Looking oldish doesn’t mean bad.
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- easily differenciable icons
- easily readable and identifiable ui widgets
- compact layout, not wasting any space for no reason, allowing to use your screen more efficiently
if you can offer a “modern” look that doesn’t compromise on this, maybe people will use it. With the current trend still being monochromatic icons that are all squircle-shaped, huge margins so that you can operate the ui with fingers on a small phone screen (applied also on desktops for the sake of “convergence”), and all-flat look where you can’t tell if something is just decorative or a widget you can interact with, it’s not going to happen.
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Me. In fact, I did customize the desktop, I had a look at what others did - but in the end I settled with the default look. It’s clean and good looking, with the right choice of colors, and it’s not cluttered; it just works. And it’s not nostalgia talking because, sadly, I never used BeOS.
No, it doesn’t. But you can do plenty of customization, if you think otherwise.
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This is really good and it’s something to be as forward as possible.
So why Haiku? And also, why not?
That’s a super valid question and honestly, both sides of this coin deserve attention.
Most of us here are enthusiasts, but a regular desktop user probably isn’t browsing these forums. They’re just asking: “What can I do with this OS out of the box?” And sometimes, the answer isn’t enough for them, whether it’s the lack of certain apps, missing NVIDIA drivers for modern cards, or just an unfamiliar experience since they have never heard of BeOS.
But one big reason could also be that “retro” label, and yes, Haiku’s default look and feel does send that signal very strongly, even if the underlying system is way more modern and capable than other systems.
So the question becomes:
What does Haiku offer out of the box, and why should someone choose it instead of just seeing it as a retro throwback?
There’s a lot of work involved in answering that question, but sending a clear message is crucial because it is a barrier to entry.
I’d argue:
- The classic view should always be available. It’s familiar, it’s part of the identity, and many enthusiasts love it.
- But alongside it, Haiku should also offer a traditional look and feel that is free from retro labels (Yes, I refuse to use the word modern because modern does not mean good), something that signals that Haiku is not just for nostalgia’s sake.
- This traditional look and feel should preserve all the advantages and features, and not take anything away, as we learnt here.
I do think BeOS and Haiku package icons are not retro and are timeless, but the rest of the experience is not.
One way could be
Let users choose this at install time, with a live preview in the Installer window.
That small act sends a clear message:
“Haiku is flexible. Haiku is for you, whether you are 90s nostalgic or just looking for a great desktop OS.”
Classic is great. However, assuming everyone wants to stay in classic mode 24/7 might be a decisive limiting factor if the goal is to attract more people. If so, this should be considered
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This goes against another one of Haiku principles: “Sane defaults, not maximum configurability”.
Have a look at our installer currently. It asks very few questions, only what’s essential for you to get started. That makes it possibles to get Haiku installed in just a few seconds. We don’t want to get the user through dozens of choices for everything at that stage.
And even later, if we end up adding a setting for something, in a way, it means we failed. We failed to find a way that makes everyone happy. The relative lack of customization is a feature. You can install Haiku and get up and running, because it already comes set up “the right way”.
In the case of look and feel, I’m convinced that the existing look can be improved in a way that pleases all (or, let’s say, most of) the existing users. In fact, there is already a more “classic” look that is closer to how BeOS looked, and a supposedly more modern flat look. As far as I can see in the forum screenshots, these are not very popular, but have their handful of inconditional users each 
Also very annoying about your mockup: you used checkboxes instead of radio buttons 
I don’t think that’s the goal. The goal is to provide the BeOS-style interface to people who like and enjoy it. It surely has decisions that go “against the grain” of everything else. That’s why it has attracted a specific subset of people who want their computers to work this way. Everyone else already has a lot to chose from in other operating systems, they don’t need Haiku, and Haiku doesn’t need them
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I agree with most of your points. I don’t think offering a choice necessarily goes against Haiku’s principles. If it did, why is the Deskbar movable and can work it work like other OS with just a few clicks? Just to name one instance of many.
The principle of sane defaults is solid, but that doesn’t mean no choices. It just means those choices should be thoughtful and not overwhelming. So, I’d argue for adjustments to the default mode rather than fragmenting the look and feel.
I think this is a tricky stance. Haiku doesn’t have to appeal to everyone, but drawing this kind of hard line might limit it unnecessarily. People stumble into new ideas when they’re invited, not when they feel excluded.
Also yes! Checkboxes are not the best choice there 
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IMO, Haiku’s UI might have a certain retro flair, but it doesn’t really look retro. If you compare it with actual retro systems you will certainly notice that.
But anyway, the look isn’t really important at all (as long as it looks good) - what’s important is the feel. Spacing, for instance, is rather important for a modern look. However, it comes at a price that not everyone wants to pay.
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If we end up with a new better default look, it will be the only option after installataion. But if people miss the old one, there will certainly be an add-on that fixes that for them.
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I think at this point we can say it’s timeless. It has already gone though a cycle of people asking for more gradients and rounded corners (in the early 2000s to match Windows XP until ~2010 to match the iPhone), and then a more flat and square look (flat design in the mid 2010s). Surely now with the launch of Apple Liquid Glass, I guess we will get requests for a more glossy and rounded look again soon?
From that side, I’d say Haiku’s look does quite a good balancing of things. Gradients that are visible but still somewhat subtle compared to some other platforms. The color scheme uses bright, saturated colors (yellow tabs, blue progress bars, icons) but a lot of the interface is still mainly grey, in contrast to other platforms who put colors everywhere (windows XP, Windows 8, early Mac OS X); or went for a completely monochrome look (NeXT, current versions of GTK).
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Haiku’s current colour balance is so good, that it’s the only operating system I do not need to use dark mode on. Grey is the best colour for graphic computer interfaces.
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Haiku’s UI might have a certain retro flair, but it doesn’t really look retro.
This exactly! To me it looks not old nor new, just different. It mixes the skeuomorphic icons with flat design to make it look timeless.
I say this all as someone who likes the look of current GNOME.
Where can one see this modern look in the Poem fork, which I guess I never discovered. I have to assume you’re referring to this? Land of the Leaves project (and Poem progress)
By the way, touchscreens are surprisingly precise. Even on smartphones websites are often more usable in “desktop” mode (especially in landscape orientation).
So this tradeoff might be questionable even on a small screen.
We already have a means of selecting a new decorator in Appearance. If deemed necessary we could add an option to the first boot prompt but we try not to do this as much as possible. Your design is somewhat reminiscent of the option in the ReactOS installer to select the theme.
If someone were to create a Tidy decorator and we loved it so much we could make it the new default and relegate the current design to Classic status. If we liked it but not enough to switch away from our “classic” design we could provide Tidy as an optional decorator the user could choose in Appearance. We already provide options for a Be decorator/control look which is an even more classic design resembling BeOS R5 and a Flat decorator/control look for people who want a more modern flat design.
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Good day,
Regarding the topic, back in the day I wiped the internal hard drive of my Performa 603e to install BeOS to find out that the issue was not the hardware but the Apple MacOS (has been like this all the time). After about a month I couldn’t find Matlab nor Octave for BeOS as at that time I didn’t have internet and no one else cared about BeOS so was stuck and had to go back to MacOS.
As Haiku is built on the spirit of that BeOS, it deserves a second chance (now that I don’t need Matlab, and there is Octave available for Haiku 
).
Regards,
RR
Lately I see more and more people online praising the user interface of Windows 95/98. You’d be surprised.
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Why would anyone even care if it “looks old”?
The idea that “looks new” would be intrinsically better to someone, seems kind of demeaning, so … searching for a more creditable explanation, it could be that people associate a certain graphic style with some odious computer platforms. Or maybe the style goes back to a time when it was dictated by resources - low resolution screen for example.
You can grow out of old associations like that.
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When I glanced at your screenshot before reading your post, but while seeing that it was about haiku looking retro I thought “ooh a redesigned UI, that actually looks really nice”. Then when I read your post I realised that it is just the current UI 
Personally, I don’t know why people think the UI looks retro… it still looks sleek and functional to me. But it seems the average person sees windows 98 when they look at it.
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SerenityOS overkilled it by openly mimicking the look and feel of Window$ 95, even though the operating system itself has nothing to do with Window$ otherwise. It’s not the look and feel I like, but it is a good example of “old looking” being preferred today.
As for Haiku, I would consider its clean UI one of the reasons for “why Haiku”. “Modern” desktops tend to be over-cluttered with stuff all over the screen. For some reason, this is considered “cool”. I would argue that
perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove - Antoine de Saint Exupéry, in Terre des hommes, 1939.
In FreeBSD and GNU/Linux, I went as far as removing everything. No task bar, no desktop icons, no window decorations, nothing: just Openbox running, with a thin line around the active window and keyboard shortcuts for everything. And it works great. It’s faster to use and it is also my go-to setup in low-end old systems, because it saves resources as well.
But I think Haiku’s approach is more balanced. You get the essentials, and if you want something more it’s always a few clicks away - or, in my case, just a key stroke away (QuickLaunch is a must; if you don’t use it, you don’t know what you are missing).
Still, if you really want a “fancy” desktop, Haiku lets you embed literally everything on it (this forum has plenty of such desktop screenshots). The choice is there.
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Well, Windows 95 had its problems, but Microsoft certainly did a great job with building a consistent and easy to understand user interface. To the point that most of the the basic elements of it are still present in Windows version 30 years later.
So, if you’re going to clone something for your user interface, rather than do something new, it may as well be Windows 95. SymbOS also went that way, and so did KDE early versions (even if it then diverged a lot from it) and various other Linux desktop environments (IceWM, XPDE, …). There is even Calmira to backport it to older Windows versions.
The BeOS interface is a little more power-user oriented. The Haiku one even more so with a lot of shortcuts and little details to make your life easier and your computer usage faster. In that it counteracts a bit what the Macintosh had done, if you compare it to earlier works (the Xerox Smalltalk environment, and Douglas Englebart’s work before that). And I’d say the BeOS engineers knew about this: the window tabs are already found in Xerox Smalltalk, so, surely, they had a source of inspiration there 
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