Hello, I have seen several times in this forum that an operating system like Haiku could sign in a more or less near future the end of operating systems such as Linux, Windows and Mac os. Can you explain me why?
Sincerely,
Why you read that here? Because this forum is full of die-hard Haiku fans and they believe itâs better than anything else.
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In reality it is highly unlikely that Haiku will completely replace all operating systems. I donât think people here have really said that.
But in the field of âopen source operating systemsâ, Haiku is pretty much the only such system which is fairly small and cohesive and written by one team. Linux has a huge problem with various distributions that work in very different ways, plus Android and ChromeOS that are based on Linux (for now) but are very, very different than other Linux systems. The BSDs are maybe a bit more cohesive but there are quite a few of them (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, etc), and they rely on a lot of other software components shared with Linux.
Plus these Unix derived systems tend to be server operating systems where desktop use is more of a secondary concern, so things like responsiveness are not a high priority by default and require special set up to get (certain Linux schedulers, etc.) Haiku is designed as a desktop system and inherits a lot of the good aspects of BeOS which make it feel very fast and responsive to the user (though of course Haiku is still in development and not totally perfect here.)
I think long term a really good use case for Haiku is as a replacement for macOS and Linux as a developer operating system. That is certainly what I want. Though that is a smaller market and obviously we would want to attract normal users too.
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Hello! While new, I am going to toss my 2 cents in. I am and have been a 35 year Mac user. I have converted family and friends over those years, but alas those days are over. I donât like the direction Apple is headed.
As such I have been looking at other OSes. It seems there are 14k different Linux based distros. As much a pain to build one as to pick one. I do have Debian 10 installed on a HP tower with an AMD video card. To date FreeBSD is leading the pack for my replacement; but then I saw an announcement of Haiku R1 Beta 3. I have always kept an eye on this OS over the years, but now was as good as time as any to see if it is up to snuff.
I am running it on VirtualBox on a MacBook Pro 16,2, Quad-i7 2.3GHz. It has only been a couple of days but it has passed muster in my book to put it on some bare metal of itsâ own and get a better feel for it.
I am very impressed with the work that has been done. I think they have a chance to be very competitive.
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And of course they are right.
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I donât know anyone who does like their current direction, honestly. 
While Haiku does still have a few flaws, I believe itâs very close to being ready for prime-time. Iâve been running Beta 3 for the past few days as a secondary OS, and it hasnât given me any problems thus far. This community is rightfully proud of what the dev team has accomplished.
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Maybe not everywhere, but it did on my computer 
Only if you ignore Serenity, RedoxOS, ReactOS, and AROS, at least. Thatâs a lot of things to ignore, however.
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At least one thing is certain! The members of this forum have a lot of humor ^^
Thanks for your answers.
Sincerely,
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Well, Serenity is ânot for non-technical usersâ; Redox would appear to be similar; ReactOS is ârecommended by the developers only for evaluation and testing purposes.â; and AROS is Linux-like in offering a number of distributions.
I wouldnât call any of them a competitor to Haiku currently, even though they might be small, cohesive, and written by one team
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That is exactly the situation of Haiku which is currently in beta phase as well. Donât use it in production, it may eat your data, and support is only best-effort!
We may be a little ahead of them currently, but things could change quickly.
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Re:AROS
It barely has multicore support and development has largely stalled. The other Amiga-likes are still single-threaded.
Re: Haiku advancement
Haiku is smaller and faster than most mainstream operating systems because it has only the necessary minimum capabilities for an operating system (other than the BeBox legacy capabilities). Itâs pervasively multithreaded since almost the beginning. I can only hope it stays that way.
Re:Mainstream OS designs
The mainstream operating systems are examples of how having too many resources yields over-bloated monster codes. Features for only specific use-cases that occupy resources needlessly. They clearly need to be broken up into modular chunks so that unneeded modules donât need installing. Linux tries to be modular but the kernel is not. Mac is a closed ecosystem that is being merged with iOS. Windows is a bastion of closed-source binaries that will be lucky if they survive the switch to AArch64 microprocessors.
Re:Portability of software
Now that bytecodes are being standardized by the W3C around WebAssembly (and there have been many other attempts) the ability of a user to choose their operating system is becoming a reality. This will help break up the old networks of vendors supporting only their preferred systems. Iâve addressed this in several other threads so I wonât go into much more detail here.
Summary:
Haiku by itself is just an operating system. With all the competition going out of their way to disappoint clients and WebAssembly coming out to remedy that, itâs actually a convergence of events that is leading in a common direction. Haiku may make it to the next level indeed!
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I think if you can make Haiku very developer friendly, then they will come along with lots of apps that end-users expect.
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I quite like Haiku to develop on. Nice clean API, not too much buried, most stuff makes sense. You can put together something quite quickly which is not always that easy in C++. I guess the same was true of BeOS, so itâs not a big surprise but itâs a credit to the devs here. Love the Layout API, HaikuPorts and the whole packaging system is great too. Iâve not had too many troubles with the OS itself either, even though itâs in beta.
I would say docs arenât always great, although the old BeOS ones can be helpful where the docs fall short, and while Pe is not bad I miss the luxury of Visual Studio or the like.
I would compare that with something like AROS which someone else mentioned - Iâve worked on it a few times - the best thing about it as a dev is you can run it straight from Linux so itâs not so bad when it crashes, and you can use a nice Linux IDE to develop for it. The same bugs I encountered many years ago are still there, and itâs still got that horrible MUI, plus thereâs a lot of compromise in trying to keep it somewhat in line with classic AmigaOS, which was very much of its time.
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⌠but they have 3D acceleration and multi display support.
Weâll see what happens with the ongoing work to bring MorphOS to x86 CPUs, I guess, their decision to support only PowerPC so far was probably limiting their outreach by a lot. But theyâre working on it.
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UhâŚwhat? 3D acceleration is a third-party add-on for AmigaOS 4.1FE unless you count MiniGL, a limited OpenGL 1.5 clone comparable to MorphOSâ TinyGL. Only on older Radeon cards and chips.
Aros has shader support but only for ancient nVidia cards and some Intel cards. The 3rd-party add on to AmigaOS 4.1FE is shader equipped and compatible to OpenGL ES 2.0 and is the best of the bunch if you have a supported Radeon HD or Radeon RX card.
None of them have multiple monitor support. Full-stop.
In short, weâre almost caught up with AROS for its Gallium 3D and only have AmigaOS 4 to look toward because they ditched Mesa for a homebrew solution called Warp Nova from AEon, Inc.
Re:MorphOS on x64
All 32bit apps on MorphOS v4 will be either PPC or 68k. No support for x86 32-bit is planned. Secondly, all hardware for the x64 version will be cherry-picked hardware starting with ONE SUPPORTED MOTHERBOARD and some Radeon graphics cards. All other hardware will be unsupported. Finally, their motive is that aging Mac PPC models are failing from lack of adequate repair facilities.
Anyway, you get the idea. I have a 1.5 GHz PPC Mac Mini with 1 GB of RAM, 64 MB of video RAM running MorphOS 3.15. Itâs nice for single-threaded code.
Multi display support documentation in MorphOS: Multi-display - MorphOS Library
Is the doc lying and explaining things that donât exist?
If so, can you explain the pictures showing it in action here? MorphOS 3.12 adds proper Dual-head External DVI Handling - Amitopia
Are they fake too?
Good choice. Why would they port to an obsolete architecture?
Itâs exactly what some users keep asking us to do. Canât make everyone happy I guess.
And, you have to start somewhere. Weâll see what happens after they get the first motherboard running.
Also, âsupportedâ can have different meanings. If you have ever heard of âhackintoshâ you see what I mean. The system will probably run to some extent on hardware thatâs not officially supported.
Re: Dual head on MorphOS
Amigas have always had support for multiple âscreensâ on the same monitor but I had to follow both links you posted before I believed that MorphOS got dual-head support a year and a half ago. It requires specific hardware configurations and it is not all usable from the same desktop screen like in other operating systems but it seems to work. It appears that you have to flip between them like Amiga public screens have always done but now you have 2 active at once. My MorphOS machine only has one video out so I cannot use that function but I guess it works. I stand corrected.
Re: One Motherboard
The MorphOS team is planning on making drivers for the functions of that one motherboard and keeping it closed hardware. Haiku is open source so if someone can figure out how to support their own driver, have at it. MorphOS is closed source and may just support a single-board PC like I see as a low-hanging fruit for driver support on any system. A SoC is the same for all system configurations which makes the Nuc a likely choice for the first system.
Older video cards did have dual screen support in Haiku (see Question: dual monitor support?). As the Haiku developer base grows, we may get proper video drivers for modern cards.
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Also donât forget this post:
For PCI-express the choices are more limited, but Matrox PCIe G550 does exist (got one or two here), these are single lane cards as that offers enough bandwidth for this older card (32Mb RAM),
Also within the supported range of nVidia cards PCIe types exist. Donât know by heart which ones, but I guess this can be easily found out by searching for the subject on a search engine on the net
Nvidia Quadro FX (G70) series. Quad-monitor capable.
On Amiga subject, AROS did develop a 64-bit multicore/multithreaded Amiga OSâŚ