If it weren’t for the name mangling in the shared objects, I’d agree.
Hey all, newbie to Haiku but remember seeing BeOS and being curious, it just took, what, 30 years? for me to actually get around to trying it out.
Personally I’m just fascinated by computers, and computing - as an industry, hobby, and culture. I was raised on PCs (still trying to find an IBM JX 5511, my childhood machine), found GNU/Linux at University, and made a career of it. But there’s so much I feel I missed, or took for granted, so my reason for Haiku is to explore and learn something new and interesting.
Might need to learn C++?
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For me - mainly as someone who’s always trying to bury the C++ API as a foreign layer under another language - the mangling isn’t as bad as the overloading. If you want to link directly to the class functions, it’s doable - Rust bindgen does it at scale. But if any other language supports the function overloading nuttiness, it’s news to me, so you’re always needing to invent a suffix convention or something. Oh, and the `by value’ argument passing call signature that may be really passed by value on the stack, or by address, and no one knows but the C++ compiler which it will be.
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Hi there scifidad. Welcome to we few, we happy few, we band of brothers …
C++ is necessary if you want to dig deeply into the OS’s internals, or write unequivocally native Haiku apps. But there is a lot of things non-C++ people can do to contribute. There are icons to be made, translations to be done … We have a great BASIC dialect (yab), we have Pascal and python. Or you can just help get the word out.
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Why Haiku? That’s a good question. For me, it’s the simplicity.
In the early days of Windows 95, or during the transition from Mac OS 9 to OS X, it was an exciting time. Ironically, that connection to the past is sometimes what works against it. Having a retro label doesn’t quite do it justice. I’d say walking away from that label would be good.
I wouldn’t call Haiku a throwback. To me, it’s a fresh take on what desktop computing could be: no bloat, just clarity and purpose. If it were just a retro OS, I wouldn’t be here commenting.
I can’t use Haiku as my daily driver, much as I’d like to. Too many essential apps are missing, and it’s difficult to imagine pro tools like Unity Engine or Photoshop ever arriving. Of course, NVIDIA acceleration support would be awesome.
And yet, there’s something playful about it, not in a nostalgic sense, but rather a system that invites you to build with it, rather than just use it. I feel like that is something we have lost on iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows, at least.
Sadly, I haven’t been able to connect with any Linux distro, no matter how much I tried.
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I don’t know what more we can do about that. We have changed our introduction to say “inspired by the beos” rather than “reimplerentation of beos” already, like, 12 years ago?
The only other thing we could do is artificially increasing the minimum system requirements to pretend we need more memory and a powerful cpu.
It is not retro, but rore about imagining a different future that could have been, and then making it happen, because, after all, it’s not too late for it.
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Having Haiku running like a charm on a Ryzen7 laptop with 8 cores (16 threads) and 16GB RAM doesn’t feel too retro for me, kudos for the developers bringing it up to these standards!
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Every other OS in the early 00s got in the way of actually using your computer to do stuff. BeOS didn’t.
I’m still not entirely won over by the immutability introduced by package management in to thinking that Haiku meets that requirement… but it’s close. And everything else is much, much worse.
Personally, I’d say the semi-immutability provides a reasonable safety net, that makes me willing and able to try more things, knowing that I can always easily fix it if needed.
Recently I accidentally removed the entire packages directory on my install. It continued running well enough for me to understand the problem, copy back most packages from another partition, reboot, continue from where I stopped in a matter of minutes.
No other OS has this level of resilience to user error!
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So it’s not just me, then! 
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7 posts were merged into an existing topic: Linux and corporate sponsorship of open-source
Microsoft is Evil.
Apple is a walled garden with stolen goods inside.
Linux is an old friend… who was always a pain in the ass.
BeOS was the love of my life.
So Haiku.
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That 
Funny that Haiku is considered retro when its the YOUNGEST OS OUT THERE!
Apple - 1976
Windows - 1985
Linux - 1991
BeOS - 1995
Haiku - 2001
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Haiku has a somewhat retro aesthetic but you’re right Haiku is in no uncertain terms not a retro OS. It is more like a modern OS for those who appreciate the look of a retro OS without actually being a retro OS. I forget the name of the former Lucas Arts developer who said something to the effect of “we want the Renaissance Faire but not the Renaissance”.
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Quite so. the actual Renaissance was short on indoor plumbing.
The Apple 1’s OS has no relation left to today’s MacOS.
HOWEVER
Since MaCOS has been officially certified to be a version of UNIX, we can say
Apple - 1971
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Modern MacOS evolved from NeXTSTEP, which is introduced in 1989.
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“Microsoft is Evil.
Apple is a walled garden with stolen goods inside.
Linux is an old friend… who was always a pain in the ass.
BeOS was the love of my life.”
Google (Android) is a more modern evil.
Haiku is fast & efficient… but forever stuck in a retro aesthetic.
- You answered your own question.
Come on guys, who’s going to use an oldish looking OS? It needs a modern look (like the modern look displayed in the Poem fork).
Me. People love chasing trends, but a deeper culture requires some respect for the past. Musicians still study Bach many centuries after his death.
There’s more imaginative uses of the past than merely copying it, but I like that Haiku does not throw it away.
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