Recently tried Haiku using the Alpha Iso having been following the project for a while now having loved The Beos Pe 5 and Beos Max i have tried and very impressed with haiku considering its still alpha.
like the Fast boot up time and the overall ‘bloat’ less feel of the system. My preferred OS of Choice is Debian Linux with Fluxbox WM but Haiku will be a ‘stayer’ on my HD now and hope to use it more when it becomes fully developed for graphics work which the Beos was designed for.
A few problems for now are Bezilla is still very slow compared to Firefox/Iceweasel on linux. On the Alpha it was easy to make your system unusable by installing a additional pixel ttf font, which i did and had to use the live Cd as a Rescue to boot up and copy the font config file to my HD installation, to correct this.
Some of the software available on Bebits and Haikuware marked as compatible is not on this alpha.
the Rhine II Ethernet adapter marked as compatible connects to the internet but sometimes leads to a blank page, other times not. Tried with Matrox and Nvidia and Ati graphics cards all ok. Still waiting to test sound as most of the cards ive tried not working but just ordered a cheap ‘Haikuware’ marked compatible one so hoping im lucky. Also hoping a Good chat messenger and Webcam support will follow in the future, and maybe GIMP ported to Haiku would be great, for Graphics although 'Wonderbrush which ive tried seems nice.
So overall a big thumbs up for all the great work thats been put into this project and expecting great things from it in the future.
Thanks for your comments! Work is ongoing on a new and faster native browser (I’m working on it actually), and as for software we wanted to keep the alpha release pretty small and focused so we did not include every possible working application. We definitely hope to improve the finding and installing of new applications in the future. As for chat there is the IM Kit though from what I have heard no easy downloads are available (in other words you may have to compile it yourself.)
Also we would really appreciate it if you could log a bug report with more detail on that TTF font issue. That sounds pretty bad and we don’t want those kinds of bugs going unfixed! You could also log a bug about your Rhine II.
One quick note about logging bugs: if you don’t have an account on our Trac you will need to open one, and be sure to look for a confirmation email (check your SPAM folder) and click on it, otherwise you don’t be able to log a bug. Thanks!