One thing that hugely surprised me, was availability of electronics-related apps like OpenBoardView, LibrePCB, KTechLab, SimulIDE etc…
As I work on electronics, it’s nice to just open the laptop/cellphone/etc schematic I need on Haiku without needing to reboot another OS same when designing some quick PCB project etc.
If I think about Haiku it is “So much work has been done! Wow!”
Haiku gets usable more and more with lots of ported applications(also killer apps like GIMP …) and even on 3D hardware acceleration is beeing worked on. Seems like the software I really need to do my daily business is arriving piece by piece and end is in sight.
Also the Haiku kernel and base looks sooo good. Its a huge task to build a OS. But Haiku team is doing it somehow. I love many aspects also about Haiku itself like the package management. <3
Once I have, for me, decent 3d hardware acceleration, I plan to try/use Haiku as daily driver.
I use Haiku on my main machine for all of my 8 bit computer hacking. All the needed tools are packaged in haikuports because that’s so easy to do. No other OS will have you up and running this easily if you want to eork on such things.
Though Haiku still has a ways to go until its ready for prime time. I think it has surpassed BeOS in many ways when comparing the underlying technologies that were developed to make the thing work. I myself come from the BeOS era and it is still my all time favorite operating system followed by classic MacOS. However, BeOS had its warts and was getting better and better with each release. Too bad we didn’t get to see what Dano could have been.
I hope Haiku doesn’t get rushed to the stable release. I hope that the last few things missing get resolved and I also hope the applications still having issues that come with Haiku out of the box get fixed and are ready to go when R1 stable is finally shipped.
If Haiku hadn’t already surpassed BeOS by a long way we would all be wasting our investment in it. By “investment” I mean the hard work of the devs and the financial contributions of people who can’t contribute in any other way.
My feeling is that Haiku now works (and works very well), for most people, providing they have compatible hardware.
It’s very fast, it is incredibly easy to install and update, and most of the basic applications are there and working well.
I love it.
When it will handle a second screen it will become my main OS. And if WINE works well enough and it can output music by USB it will become my sole OS.
I think it’s tremendous, and Beta 4 is a huge milestone.
I would also want to use Haiku as my daily OS,
Now it covers nearly all my computer needs,
but it still does not have a web browser that works all the time without crashing numerous times & that it can also show videos on all sites, including streaming.
Very recent improvements to Web+ have made it much more usable. However, I find Gnome/Web/Epiphany works better for me at the moment. It certainly doesn’t crash numerous times. In fact, it hardly crashes at all, though you might be asking it to do things that I don’t ask it to do.