Hello Haiku, few questions and suggestions

1

I am glad to see the existence of Haiku, I discovered Haiku a fews days ago, just wasting my time googgling…, i was looking for alternative O/S since i am not quite happy with windows, linux and OSX. After read so many articles about haiku, i think its better to just try to ask here.

in my opinion in the context of Desktop O/S:

Windows : is the best Desktop O/S for end user, relatively easy, a lot of hardware support, a lot of application support, and quite stable, but its microsoft! closed source and not free

OSX : it was nice, but apple is doing everything just to make OS beautiful, they bundled the OS with bunch of applications and said it was OS features, see WWDC they just showing up the application side not the OS side, they just doing it for marketing the hardware (mac), and its closed hardware, relatively few software compared to windows, and not free.

Linux : its high performance OS, very reliable, and flexible OS, you can make it just how you want to be, but its a crap for end user, linux is operating system from developer for developer, not for PC users. What i hate is the monolithic kernel, centralized repository, complicated app. installations, scripts everywhere, to many versions and branch, complicated app. dependencies, lack of unification : X11, X.org, WindowManager, desktop environments… user are free to choose which one they like but is bad i dont like it.

so I hope Haiku could fix it, make the better O/S out of those O/S…

here are my questions and suggestions

the good side of OSX.
very easy installations, you just download the package and copy (or extract) it to harddisk then run, simple! nice! efficient!.. don’t ever do what linux does, repository, install script, library dependencies, even manual compilations. its all crap and obsolete.
-My Question related to this is, how does haiku implement the application installation?

the good side of windows
they have a lot of applications and hardware drivers
-My Question, is there any development tools to develop haiku app. easier?, how about the hardware driver? it would need a lot of time to make OS easy to run on broad options of hardware, see linux after more than 10 years, the driver problem is still the big problem, can we just use windows driver to make it run on Haiku? maybe cooperation with ReactOS developers?

the good side of linux
they have a high performance kernel, a lot option to use advanced filesystem, advanced and high performance networking, highly customizable.
My Question, how does haiku performance compared to linux? is there any benchmark, or at least we have something superior to linux?

thanks!, any comments?

2

Those are great questions and largely why I’m looking at Haiku, myself. Hope someone answers them for you and me soon.
I’m also hoping there will be an ISO to download in the near future.

3

As I’m trying to avoid revision right now, I’ll have a stab at answering some of your questions:

  1. App Installation

The first release of Haiku will be very similar to BeOS R5, and compatible with old BeOS applications. BeOS apps are almost always distributed in binary format - installation is usually just extracting the application where you want and then running it. As Haiku has in-built kits for doing most stuff applications don’t have the huge host of dependencies that they do on Linux. Nevertheless I don’t think there is a guideline for what to do with apps that do require external libraries - often they are distributed with the app in a /lib subfolder which is the best way I think.

For future versions there has been talk of having something similar to OSX’s bundles, but nothing has really been decided on that front yet.

  1. Application/Driver support

You’re right, this is a big area of trouble for open source systems. If it was easy to use windows drivers under other systems, you can bet Linux would have done it by now! In fact for network drivers this is actually possible. More problematic are non-standard bits of hardware with custom manufacturer’s drivers (webcams etc). Haiku is in pretty decent shape considering standard hardware.

We will also lack applications for a while.

Both of these are issues that will take care of themselves if Haiku becomes popular enough. Keeping application growth in check (trying to set a good example for Haiku applications) is going to be one of the hardest things in future, I believe. After the first release I reckon there will be lots of linux types porting all manner of apps to Haiku - we need to try and keep a Haiku identity through that.

  1. Performance

Linux will easily beat Haiku on benchmarks - it’s much more mature code and has gone through lots of optimisations. The Haiku developers haven’t really started optimising yet, the first goal is to get the system feature complete and running stable.

Linux has great server performance, throughput and so on. Haiku is very unlikely to match that, especially in its first release. However Haiku should still feel faster in normal desktop use - it will boot more quickly, and the apps will tend to be smaller and sharing the same set of libraries (thus will start quicker). BeOS applications have a strong tradition of responsiveness and that should continue in Haiku. Anything that might take time happens in the background and the main interface stays responsive, thus feeling faster than applications on other platforms.

4

You forgot to mention how unsafe and prone to damage Windows is. Kids can destroy it by mucking around or just not knowing enough to be careful on the internet. Unless it’s set up very secure and protected with a wealth of software it’s very likely to die a slow, or quick death with internet use and ignorance or carelessness. Sorry but system restore won’t save you from the malware and is largely a worthless feature.

Another advantage over Windows and Linux is that you can upgrade hardware or literally pull the hard drive and stick it in a completely different computer and it’ll happily boot up without installing drivers or rebooting multiple times to configure hardware. As long as the hardware is supported configuring hardware is minimal (network settings being an exception).

Haiku applications are largely self contained. They can used shared libraries but most don’t from what I’ve seen. Usually (almost always) you can copy or move an application folder without problems. Application specific preferences are generally stored in a centralized settings folder within their own folder making copying the application and its settings to another computer easy. Copying the settings usually aren’t needed unless you want to avoid setting something again.

Drivers are a problem for any OS that doesn’t have broad vendor support. Even Windows has problems sometimes. Windows 98 users have a hard time getting new hardware support and Windows Vista users frequently have problems with some hardware not being supported. Haiku will likely always have problems getting support for some hardware. I think from a developer point of view making drivers is probably easier than it is for other OS’s but a developer would have to comment on that.

Development tools are available for Haiku/BeOS. I’m guessing you’re wondering about RAD tools? I can’t comment on that since I don’t really develop software. I know it exists in one form or another but I don’t know how it compares to other OS’s other than I always hear Haiku is much easier to develop for in general. But a Haiku developer would know a lot more than me. :slight_smile:

As far as Haiku performance? For desktop use it would probably be faster than Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X by quite a bit. The comparison isn’t quite fair though since Haiku doesn’t have some of the features of most of those OS’s. It’s just not done yet. It also doesn’t have the bloat, backwards compatible baggage, or hacked together mess most of the other OS’s have. For server use it will probably never be as good as Linux because it isn’t designed for that. But having used BeOS/Zeta for web/email/file server for years I can say it works good for me. But isn’t not a server OS per se. Haiku has a lot of advanced things that make it fast like journaled file system and relatively clean design. I’m sure someone else can sing Haiku praises better than I can though. I just know I like it, or will when it’s ready for general use, because I’ve already used BeOS and know what to expect of Haiku. Even though Haiku is already improving on some things over BeOS it still needs some more work before it’s ready for mass use by the general public. Although I think I could replace BeOS on my mom’s computer with Haiku and she probably wouldn’t know the difference for what she uses it for (play BePatience). :slight_smile:

I think it’s pretty safe to say there is a silent, and not so silent in some cases, mass of people anxiously awaiting a stable Haiku release. To many of us it’ll be a dream come true. Don’t expect it to replace any of those OS’s anytime soon if ever. I think that’s the biggest mistake people from any OS camp make is expecting their OS to replace all the other ones. They all have strengths and weaknesses including Haiku. The good news is Haiku probably has fewer weaknesses in many areas and it gains strength everyday. But that’s just my opinion.

5

[quote=Simon Taylor]1) App Installation

The first release of Haiku will be very similar to BeOS R5, and compatible with old BeOS applications. BeOS apps are almost always distributed in binary format - installation is usually just extracting the application where you want and then running it. As Haiku has in-built kits for doing most stuff applications don’t have the huge host of dependencies that they do on Linux. Nevertheless I don’t think there is a guideline for what to do with apps that do require external libraries - often they are distributed with the app in a /lib subfolder which is the best way I think.[/quote]

I should add that Haiku also has a package installer for the BeOS .pkg packages. It’s a very simple format that doesn’t support dependencies, but it allows for doing more complex installations (e.g., drivers, add-ons). OTOH, some drivers also come as a .zip file with a Bash installation script (which opens GUI windows to ask for user input, so you don’t need to go into the Terminal). Also, most add-ons come as a .zip file which contains the binary and a link to the target folder that is named “drop here” (so, you extract the zip file and drag-n-drop the binary on that link). These are all hacky solutions which only work well enough due to BeOS’ simplicity (no need to mess with configuration files, just copy the binary and you’re done), but .pkg files would’ve done it much better, too (and with a nicer interface).

For those interested, I’ve reworked the RFC you’re referring to (the implementation part isn’t so great, but the end-user part should now be easier to understand):

Note, it’s not really like OSX bundles, but more like Klik: The whole app is like a single self-contained .exe file (that is transparently compressed) which integrates all dependencies and data files (one app, one file). There is absolutely no installation process. Just run and you’re done. :slight_smile: Delete and it’s uninstalled. Replace/overwrite and you’ve upgraded. Oh, and the system cleans up automatically, so you don’t need to delete old settings.

I hope this will get into Haiku, but not all developers saw a real need for simplifying (eliminating) the install process to that level.