Haiku is not bloat

Is all this serious? Are you guys actually arguing about pointer size as a reason for an OS to be labeled as “bloated” ? Gosh, this can’t be real.

Last time I used Windows on my personal laptop it had Vista installed - well, it shipped with more: there was a something version of Office and a broken web browser (IE) I could not uninstall (remember? the browser was part of the OS: disgusting!). Further, the laptop vendor also installed a few lame games where full features were only available into their paid versions, and those could not be uninstalled as well. THAT was bloat. Look at current Win10 installation directory: it is 10 GB big (at least) and it’s only the OS!!!

After my >30 y of OSs user experience, usage of a few milliseconds more at boot because haiku detects new hardware is not surprising, it is legit: they call this “progress”, and I will not die while waiting for a few ms more. Of course, support for more hardware comes after a bigger binary image of the core OS, nothing comes for free. But hey, haiku images are far below a DVD size! And all the system executables are tiny (even those with a GUI)!

Just note: I think it is not the OS being bloat per se, look at linux (I mean the kernel). When packaged by Google into Android it is heavy, fat and slow (and for the OS to just compile it is mandatory a huge amount of RAM!), and ships with software no-one would ever use. When packaged by Debian (just my personal taste) then you are allowed to change your DE, remove Libreoffice, change your web browser, even install without X.

Haiku bloated? Bullshxt.

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It appears you replied to me but its hard to tell… if so then No it isn’t about pointer size that’s what I was saying, yes pointer size does increase memory use a little but its negligible its one of the few things I’m totally OK with because it’s required.

I just checked in a VM, Haiku can just barely boot today in 192MB ram… where as a few years ago I ran it usable in 256MB, maybe it would boot on my p2120 again… but it would be a lot more cramped than before. Booting in 192MB is a major improvement over a few years ago just after packagefs was release I’ll grant that.

No, it’s not a reply to you, cb88 :slight_smile:

This is not true. For example VisionFive 2 display engine supports 2 overlay planes in addition to primary and cursor planes. Overlays are used on mobile devices to save energy.

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Sorry, I wasn’t very clear here. What I meant is, we don’t have support in Haiku drivers for modern videocards. In intel_extreme I spent some time on it (the hardware has one overlay plane and one cursor plane) but I couldn’t get it to show something on screen. In radeon_hd I think no one has even tried doing it?

Maybe on RISC-V and ARM we get some simpler display engines where writing a display driver is not so complicated, and we can enable overlays and hardware cursor for them. They are certainly very useful to save energy and CPU use (in particular for video replay) and we should put more effort on them.

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My inital point was exactly the opposite, that I see no evidence at all for bloat. My assumption about larger size consumption due to 64 bit has been proven incorrect, so even that apparently didn’t lead to a bigger system.

IE is actually not just one web browser, it’s a myriad different ancient versions of their web engine that the browser shell switches between for backward compatibility with ancient business web applications that are too big to fail. That is what I would call bloat.

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I am one of those people Pulkomandy mentioned in another thread that just boots Haiku once a month, updates it, checks out what’s new and then shuts it down until next month. I do this because I just like to play around with different operating systems. I have computers running everything imaginable from FreeDOS to Windows 11. I have computers running OS/2 Warp 4.52, macOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, four different brands of DOS amongst other things. 99% of the time I use Linux which I have been running since 1997. I have a dedicated 4 core AMD A8 laptop just for running Haiku. I have run Windows 10, Linux and now Haiku on this same AMD A8 laptop (I have two of them). I think I’m in a good position to compare and judge which OS is bloated and which isn’t.

What do I mean by bloated? Requiring more RAM, newer and faster hardware to do the same old thing.

I don’t know what those that say that Haiku is bloated are smoking, but it is most definitely NOT bloated. NetBSD with a window manager such as FVWM2 uses up 200mb of RAM at boot. But then you sacrifice all the integration and the polish that Haiku (or a Linux DE) offers and live with shell scripts. OpenBSD or Linux with Xfce (which is a lightweight desktop) use more RAM than Haiku. I don’t consider Linux or OpenBSD to be bloated.

As far as performance/optimisation and features, Linux beats every other OS out there. But it does require more RAM and the system integration is still not up to par with macOS or windows. But I think Linux’s RAM usage is reasonable considering what you’re getting. In fact last I checked, a stock 64bit Alpine Linux install (no graphical interface) uses up only 40Mb of RAM.

Really it is Firefox and Chrome-based web browsers that are bloated. And Windows is intentionally bloated in it’s parasitic relationship to line the pockets of hardware manufacturers. Windows 11 is unbearably sluggish on an X280 (which has a supported cpu), while Linux is snappy on an X230 and Haiku is snappy on a 2.4Ghz AMD A8 or an Athlon II X2. Calling it bloated is just crazy.

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I just updated Haiku on my netbook. Haven’t measured, but it seems to boot faster than before. Fun as this conversation is, we’ve been trolled, plain and simple. There, I said it.

And since it’s been mentioned: it turns out said netbook gets very hot very fast when running WebPositive. Anything else I do? It stays cool. Yep, we can blame the modern web. Luckily, NetSurf is there and can be used for less demanding websites.

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IE is actually not just one web browser, it’s a myriad different ancient versions of their web engine that the browser shell switches between for backward compatibility with ancient business web applications that are too big to fail. That is what I would call bloat.

Not really on topic here, but it doesn’t suddenly become multiple browsers simply because more than one parsing/rendering engine is available. We could maybe argue that Internet Explorer (IE) has a multiple personality problem, though.

E.g. it could behave completely differently on the basis of what it thinks about the website/resources it’s accessing.

Depends on what you mean by “all this” and “you guys”.

Some of us are talking about what would actually constitute bloat from our perspectives. That should not be taken as a claim that Haiku (or anything else) is necessarily bloated, but rather as an example of what bloat might look like in practice.

It’s certainly something that should be examined as part of the overall development process, if you ask me.

I would also add the graphical interfaces.

Just look at KDE Plasma and all those transitions, effects, glows, shadows, transparencies…

That consumes a lot of CPU, GPU, and RAM.

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Indeed, it’s pretty, but rather useless in it self.

I would much rather have a very speedy interface without those bells and whistles.

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The only “eye candy” feature that I find useful is window shadows. It helps distinguish overlapping windows from each other. Making the active window border the same color as the active tab also helps with this, but limited to distinguishing the active window from the window underneath. It does not distinguish inactive windows from each other, which window shadows can.

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Window shadows could be added to Haiku. It’d not be too much work inside app_server’s drawing code, but it could be a little slow as there’s no hardware compositing support.

I don’t care a lot for that stuff. But this is not what slows down a machine, because this is handled by a GPU. What really slows down a machine, is mostly programmers not caring at all about performance/optimization: using JIT/interpreted languages for systems programming, piling up abstraction layers, horrors like Electron and so on…

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