For what it’s worth I’d like to announce a little project/experiment that I’m planning to do.
As the title already hints to, I’m planning on using Haiku as my main OS for a limited period of time to get more of a feel for what’s actually possible and what not (as of now). The idea was initially inspired by some threads on the forum along the lines of “What is missing from Haiku that keeps you from using it …”.
I have been using Haiku on and off since about 2010 (mainly in VMs), written and contributed to several apps and tried to do all different kinds of tasks with it. But I’ve never used it as my main OS. As the time of year now approaches that we call “Fastenzeit” in German (Google Translate says it’s called “Lent” in English) I thought this was a good opportunity to change that fact. By the way, I’m not particularly religious, but I always use this time of year to challenge myself in some kind of way.
Thus, if all goes according to plan, from February 18 to April 4 I’ll be using Haiku on bare metal as main OS (instead of Linux) for nearly all my private desktop computing tasks. I’ll still be using my ancient Macbook with Logic Pro X for any music recording that might happen during this time, as multitrack recording on Haiku is out of scope for this project (might be something to try next year)
For the hardware I have two main options that I’d like to use, a 2012 Macbook Pro (i3 CPU and 4GB of RAM) and an old no-name desktop with a Core2 Duo CPU and 4GB of RAM as well, that has been collecting dust for the last few years. If both of these machines prove to be unsuitable, I can resort to run Haiku on my Lenovo Thinkstation workstation from an external drive.
Software wise I haven’t decided yet whether to use Beta5 or nightly. I think I will try beforehand which one runs better on the hardware I have.
I’ll keep you updated regularly on this thread once the project starts, and I’m sure it will lead to a lot of questions coming from my side
I’ve been primarily on Haiku since mid-December and, since I mostly sysadmin, haven’t had many problems.
(I’m using the nightlies, since B5 doesn’t really work well on this laptop and the the nightlies have been showing visible improvements for me at least weekly, which is very neat. No other OS I use feels good to update.)
It does fine with:
web: LibreWolf as my “secure” browser and IceWeasel for general browsing with JS turned on; BitWarden, uBlock and NoScript work fine in LibreWolf
email: IceDove, since MailKit can’t send through my mail server and doesn’t do encrypted email
ssh: Terminal is fine, though it seems to not have keyboard control for scrolling?
autossh: I ported this since I haven’t found any Haiku VPN solutions
Honestly, I would have no problem endorsing Haiku as a primary workstation for sysadmins.
I still go back to my MacBook for image editing, since Affinity is great and I’m used to it; I haven’t spent enough time going though the options on Haiku to know if they’d be acceptable.
I did have to put one of my old wifi base stations back in service, since Haiku couldn’t maintain a connection to my mesh network.
Haha, I kinda expected this. You never disappoint @Begasus !
I do, almost. But mainly in a VM (KVM/Qemu under Linux these days). So when I’m developing or trying out stuff on Haiku I switch over to Firefox on Linux for all browsing or have music playing on the Linux machine. These small and convenient “escape patterns” make this experience quite different than using Haiku on bare metal as main OS. At least that’s what I expect. We will find out
Couldn’t resist, was a picture from yesterday when we got back home.
Well there is Iceweasel and plenty of applications out there to play videos and/or music (granted your recording issue is not resolved) around, even got plenty around not released that do the trick here.
I plan to use Web+ for browsing as much as possible but it’s great that there are alternatives available. I’ve already used StreamRadio to listen to web radio, so I’ve got a good starting point here.
Thanks, that’s good to know. And that leads me to another question: I’ve written a frontend for yt-dlp in python with a tkinter gui. I tend to use that to download videos from YT and then watch them locally. Do we have Tkinter available on Haiku? I can remember there were some obstacles to it in the past.
@BlueSky , in solidarity with you, I’m going to join your experiment too!
I already have Haiku Beta5 running on my desktop, a Lenovo ThinkCentre M900(2015 IIRC) with i5 and 16GB of RAM. Everything works well except for needing to connect speakers to the front audio jack vs the rear (no big deal). Haiku is on an internal NVME drive with PopOS Cosmic on another.
I will need to figure out something with my laptop. It boots to the Haiku install disk and it appears to work good. I just need to see about getting an external drive or something to boot from, or resize partitions and install Haiku there. The laptop is a Dell XPS-13 (2018) with an i7 and 8GB of RAM.
If you just want to play around with it, something like intenso mini/micro usb thumb drives could be fine. They only petrude out a couple of mm out of a usb port
That is a great idea but unfortunately the XPS-13 only has two USB-C ports, and one of those I need to keep connected to power since the battery is bad and needs to be replaced It does have a micro-SD card but I don’t think Haiku can use those.
I think you can use the sdcard, but most computers can’t boot from one, so maybe you can put the bootloader (efi) into your normal esp but the haiku filesystem on the sd card
That sounds like a great idea! The BIOS for this laptop does have an option to allow it to boot from SD. I’ll see what I can figure out. Thanks for the info!
Okay, I couldn’t get Haiku to see the microSD card, but I was able to get it installed on an external drive. I just installed from my desktop system and then updated this system to nightlies–woohoo!
Well, it’s time for a little report on how it is actually going.
The start was a litte rough, not entirely unexpected though. Coming from using Haiku mostly in VM where I got to know it as a quite reliable and stable platform, on real hardware the story is a little different. Again, not really news but different from what I was used to.
I did not manage to get Haiku running in any usable form on the 2012 Macbook Pro. Nightly hangs at boot, Beta5 installs but crashes quite reliably within minutes. Detailed bug reports for all these problems will of course follow in the next few days. In the short time that beta5 was running I discovered that wifi and sound are not working. Wifi is less of a problem because I have a USB wifi stick that works very well with Haiku, having no sound is a problem I cant work around so easily.
On my Core2 Duo Desktop Haiku nightly crashed at the start of the installer so I installed beta5. Driver-wise Haiku works really well on this machine. Graphics and sound (both Intel onboard) are recognized and work very well. For wifi I use the stick mentioned before. This machine, despite being quite old would make a great platform for this project.
If it were not for an extremely annoying problem. From time to time, the machine just hangs. That means no crash, no KDL, no visible error message. The time from boot until this occurs varies from about 5 minutes to nearly one hour. Mostly it happens after an uptime of about half an hour. So far I haven’t found a way to trigger it with any specific action or workload. Even under high CPU load and memory use the OS performs well, only to hang at some random point later on.
I’ll open a ticket for it, but before doing that I’d like to know if I can collect any additional data apart from /var/log/sylog (which I looked at quite extensively but couldn’t see anything that appears to be related to the problem). Or any kernel settings I could try to see if it remedies the problem.
The machine has a serial port, so I could use that for debugging, if needed.
That was it from the hardware front. Application wise I’m slowly getting settled in. The bug list from the category “small but annoying” from several Applications continues to grow, of course also here there will be bug reports and in some cases maybe also patches. I’ll report on that in more details at a later point.
To end this post on a good and funny note, though not very productive in a grown-up kind of way (which isn’t really my thing anyway ) I’ll add a little screenshot for you. See for yourself!
Hmm, ok. Uploading png images to the forum doesn’t seem to work in Web+. I’ll try from another browser on Haiku (or resort to using my Linux machine if I have to) .
It does have a micro-SD card but I don’t think Haiku can use those.
