I’d been following development of betas since B2, & found B4 usable, but it is still not right, (for me at least).
Lots of people suggesting tweaks to usability, which seem to get rejected out of hand, simply because it wasn’t the BeOS way - but BeOS died!
20+ years later, only those committed to the BeOS way are using Haiku, it seems, but few new users staying with your project, (me included, I’m afraid, as it doesn’t have ‘usability’ as a main concern).
I wish you well, with this archaic O/S, it has been an interesting sojourn, but I will now return to the usability of Linux/BSD.
There’s nothing wrong with the BeOS way. It’s a good way. BeOS died because Microsoft owned the bootloader. Linux survived because it lived in a safe habitat. Haiku lives in a safe habitat. Watching a massive software project being born and growing up is sometimes like watching paint dry for people like yourself but Haiku is starting to look like a coiled spring. Who knows what might spring out of it in the future; perhaps a distro that’ll do things your way, amongst others.
Most of what you call usability is just what you are used to. Of course, Haiku is far from perfect, and there are real issues that will be fixed some day, some of which you already stumbled upon. Sometimes, when you actually take the effort to adapt to something different, you end up with something better.
Threads like these make me wonder if people also write “love letters” to Micro$oft when they quit Windows and install any of the open-source OSes
It’s fine if you don’t like how Haiku looks like or how it works,then go ahead and use something that fits more to you.
On the other hand,there are many people who like it just the way it is and don’t want to see another Windows or MacOS clone without new ideas,that throws away a usable UI in favor of flat touch elements and “let’s make this button even bigger!”
I don’t see this implied exodus. Quite the opposite: I used to be able to follow everything that happened in the forum if I visited on two subsequent days. Now there are too many threads to read every one, which suggests more enthusiasts are joining than leaving.
I never had the chance to use BeOS (thanks to Micro$oft’s unethical tactics), and therefore I can’t be committed to BeOS. But I use Haiku, and I like it. I’m sure I am not the only one with that background.
So all my projects run on an “archaic” OS just as well they work on “modern” operating systems. Good to know.
What exactly is unusable, that fixes to are rejected to keep with the “BeOS way”? None of its BeOS elements make Haiku less usable.
If you want more usability of Linux/BSD, then use them. But haiku can be more usable while being nothing more like those two OS’s.
If you want things to be more like Linux, how much closer can you get than Haiku’s equally low-grade printer support. One thing for sure, is that I’ve had to do a lot less manual terminal work (zero) to get Haiku’s interface to be the best interface of any current version OS out there.
If you want BSD, you could try and make a version of Haiku that is a pain in the rear to install? Or maybe hide every possible thing you might want to do under some documentation somewhere. That’s my experience with it anyway, maybe you have better luck with such things.
Or you can dual/tri boot. I personally use Haiku for the joy of it, but when I need to do real work that can’t be done in Haiku, I’ll just reboot and choose to run OSX. (Not Linux or FreeBSD, because I need to do actual work, not work on making the OS usable)
Okay without anyone being angry, beos today would be like Windows in the 90s (even better) the Windows graphical interface of the 80s/90s (better known as Presentation Manager) is complete garbage compared to the Geoworks interface Ensemble 1.2(PC/GEOS for friends). However, the Beos interface is good enough for daily use. What can be improved? Of course it can be improved!! But I think there are bigger things on the horizon than just the GUI.
I’m considering leaving as well and for many of the same reasons. I like Beta4 on my 64-bit system with maxed-out 32 GiB RAM booting from a spare SSD. My main SSD runs Manjaro Linux and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
I tried installing NetBSD as an alternative on a platter drive and haven’t gotten back to it after my initial failure. I have MorphOS on a G4 Mac Mini that runs great for a single-core OS in 1 GiB of RAM. My MicroA1 is feeling tired and old running AmigaOS 4.1FE2 so I might rejuvinate my A1200 instead but 68020 is quite dated.
I’ve made the rounds for Amiga-like operating systems and am amused by some of their work-arounds like the FPGA chips for Amiga chipset compatibility and RasPi CM4 based accelerators for running a JIT in place of the dated CPU.
Needless to say, I need something else for serious work and serious other uses like gaming. Consoles are limited by fixed configurations (though SoC configurations of SBCs also suffer similar limits). Windows and Mac are too politically involved to take seriously as alternatives.
The BeOS way is too narrow-minded for my liking. I liked Haiku as long as it looked better than the other alternatives. But I’m still stuck on Linux primarily for video-conferencing and multimedia. I don’t need another hobby system to putter around with. I have several Amiga-like systems that scratch that itch.
FWIW Haiku is my main operating system because I offload some tasks, I do my playing games on SteamOS on the steam deck and PS2 or Wii for instance.
In any case, I can understand the want to leave the forum, it can become very tiring and draining, especially if as a user you aren‘t that involved in the development and it looks slow. Now especailly, beta5 has a huge ammount of work put into it, but it also has some blockers because of this, we are chopping away at those and somewhen we can release beta5.
But to the outside it looks like no progress was made.
To those who want to leave, thank you for staying here in the past, and if you wish to return at some point you are welcome again. : )
How many people don’t see the value of large amounts of ports that have brought us here? How many people turn up their noses in conceited arrogance just because it isn’t native code? Code is code! If it needs some fixing, fix it!
At one point I thought that using datatypes on my Amiga 1200 would be a good idea for a compiler framework. I thought I could import any code I wanted. Wouldn’t TranslatorKit be just as able? At the heart of it would be the modern LibGCCJIT but of course that’s a port! Once again: code is code!
Lots of ports to the Amiga came from AtariST series computers and failed to take advantage of the Amiga blitter coprocessor. Does that mean that those ports were inadequate? Certainly! Should more effort have gone into it? Obviously! But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Open-source code is a gift!
