Haiku will reach that elusive milestone, where it can replace Windows as my operating system of choice for everyday computing needs.
I think he obviously misses the point for many of us.
Personally, I love freedom of choice. The more, the merrier. The more, the better the choice. And if push comes to shove, I prefer quality over quantity, thank you Microsoft, and now Apple. Yes, 90% of the time, I’m on Linux, but I snicker knowing I have a cool as heck alternative OS that I’ve known since the 90s and that is just that, alternative!
I love underdogs. I go to bat for that uncovered gem, and so I continue to do so with Haiku because BeOS came into my life when I was elbow deep in Mocrosoft crap, fixing computers and networks with that retarted as sin Y2K BS ripoff MS copiously made a profit on nothing. It turned me off so much. I sold my IT company, bought a Mac and never turned back! OK, so I emulate it sometimes, big deal.
Unlike many, I have another OS not too many know about that fits my needs. What more do I want?
I used to love BeOS back in the day. I was 19 when R5 came out, I had a lot of time on my hands. I used R5 Pro as my main OS for 2 years before Be went bye bye. I did my thesis on it. I loved that OS. But times have changed, I moved to Linux and have been using it exclusively for the last 12-13 years. Haiku is nice, fast, but - sorry to say - it will never be more than a hobby OS. I don’t see anyone using it as a full-time OS. There is not enough manpower to sustain it. Linux barely manages to get along with novelty in technology, and it’s backed by hundreds of thousands of developers, RedHat Inc, Canonical, IMB, Google and a bunch of other big names. Haiku has maybe 20-30 developers. It’s been 14 years since OpenBeOS started and then turned into Haiku and there’s still no R1. It’s frustrating. It would be another years or so until R1 is reached of what I can tell. I’m 36 now btw.
So yes, I loved BeOS, I like Haiku. I have an old Asus EeePC 701 with the latest nightly on it and I open it from time to time. But I can hardly do anything on it. WebPositive crashes and it can barely display Google.com. There are maybe 10-15 apps I managed with great difficulty to run. Almost no games for the younger users. No office app so there goes compatibility. The only thing I use it for is to occasionally play Heretic, watch a movie or two and listen to music through SoundPlay (which is an amazing piece of software even today). But I can’t see myself moving full-time to Haiku. Not now, not ever. It was hard back in 2001 to use BeOS full-time, it would be even harder now.
I use Haiku as my main operating system on all my computers and I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I like the simple and efficient design and architecture, the friendly community, the fact that I can fix it myself when something doesn't work right.
Yes, there are a lot of problems and I still have to run Linux and Windows much more than I'd like. But the apps I need are getting there, one after the other. And the problems I hit are mostly my own fault, so at least I know who to blame.
Is it only about love? I'm not so sure. We have TuneTracker systems shipping machines running Haiku to all their customers. We have shown in the previous year that it was possible for one of Haiku developers to work full-time on it and be paid by donations from the community. Sure, you do need some love and dedication, but that's certainly not the only thing left.
The angry complaints from users when something gets broken is a good thing: it means we have users. To quote the C++ language creator: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."
Is there something wrong with being a hobbyist’s OS? Sure, I understand that having Haiku suitable for use on a fulltime basis is the goal we should aim at if we are going to improve it. But if Elon Musk came in tomorrow and did to Haiku what Shuttleworth did to Debian, I’d probably soon be bored among all the suits and move to something more obscure like KolibriOS - Assembly Language only, now there’s a challenge . If Haiku was commercially competitive, all the fun would be sucked out of it.
This is my hobby. I make the contributions I can make; blogging, writing modest apps in yab, making hpkgs, setting up my own little repo … and I can feel that it matters, that if I write my little app, the community, small as it is, will take notice. Write an app for Linux, Windows and MacOS and it just gets drowned out in the noise of a thousand others just like it.
And if Real Life™ intrudes, I can turn off my haiku rig, fire up the iMac and do some real, money-earning work for a month.
We should worry about making Haiku better. Get apps up there, improve compatibility, increase its visibility. But let’s not delude ourselves that we are going to take on Microsoft, Apple or even Ubuntu. Making Haiku better is its own reward. And that is enough.
All of which does not mean that I am going to stop nagging the devs to give me a stable beta to develop against
I’m afraid Scot [one ‘t’, BTW – he gets annoyed by the misspelling (:-/)] was fairly bummed out by the loss of BeOS. He’d put quite a bit of work and love into it, with his “BeOS Bible” and betips.net. Linux never agreed with him, either, and he found the Mac environment congenial. so I suspect he isn’t much of fan of open source. I tried to interest him in Haiku a few years ago, but his response was pretty much “Oh, that’s nice…”
OTOH, like Pulkomandy, Haiku (and for some things, even BeOS!) is my main OS, with occasional forays into Ubuntu when I need a really up-to-date browser or something. I guess I’m not quite the usual computer user as I don’t have much need for business software and so on. But the main reason I’m at home with Haiku is that I like its design by far the best of any OS I’ve used.
if it weren’t for my work, haiku would be my main, too (and one of these days, it will be, and it or some future implementation of the beos design will greatly enhance my workflow, to boot)
BEOS was interesting because of its features, which seemed well thought out after examining problems of other OS’s - particularly multithreading to prevent OS crashes.
However, it is concerning that since BEOS folded, the code has failed to attract big money support, and the businesses / coders / universities that have worked on it don’t seem to have been able to progress it very far. For example, if the BEOS concept was so good why hasn’t google, gates, ellison or someone tried to buy it?
Or is it the case with most hobby OS’s - Menuet, Genode, Kolobri, SkyOS, etc., - that they promise a lot, but reach a certain level of development and then just stall forevermore?
This is a new one. How do you think multi-threading prevents crashes ?
Operating systems exist only to run application software. So there’s no reason why you’d choose one that doesn’t have any applications.
But anyway, Be was JLG’s plan to show Apple that they were wrong and he was right. You can see the result today, JLG’s “successes” include the abandoned BeOS and the never used PalmOS Cobalt. Meanwhile Apple is one of the world’s most successful technology companies.
I can not understand why someone is constantly dependent on a forum if it does not interest for the corresponding operating system and also, according to says to himself, “not haiku for me”. Is there not a forum for the operating system of your choice, where it still makes so much more sense would there bugs and suggestions to emit as to make everything bad and the people whom it is fun to deal with Haiku your hobby badmouthing?
someone else also told apple they were wrong and he was right, and apple was indeed wrong, couldn’t run fast enough to give their computers away. they went with a different ex-employee than jlg though when they noticed a need to turn the bus around.
I fell in love with BeOS since the first time I used it for a number of reasons. Haiku has an even cooler name. Let me count the ways in which I love Haiku:
Fast boot-up time! Nothing else compares...
Using OOP language to write the system. How cool is that?
Could just drag installation packages to the right folder and instantly have a running program. Not sure how well this still works with the new package manager, though?
3D graphics from the start. No need to install DirectX or similar... Should be the perfect gaming PC platform if the user base was big enough to draw game developers.
Stability because of the modular design. If any service went down, it just got restarted again (compared to the common BSOD of Windows at the time).
The BeFS. Journaling and a searchable DB build into the filesytem itself, long before journaling was common in any of the mainstream OS'es. Still a good design today.
No issues with multi-user support for a personal computer that was only used by a single person. KISS
And the familiar bash shell for those special occasions when I still need/want my terminal.
People here seem to be saying that Haiku is not “making it” because it’s not a Windows, Linux, or Apple OS yet. The fact that it’s not any of those is the main draw for me. Those operating systems are hopelessly bloated, relative to Haiku. What manner of evil resides in all that bloat? We probably don’t want to know
Anyway, Haiku is a niche OS, and I find myself running niche apps on it. For it to have the latest word processor, latest office suite, etc, would mean windows-like or linux-like bloat. The bloat in MS Office is probably larger than the entire Haiku code base.
So - I specifically look for the niche apps I can run in Haiku. I do a lot of (other) hobbies as well as Haiku, so I can keep busy with niche apps. When I really need to use a full blown bloat app like OpenOffice, I run over to FreeBSD/NetBSD or Linux for awhile, but then I usually come right back.
Lately there’s been an exception to that theory of operation, because I’ve ported many of the hobby related apps to NetBSD-7/ARM (on the Odroid C1+) and like using the droid. Haiku doesn’t run on ARM yet, but - I’m pretty sure it eventually will run there.
Plus - I just like the minimalism of the gui (although I can get a similar effect with I3 on *nix).
As far as commercialization goes - many Odroid users run that hardware simply as a set-top-box sort of thing, home theatre, Kodi, etc. That’s a niche Haiku could do - especially with the quick boot. On the Odroid, it would have to deal with the Mali blob somehow.
C’mon - I really like Haiku, but I love my people and my dog. Arf!
. If Haiku was commercially competitive, all the fun would be sucked out of it.