In response to a recent post on the interwebs, someone asked me:
What do you like about Haiku? I know nothing about it.
An honest question deserves an honest answer, so my response was…
Nothing but nostalgia, really. i was at Compaq when they shipped BeOS (Haiku’s predecessor) for one whole product cycle before BeOS went defunct. At the time i was still pining a bit for OS/2 Warp and BeOS had a similar vibe.
That said…
It’s highly performant. One of the snappiest UIs i’ve ever used.
It’s pretty. In its own way.
…
… there’s probably something else in there somewhere.
But mostly nostalgia. Same reason the Commodore 64 is about to be re-released and some people still program for the Amiga using 1990s toolchains.
They responded with:
Oh, BeOS! Don’t make me reload those memories from cold storage, I’ll page out something important man!
My respond is mostly, “why not?” Why should I use Windows, Linux or anything else out there, granted some things are still not resolved, but in my case those are minor.
There’s something to be said for being able to be productive full-time with an OS, and i have a difficult time being productive on anything except Linux because i’ve got 30-odd years of muscle memory with it and every app/tool i could possibly want (and many i don’t coughsystemdcough) is available for it at the press of a button.
Sure, i can “get by” with other Unix-style environments, but i’m not nearly as productive with them as i am on Linux systems. Becoming that productive with Haiku would take me years of adaptation and, frankly, i’m too old for that. Haiku is a “guilty pleasure” for me, not a productivity suite.
I have no nostalgia for BeOS (I wasn’t there). I like Haiku because it’s user-friendly rather than user-hostile. And it seems to be more coherent than Linux desktop and does not evolve in questionable directions like Linux desktop.
Same reason the Commodore 64 is about to be re-released and some people still program for the Amiga using 1990s toolchains.
I kinda can understand why people love Amigas even though I wasn’t there. It’s much harder to love Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, so that’s probably would be a pure nostalgia.
Well, then you can understand those of us who migrated from BeOS straight to Haiku. Despite having to make things work with Linux in my paid job, there is no way it will ever work as efficiently for me.
Haiku is fast, simple, mostly understandable by a single person, and doesn’t get in my way. Why would I use something else?
I’ve been using Haiku on a laptop with several partitions, alongside NetBSD and Linux in case I needed something that didn’t run on Haiku. Now that Firefox ports to Haiku supply me with a browser that can survive common web sites, I haven’t used the other partitions for weeks and I’m starting to regard them as a waste of disk space. Haiku is better.
Windows used to be fun. I remember going to the local computer shop at midnight for the release of Windows 95, and then again for Windows 98. But that was a long time ago. Windows is now just a tool for corporate drones.
MacOS used to be fun. I remember looking forward to John Siracusa’s in-depth reviews of each new Mac OSX version. And that is over. MacOS has been locked down to the point that you can only run what Apple allows.
Linux used to be fun. Back in the day, before the corporations got their sticky fingers into it. Look at the guy who had the temerity to fork X11 last month.That’s what open-source is all about, right? Not any more. He got banned from forums, his patches mysteriously disappeared. Vague death threats on social media …
Haiku is still fun. Regardless of the merits of the OS itself, this is still a community of people doing something they love. Sure, we bicker, we complain, we disagree, but this remains a community. The mainstream OSs have lost that.
It’s funny you mention that because the community was a point i only later thought to add to my initial response (but didn’t because it was too late at that point). My experiences with this community have been solely positive. It’s obviously a labor of love, and that’s one of literally only two reasons to program, the other being the necessary evil of having to pay the bills.
I fell in love with Haiku the first time I tried it,after having primarily used Linux for many years (which I since stopped using completely).
Haiku is so lightweight that I can run it even on older computers and it runs perfectly smooth and boots within a few seconds even on them.
Haiku still has a great Desktop-first UI/UX that works absolutely great on desktop computers and laptops and allows me to get stuff done.
Most other desktop environments chose to ruin their desktop UX to appeal phone users (mostly looking at GNOME here,but newer KDE apps are awful,too) instead of splitting desktop and phone into separate projects and get it right everywhere.
Well,Micro$oft has proven with Windows 8 that people love it,so I’m sure it’s a great idea that I’m just too dumb to understand[/sarcasm]
Haiku has nice native application that are rocket fast,integrate well with the OS and allow for productive work.
Well,some of them need some maintenance love,but it’s still nice to have them and see how they improve over time.
Haiku doesn’t try to sell my data,there are no useless background requests,no telemetry,no ads,no bullshit and even the default search engine isn’t too bad (I personally don’t trust a US company that rents servers at M$,but most other OSes default choices are worse by a lot)
Haiku doesn’t force things on me that I don’t want,no systemd,no Wayland (except if I need GTK applications,but maybe one day there’s a native Firefox/LibreWolf UI port).
Haikus codebase is nice to work with,I didn’t know C++ before I discovered Haiku and have already landed a few commits directly in the Haiku source.
Some bugs are really easy to fix and it’s nice to see an impact almost instantly when it’s merged in the next Nightly.
There are really really many things one can love about Haiku,for me it’s a combination of everything and also this nice community here.
Oh,did I mention it doesn’t sell your soul to advertising companies and doesn’t lock you into awful walled-gardens like Discord…
The person who started this fork had been previously banned from Linux mailing list for sending anti-vaccines propaganda there. His first moves where making sure there was no code of conduct in the project and even explicitly mentionning “no DEI” which means “no diversity, no equity, no inclusion”.
If you start your work this way, of course you will not set yourself up for good interactions with other people. I sure hope things like that would not be accepted by the Haiku community either…
its very fast even on old computers
it looks good
its unique compared to othe r open source os that arent unix based, and it is one of the most well maintained and good and popular non-unix open source os
His first moves where making sure there was no code of conduct in the project and even explicitly mentionning “no DEI” which means “no diversity, no equity, no inclusion”.
For a reason though, these things are used as political weapons nowadays. But proclaiming “no DEI” in response is not a smart move.
Haiku avoids these kind of political games, fortunately.
For me haiku is just more cohesively designed than Linux (which is still my main OS in a list of two). There aren’t multiple different options for each subsystem, the components dont change with the wind or fashion. As a result the system tends to work better. Haiku is designed to work on the desktop and it makes decisions that suit the desktop. The whole thing comes from one place, not the kernel from one project, the drivers from another 10, the graphics subsystem from another, the UI from another, the init system from another, the message bus from another… This makes sure all the pieces work and perform well together and it shines through when using the system: Things are done consistently and it makes a difference to performance. It also means development is smoother because there is no fighting about responsibility (“this is ‘other projects’ fault not ours, E_WONT_FIX”). Even where pieces are borrowed from other projects in haiku they are integrated in a sensible way so that they fit with the rest.
Sure, Linux is more flexible, and that is amazing. I build tiny resource constrained Linux systems at work and the ability to swap out some gargantuan piece that is used on desktop Linux for something small that suits a system with only 64MB RAM is amazing. But it doesn’t make for a great desktop experience.
That said, I like Linux too, and I really appreciate the POSIX compatibility and bash shell of haiku for bringing that compatibility and familiarity to the system.
There are loads of more specific features I like about haiku too, but really they are all derived from the fact that the system is cohesively designed and thought out. “Do it once and do it right.” - which is a mantra that cant work on Linux because it’s designed to fit into so many different niches.
Because Haiku is different and good. I say this as a Linux user of 25 years.
Because I’ve been interested in Haiku for I don’t know how long. Possibly two decades. And look at me, running it on a machine where little else runs anymore. My faith in the project was not misplaced! Heck, the OS got even lighter in recent months, while most alternatives keep getting more bloated.
Because there’s a good community. I took a step back lately because the “no politics” stance makes me very uncomfortable. If you don’t do politics, politics will do you. But we still have a good thing here. It matters more than code.
Haiku is also pretty. Native apps look unified. Non-native apps look almost native. Everything is clear and easy to understand. It’s helped me so much.
It still lets me do things my own way. I can use ported apps if needed. I can use the command line. There’s a manual to read, and it actually explains things.
Dunno if any of that can convince someone who’s not already interested. But these are my reasons. We have to keep trying.
Switched from Amiga to Linux, in 1997, since Windows was just not good.
Played around with BeOS, hoped it would be open-sourced after Be failed.
Heard about OpenBeOS, did not think much would come of it, was amused about the Zeta Commercials.
In 2012 tried the Haiku Alpha, did not work great on my machine. Then Haiku vanished into obscurity for me, till i rediscovered it with beta1.
Since then it has made great progress in stability, usability and available software.
I like the concept, the technical details, PackageFS, Filetype Translators, the GUI, the Icons and of course the file attributes.
Why should I use Windows, Linux or anything else out there, granted some things are still not resolved, but in my case those are minor.