Indeed, I was not suggesting a 1:1 clone of their UI of course. I agree their search system is way too weak (surprising, for something that was developped by Google, who supposedly masters searching in all its forms?).
I was just referring to the way they handle the two use cases: start with something showing featured packages, suggestions, recent updates, etc (to make you discover new apps), yet allow you to search for something and switch to a different mode (to find a specific app you are looking for). And they have a third way of exploring the data, as categories, which we currently implement as a search filter. I would keep our approach on this (being able to search in a category can be useful).
This video explains Haiku-Beta1 for newbies, at this moment 89K people watched it.
Itâs third video most popular related to âHaiku-osâ, also the video shows how to create an Usb installer and download software with HaikuDepot:
Please no. Keep it simple. Thatâs one of the things Haiku does better than anyone else. Having to explain itself on a splash screen brings me nightmares of Windows 3 era installs. OMFG NO!
Too bad the review was done with a misconfigured VirtualBox networkingâŚ
I wonder why not more reviewers that have such fundamental problems come to the forums, IRC, ML to ask what might be wrong. Of course they should write in their article that they had trouble with X, Y, Z , but that they could eventually solve them doing A, B, C.
Oh, right, now you all respond that journalism is deadâŚ
Well, they are not actually interested in making things work, just in reporting what they see.
We should have more Big Red Warnings about these common pitfalls. I would suggest in the Installer welcome text, but no one reads thatâŚ
Or, maybe we should fix the bugs? They are an annoyance to our users, and these reviews are in the eye of the casual user trying out Haiku for the first time without knowing anything about it.
^ This ^ . Bugs like those should be fixed natively, not by manual tips & tricks. Unless it involves some person/reviewer finding a weird corner case while doing a review, thatâs inevitable.
From the review:
The virtual machine used a lot of my hostâs CPU. Even when Haiku was idle, VirtualBox was using 25% of my hostâs CPU resources. Running a simple application such as the resource monitor in Haiku raised that usage to 35%.
this happened to me in Libvirt, and thought it was only me or my system, but doesnt seem to happen in VmWare @ Windows 10. Some info about why this happens would be good to know.
Sure, i reinstalled a new distro (ubuntu based, now Arch based), so i will check in the new one after reinstalling libvirt, and create the ticket if I can reproduce de behavior.
I think it would help avoid confusion and comments such as âThere were some other aspects that I wasnât thrilled about - the title bar being a tab at the top of windows looks weird and inefficient to me, but that is a matter of taste.â
In this case the reviewer has got the idea that the window title bars are inefficient, which is the exact opposite of their function when used with stacking. If the quick start guide appeared after booting in an unmaximised single pane browser window (is that possible?) with a âshow at launchâ tick box it would help to solve misunderstandings like these, Iâd have thought.
The best thing, apart from getting the bugs fixed would be to have Haiku as a choice in the Virtualbox menu when creating a new VM. Maybe under the âotherâ category. Then the hardware configuration, especially networking, would be correct by default.
Of course, I wonder how realistic that isâŚwith Virtualbox being owned by Oracle
Not the default paradigm of having windows maximized to full width / height as other desktops/Os, nor using the whole âtitle-barâ for the⌠title. Most newcomers (myself included) may not use stacking nor keybindings to do it.
Not that it is bad or wrong, itâs just a thing that isnt commonly used and causes some kind of cultural-shock (ui wise).
For me it raises the question of âaffordanceâ: is it possible to grasp our user interface intuitively, without reading docs? These reviews are a valuable input showing where we failed at that. A Quick Tour is a simple solution, but kind of admitting our failure at this. It would be great to consider improving the discoverability of features, so that a QuickTour isnât even needed. It may not always be possible or acceptable, however ; but think about things like tooltips, or how inkscape always shows in its status bar what will happen if you click where the mouse is, plus available modifiers.
I would not worry too much about things such as âgot the idea that the window title bars are inefficientâ. To me that is just a tiny detail IF it were true in the first place (which I donât think it is but again, I think this is such a minor thing either way).
The by far much bigger issue is hardware support. This is an area where hopefully Haiku can improve a lot in the coming months, because if haiku does not work on the real hardware then it can not be called a ârealâ OS.
These reviews are a valuable input showing where we failed at that
That depends. I would not call a âwindow title bars are inefficientâ a real failure, but hardware being not supported, while, say, it works under linux, is a problem. Since this may also require more information for Haiku, I suggest adding some simple means for the end users to give you guys feedback in a convenient way, ideally automatic. For example, âclick this button to send a log to a remote page for hardware information and failure with thatâ. Of course people could enter information manually via their web browser but many are lazy (I know I am). The more information the easier it should be to support hardware, even more so if it already is known to work on linux (which may be easier to test for folks; there are actually quite some linux users out there in the wild; of course it is still only a small % share but itâs a very noticable number; quite a few windows users are actually dual-users of linux as well).
I think hardware support is more important than a perfect quick tour - if my hardware is not supported then the quick tour is not going to help me since I could not use Haiku to begin with. While I understand that you want to make a great first impression for casual users, do not forget the more advanced users.
Hardware support needs the person to report a ticket, provide syslogs, etc.Since most of the failures are usually âno displayâ or âno networkâ, it is hard to automate any kind of bug reporting process. And we will need manual intervention from the user to test potential fixes or provide further data anyways. So on this side, we can only blame the users for not reporting bugs, and ourselves for not taking time to investigate and solve the problems.
On the UX side, however, it is really something we can get thinking about and consider changes. Ths problem is not the âinneficientâ part (I can understand this, it makes the titlebar harder to reach, so more complicated to move the window). The thing is, this is a known problem and there is already a solution implemented (with the keyboard shortcuts to move or resize windows). However, this shortcut uses the window key, which is unusual and completely undiscoverable. I donât see a way to make this more visible, however, so a Quick Tour entry may be the only way out (this is already mentionned in the user guide, but apparently people donât read it all, and only refer to it when they get stuck with something).
While I agree that limited hardware support is a problem, I doubt itâll be solved in the coming months. How and why in the coming months when it wasnât in the past months?
Anyway, Haiku is a ârealâ OS, because it does run on real hardware. Just not on every hardwareâŚ
The difference in effort to improve hardware support and to improve the QuickTour are probably a few hundred magnitudes⌠Plus the skill sets needed for tackling each are very different.
Iâd say, mostly not even when stuck with something.
Ironically the distrowatch review mentions the nice documentation, so that is at last something on the plus side.
(only german)
this happened to me in Libvirt, and thought it was only me or my system, but doesnt seem to happen in VmWare @ Windows 10. Some info about why this happens would be good to know.
would be to have Haiku as a choice in the Virtualbox menu when creating a new VM. Maybe under the âotherâ category. Then the hardware configuration, especially networking, would be correct by default.