Haiku makes me feel depressed

[bitigchi]

Spring-loaded-folders feature is the ultimate tactical response you can get from a desktop computer. It really makes you feel interacting with the folders.

[nephele]

@humdinger

I have one finger near the OPT key, and just hold it when double-clicking to close the parent window.

I honestly did not know about that :o

I will try it out later.

Edit: is opt used for other stuff in tracker? If not I feel like it should be single click to open then for simplicity

[humdinger]

@nephele

Edit: is opt used for other stuff in tracker? If not I feel like it should be single click to open then for simplicity

I don’t think OPT is used elsewhere in Tracker file management. Not sure changing the double-click to single-click behaviour is a good idea. I feel it’s more consistent that the additional OPT just modfies the standard behaviour: Instead “Open file/folder” it’s “Open file/folder and close parent folder”.

[brunobastardi]

I do not care about you “one user with too much expectations”

Haiku is beta and in developement!

It is much better than new user with no or less experience with Haiku know!

I don’t care what you want!

But, yes thank you for sharing your experience with Haiku as a new User!
It will help to make Haiku even better!

Thank you!

[waddlesplash]

@apgreimann

Multi-card reader: Sorry Haiku doesn’t support this, for real too.

It definitely does with some card readers which present as standard USB disk devices.

@apgreimann

@Haikuser

No support for PDF annotations or PDF signing.

Yeah… far as I know, I don’t think Haiku has this.

Okular, the KDE PDF reader, supports at least annotations and is in the Depot.

[X512]

A bit offtopic, but it is something wrong with window decorator add-on on your screenshots. 1 pixel-width rectangle it not properly repainted.

[Nexus-6]

It’s a known bug of the flat decorator which occurs with fonts larger than 14pts

[khallebal]

It is with all decorators/controllooks except the default one, i’ve already filed a report about it a while ago.

[apgreimann]

Sorry about this on my part, on the (Intel) Macs I’ve tested Haiku out on real hardware (I now run Haiku in an x86_64 qemu port on my current MacBook Pro), I haven’t got SD cards to work so I was basing this on that; sorry I messed up on this! Happy to know I did too because that means Haiku’s moving forward!

Also thanks for the tip with Okular! I will definitely remember this in the future I feel Haiku’s getting closer to being a full Linux alternative for the world with every release!

[Haikuser]

Thanks for your detailed reply.
As I see Haiku in this current year, I am not really sure what is the actual purpose or goal of this OS. What I mean is: Is Haiku a way to preserve BeOS? If that is the case, then BeOS is already preserved, just download it from web archive or something, so there is no need to preserve something that is already preserved.

Or is Haiku a way to bring BeOS to the modern era? If that is the case, then it won’t meet the expectations of the general public who are expecting something that works well and that supports the most common hardware properly. My PC is quite standard, nothing special yet barely anything works well.

As some people commented above, Haiku is not Windows/Linux/Mac, which I agree, but there is nothing bad about importing ideas from these OSes or use what other people worked on to simply port it to Haiku instead of reinventing the wheel.

So, my point is that using Haiku in the current state is more a novelty or a tinkerers’ toy rather than a useful tool for real productivity (other than just light webbrowsing and LibreOffice stuff).

@apgreimann

Printer: Not sure what to say about your printer, but to be honest, I definitely would dual boot and use that with a flavor of Linux (or another major OS) for now, as it has more printers supported out of the box, especially in mainstream distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora. Haiku doesn’t have that same luxury so that’d be my advice. If you need to print using Haiku, then your best bet would be to find a cheap printer that’s compatible with Haiku.

I would dual-boot into Windows to print the document, so there is one less reason to boot into Haiku if I want to be productive.

@apgreimann

External floppy on startup: Sooo I gotta confess, as a younger enthusiast of Haiku, this is an odd one, like it’s not every day someone would use floppies, unless you have them there for retro/historic software or an old machine or something, and that part totally makes sense. But why do you have this plugged in while you’re starting up? This one I can’t solve really, mainly because it doesn’t make sense why it’s there all the time. Because Haiku’s ancestor BeOS once used boot floppies (I wasn’t around to see BeOS do this, but I wrote a BeOS retro review series once), my guess is Haiku is probably trying to figure out by historic design why a floppy drive is present, if it can start from it, then KDLs when it can’t. It’s actually kinda cool the other systems skip past it and don’t get tripped by it — but from the computer history I’ve studied, vintage floppies could start an OS (and also could mess up starts).

The FDD drive is conencted to the back of the computer. It would be annoying to always get under the table to disconnect it so I can boot Haiku. Haiku should see clearly that during bootup there is no disk inserted, so should move on, like any other OS available.

@apgreimann

nVidia GPU: nVidia != good with open source. Even with Linux, Torvalds famously gave nVidia the finger for being annoying toward Linux. So yeah, Haiku’s probably not going to like nVidia graphics either. I know on the Macs I’ve tried Haiku with, the ones with nVidia in them are stuck in Vesa. My advice is if you can switch your GPU for another one in your computer, I would, even if you’re using something big like Ubuntu although Linux does at least have packages available for these creatures, but, anyways

Totally understandable. Not asking for a flawlessly driver for nVidia cards, but at least a decent support like with Linux. There are already drivers for Linux, would it be so difficult to adapt these to Haiku.

@apgreimann

WebPositive is a bravely put together little WebKit browser that’s doing all it can, but it honestly just can’t compete against the big browsers, yet. It’s doing it’s best to be the default, but desperately needs more volunteers to work on it.

(and, I totally know some peoples here might get annoyed with me for saying this), but there needs to be a little note when starting Web+ for the very first time that says “we’re still in beta, not everything will work with this yet” because Haiku nerds get this, but I think for first time Haikuers, I can see where it’d be genuinely frustrating. Yes, FirstBootPrompt and the landing page say this about Haiku — but not its browser, and it’d be helpful for newbies.

The same with this. The guys at Mozilla foundation already have a fantastic browser, why try to implement a brand new one instead of simply port Firefox? Oh, yes, “Mozilla should be the ones who port it to Haiku”.

@apgreimann

Um, so I don’t know what’s causing it to download this slow, other than something might’ve been up with the mirror when you tried it out, or my second guess is probably the network card you’re using with Haiku is going really slow… which would be a hardware/driver problem instead of a software problem, but either way isn’t a good thing. Whichever one it was, sorry for the bad experience.

I have no idea. I tried with the latest Haiku nightly build but is the same mixed result. All in all it is very unstable and doesn’t work so well, so it is like one step backwards in therms of web browsing.

@apgreimann

Sorry to hear about that, it’s honestly gotta be frustrating. I get this doesn’t sound the best, but have you tried disabling ACPI in Haiku’s startup menu? My guess is there’s something about it on your system it doesn’t like and it’s stopping shutdown.

I think I didn’t explain well. After Epiphany crashed (one of the times I was able to install it), the debugger was launched. Since I couldn’t debug anything due to lack of whatever file, I simply closed it and moved on. When I wanted to shut down the computer, the system simply refused to saying “Debugger prevented from shutdown”.

@apgreimann

Far as I know, there isn’t — but you can assign a keyboard shortcut to open Applications or Preferences (as a Mac fan, I have Cmd+Shift+A and Cmd+Shift+P for these) and turn in type ahead filtering in Tracker. You can start typing for whatever app or preflet you want, press return twice, and open it fast. And I say this because I actually use this and like it!

Yes, I tried that for the console (CTRL + T if I recall correctly). The problem is that such key combination only works when the desktop has the focus. If the focus is held by another window or software, that CTRL+T is ignored. But I will test again, maybe I did something wrong.

@apgreimann

tbh I think the Leaf menu stays pretty clean by default, and I actually like the Haiku way of using Tracker better than Mate, Xfce, or similar on Linux. After opening Deskbar preferences and clicking ‘Edit in Tracker’, you’ll get a folder. You can add whatever in there, folders, links to stuff, or whatever you want to make it your own. Also, type ahead filtering works in all folders in Tracker once it’s switched on, so you can quickly narrow stuff down in there too.

Yes, I also love the way Haiku does it, but allowing to pin some shortcuts to the deskbar would be quite nice, or some other way that allows you to open your programs faster for user who don’t want to have one keyboard shortcut for each program.

@apgreimann

Haiku’s never had one. Deskbar kind of works like a Windows taskbar halfway if you drag it by its handle to the bottom, but all the app blocks will work like menus instead of buttons.

Yes, a quick launch is what I mean, I will check that.

@apgreimann

Good news is you aren’t stuck with it You can download a ported file manager from the repos, first one I can think of is Dolphin (and again, I just use pkgman install dolphin as it’s quicker) but beware that’s going to pull a lot of dependencies, so be prepared to wait a good long time for that to be installed.

I will also check that one too.
What I miss is a way to simply drag and drop files in a fast way from one folder to another one that is not its parent or anything, for example from an SD card to my Pictures folder, etc.
I don’t know how the current drill down action allows this, but it surely will take a lot more time than having some sort of sidebar with your favorite folders and a system tree.

@apgreimann

For this point I’m guessing you mean in the HaikuDepot app, which I confess isn’t my favorite thing to use either; tbh I find it slow, cumbersome, not as efficient or good as pkgman is, and usually avoid it. From the Terminal, I’ve never had problems using pkgman which does list out all the dependencies just like BSD or Linux would (outside of general errors when it drops a connection, but then I can usually re-run it and resume). I actually did a mockup re-imagining if it was like the classic App Store on the Mac but it never went anywhere.

I will personally try pkgman from terminal, but this is yet another example that will frustrate users who expect a proper HaikuDepot, but it still looks unpolished.

[Munchausen]

@Haikuser

A lot of software from the repo doesn’t show the dependencies in the description or anywhere, only until you try to install it you might be asked to install them. Good luck cleaning up the system after uninstalling that software. Not sure if there is a clean up dependencies sort thing like apt-get autoremove or something.

Not sure if anyone else got this one already, but when uninstalling something the package system does a check and a window pops up asking if you want to uninstall the now unused dependencies. Not sure how the details are worked out. It will do this even if you just delete or move the package file, too, its not anything to do with the depot.

[humdinger]

@Munchausen

Not sure if anyone else got this one already, but when uninstalling something the package system does a check and a window pops up asking if you want to uninstall the now unused dependencies.

That’s new to me… It would be a pleasant addition indeed!
AFAIK it’s quite the other way around: you try to de-install a dependency and a window pops up, if you want to deinstall all the stuff that depends on it as well.

[Munchausen]

Ah I think you are right there. Perhaps worth an improvement ticket as it would be nice

[humdinger]

This ticket is related to this: #15567 (Track packages installed as dependencies) – Haiku

[Munchausen]

That’s it exactly! So it needs a way to track which packages were installed by a user explicitly and which were pulled in as dependencies, then the rest seems to be plumbing.

[brunobastardi]

That’s a joke!

[PulkoMandy]

@Haikuser

So, my point is that using Haiku in the current state is more a novelty or a tinkerers’ toy rather than a useful tool for real productivity (other than just light webbrowsing and LibreOffice stuff).

That’s your point of view. Several of us have been productively using BeOS and then Haiku for the past few decades. That’s what it is about: keeping the BeOS workflow, that works well for us, keep refining it and making small improvements.

Staying exacly as BeOS is a non-goal (BeOS can do that itself), and becoming more similar to other systems is generally also a non-goal (if we thought they were doing a good job, we would either use them or try to clone them, but not BeOS).

Yes, this means we decide to make some definitely non-mainstream choices. In some of these cases (single window mode in Tracker, use of modifier keys in Tracker), the demand for the mainstream variant is strong enough that there is an option somewhere to change the behavior (“strong enough” meaning busically “a developer decided this was imhortant and imhlemented it”). The default settings are unlikely to change if the option has already been there for several years. The discussion was already made and the decision taken. Unless there is some new element, for example, the interface evolved a lot, there is some independant research, … But not just people on the forum discussing it again and again with the same arguments.

[bechars]

For all the hardware-related stuff I have to say in general I don’t think it’s particularly useful to complain about things like lack of driver support for all sorts of random hardware you happen to have unless there is some kind of a proposal for how to change this. Every alternative OS has limited hardware support simply for the reason that constantly writing drivers for everything that comes out is a huge amount of work and a small number of people working on an OS simply cannot do it.

Haiku does already get some help from the FreeBSD compatibility but that’s not a silver bullet. Targeting a very limited set of hardware that is made to work well might be another way to make the most of the resources that are there but that would not satisfy someone who comes in with the attitude that everything should work if it does in Windows either.

[BiPolar]

Far from a good “uninstall unused dependencies” but… I’ve made this some time ago: pkgman search --not-required, as a “proof of concept”.

[Luposian]

@Haikuser

Thanks for your detailed reply.
As I see Haiku in this current year, I am not really sure what is the actual purpose or goal of this OS. What I mean is: Is Haiku a way to preserve BeOS? If that is the case, then BeOS is already preserved, just download it from web archive or something, so there is no need to preserve something that is already preserved.

Or is Haiku a way to bring BeOS to the modern era? If that is the case, then it won’t meet the expectations of the general public who are expecting something that works well and that supports the most common hardware properly. My PC is quite standard, nothing special yet barely anything works well.

As some people commented above, Haiku is not Windows/Linux/Mac, which I agree, but there is nothing bad about importing ideas from these OSes or use what other people worked on to simply port it to Haiku instead of reinventing the wheel.

So, my point is that using Haiku in the current state is more a novelty or a tinkerers’ toy rather than a useful tool for real productivity (other than just light webbrowsing and LibreOffice stuff).

Accept it. Haiku is not for those who want EVERYTHING other OS’s offer. There may come a day when you can have the best of ALL worlds in ONE OS, but that day is not today.

And for what earthly purpose do you still use a Floppy Disk Drive (even USB)? I’m currently working on replicating the mechanism of one, for my own project that involves Haiku, but… well, enough of that… [top secret paper shuffling noises]

Complaining, alone, will not happiness bring. YOU must be the solution to your OWN problem. Or you must find others who share your grief and have the ability and willingness to make the changes you desire. That is really the only way Haiku will be what you want.

Needless to say, there will ALWAYS be malcontents for EVERY OS. Windows, macOS, Linux, Haiku, etc. Something the users don’t like, don’t have, or don’t want. That’s life. Accept it or move on. Or BE the change you want to see in the world.

“You can lead a man to wisdom, but you cannot make him wise.”