I think CDE is one of the best desktop UIs ever conceived. And yes, I worked with it professionally on both VMS and some flavor of UNIX for years. I would love to see CDE make a comeback with some modernized tweaks.
Like this?
Xerox Smalltalk had a lot more user power in mind. Haiku still has a long way to go.
Yeah, I saw that sometime back recently.
I remember seeing rounded edges on Zeta windows, maybe we could bring it back for Haiku.
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There’s only text now, on the wayback machine.
It was landoftheleaves.org, then poem-os.com, then he changed to other projects of soliloquy and couplet. Whatever it was, it had a blueish desktop with modern icons that looked nice.
I like Haiku for being a relatively simple to understand operating system that is quite nice to use and tinker around with whilst also being usable as your main operating system. (Though I tend to use linux as I have some programs that only run on it and sleep is an absolute necessity for me, as that is the only way the battery of my laptop will last when taking notes in lectures.)
I personally would not want to contribute to a project (like Xlibre) that writes such statements right on their front doorsteps, knowing that this attracts people that mean harm (to say it extremely lightly) to both friends of mine and myself.
And I find it especially upsetting since I personally prefer X11 over Wayland for architectural reasons and fitting in with the rest of the linux ecosystem a lot nicer imo.
(sorry for picking up on the Xlibre discussion, I started with writing the reply ~2-3 weeks ago and had to study for quite a few exams)
I absolutely love the approach Haiku has to packaging and I quite like the things done with messages, file attributes etc. (for example peoples, mails and replicants). It feels super simple yet quite powerful. Also Haiku’s kits/servers feel much simpler than their linux counterparts and less heavyweight, with less need to configuring them to have them usable. In general I think that Haiku is much more user-friendly and coherent than a lot of the linux ecosystem. If it weren’t for missing sleep (which is quite difficult to implement afaik) I’d probably use Haiku as my main os on my laptop.
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i’m drawn to haiku mostly because its a rare surviving example of an operating system that was designed ground up for at-home gui use, as opposed to windows, mac, and linux which derive themselves from text-based dos/unix and suffer for it (especially linux where its often very clear what you’re using is a thin graphical shell over an ever-shifting, directionless amalgamation of independent components barely passing for a unix clone).
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Can you elaborate on that, in Linux, I have a Terminal with a shell, default one is bash, the literally same as in haiku.
I am not 100% sure, but I don’t know where I would have to use the terminal in DesktopLinux usage, the same as in Haiku.
Of course it is sometimes convenient to be able to just tell the computer what to do, and to automate that with scripts, which run the same on Linux and haiku for the most part.
I love Haiku, the look, the feel, but I also love Linux, and I don’t get the mindless bashing it gets here sometimes.
Maybe I a just don’t see some Linux flaws, so I would really like you to tell me about them, maybe we can make Linux and Haiku better
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linux’s greatest strength is its deepest flaw i feel - in having so many choices, so many distributions, so many alternate components, it has dug quite a deep hole for itself. it’s difficult to learn and use, since what works on one linux system may not on the next for any number of arcane reasons, and its incredibly rare for linux cli tools and applications to share common ui decisions if they weren’t developed as part of the same project. its difficult to develop for, since its practically impossible to account for all the variations linux systems can have - gnome vs kde vs whatever else, openrc vs systemd, glibc vs musl, etc. it wastes immense amounts of development resources, since each distribution must re-package the same software for itself (resulting in band-aids over this flesh wound like flatpak), maintain its own infrastructure, and often create its own equivalents of already existing tools. there’s also a certain lack of coherence in linux’s design - when installing an application on windows the installer extracts itself to the program files folder, on mac os and risc os an application is a self contained directory with some funny files inside, on haiku package files are distributed into a number of clearly labeled directories, and on linux… package files are wildly distributed across the main file tree in a manner that is completely oblique to any user that doesn’t yet know about man hier, which on desktop is likely most of them. oh.
and just to be clear, i know i am being very negative toward linux in this post, but i am in no way saying it’s bad as a whole or you can’t enjoy it. i myself use it in a lot of places and prefer it to windows and mac, just i’m very keenly aware of its flaws too, and that’s what you asked me to expand on :>
Most Linux systems use the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, Mac OS is pretty similar, Windows is a convoluted mess. But for desktop use, you don’t need to know any of it, you install packages via graphical or cli package manager, just like in haiku.
apt install inkskape Vs pkgman install inkskape
I am not talking about embedded Linux, Linux servers .
In what case do you feel Desktop Linux (Gnome, KDE or cinnamon or XFCE) just feels like a layer on top but haiku feels more solid
I might have a bit of a unique perspective here, Amiga user, used desktop Linux since 95 at university, did not know anything about the system, just used it, Netscape Navigator, news, xfig …
I used Desktop Linux before it was cool 
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Yeah, me too. Of course Desktop Linux has it’s fair share of shortcomings and I like that Haiku is doing many things differently. Linux (Mint cinnamon edition for the last few years) is still my main OS and provides a very productive environment for many different tasks for me. The list of missing features in Haiku that prevent me from using it as my main OS gets shorter every year though. The main things are web browsing (no disrespect to anybody involved with Web+ or other browsers on Haiku intended, quite on the contrary) and accelerated virtualization (I run lots of VMs with different OS). I only do retro-gaming (in DOSBox and ScummVM) so the lack of hardware-accelerated 3D graphics is not really a problem for me.
What I really like about Haiku is that it is focused to be desktop OS, the package management system and the rollback capabilities that come with it (would love to have that on Linux too) and most of all the small the community around it. If you make a small but useful app you immediately get feedback from people trying it out and making suggestions for improvement. Try that on other OS 
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Most Linux systems use the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, Mac OS is pretty similar, Windows is a convoluted mess. But for desktop use, you don’t need to know any of it, you install packages via graphical or cli package manager, just like in haiku.
while you CAN use an operating system without understanding it’s file tree, i’d argue the ideal here, at least for a desktop system, is a tree simple enough to be immediately clear to most users.
In what case do you feel Desktop Linux (Gnome, KDE or cinnamon or XFCE) just feels like a layer on top but haiku feels more solid
again, as i think i mentioned, theres a certain incoherence inherent to layering so many independently developed projects on top of each other, and, because there are so many variations of linux, the illusion of a unified system that your DE of choice brings quickly falls apart when you start installing external applications that were developed for a completely different environment with a completely different set of tools and ui standards. haiku doesnt have this problem because there is only one variation of haiku; any program made with haiku in mind, rather than ported from another platform, works and fits right in to ANY haiku system.
id also say with haiku it feels as if the core mode of interacting with the system is expected to be the gui rather than the command line, which could not ever be the case with linux since it is text-based at its core, necessitating x11/wayland and a window manager to be layered on top.
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I use ZFS with ZFSBootMenu, so i have that Snapshot and Rollback Features on Linux, BRTFS does this also, but i don’t like it. I wish ZFS licence were compatible 
3D HW Accel would be nice, someone is working on an nvidia driver, afaik, browser situation is a lot better nowadays, wekit2 is coming along slowly, what is missing for me to use haiku for my work (sysadmin) is:
- multi monitor support
- full disk encryption
Nice to have:
- virtualisation support
- webcam support
- 3D Accel
- sleep / suspend
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while you CAN use an operating system without understanding it’s file tree, i’d argue the ideal here, at least for a desktop system, is a tree simple enough to be immediately clear to most users.
It is not obvious, that the system live in /boot
/boot/system/var/ is not inherently better than /var, /boot/system is not better than /usr.
You should not need to do any manual interaction with /var or /usr (/usr/local is the exception) in Linux, especially not if you are a desktop user. In fact linux prevents you from doing anything harmfull there without root / sudo.
The only folder that should concern you should be /home/USERNAME (this is arguably easier to understand than /boot/home) and /media/USERNAME/MEDIUM for external media, again quite self explanatory.
the illusion of a unified system that your DE of choice brings quickly falls apart when you start installing external applications that were developed for a completely different environment with a completely different set of tools and ui standards. haiku doesnt have this problem because there is only one variation of haiku; any program made with haiku in mind, rather than ported from another platform, works and fits right in to ANY haiku system.
KDE doesnt have this problem because there is only one variation of KDE; any program made with KDE in mind, rather than ported from another DESKTOP, works and fits right in to ANY KDE system.
GNOME doesnt have this problem because there is only one variation of GNOME; any program made with GNOME in mind, rather than ported from another DESKTOP, works and fits right in to ANY GNOME system.
The same goes for Cinnamon, Cosmic, Windowmaker … but also for MacOS, Windows, and HAIKU
which could not ever be the case with linux since it is text-based at its core, necessitating x11/wayland and a window manager to be layered on top
But what do base that on, if you did not know that linux has a Text Konsole?
That is what i dont get. Haiku has a serial Interface support as well, so it is also “text based”
If i build a linux kernel without Serial and TTY-Konsole Support, does that change how you interact with KDE/Gnome?
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Let’s hope the new look isn’t rejected just because it’s different, though.
I fear we are a bit too conservative sometimes
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Linux was never meant to be everyone’s desktop operating system.
Many people seem to be a bit confused about that, expecting it to be nothing more than an alternative to Windows or modern macOS (or even Unix) that avoids the things that they happen to personally dislike.
I don’t consider the intentional freedom baked into Linux to be a flaw so much as a very different philosophy about what an operating system should be or do for the user. You can very much make it whatever you want to be within reason.
As an aside, I should note that ‘Linux’ technically refers only to the kernel itself, despite many of us, myself included, having a particular baseline software distribution in mind whenever we say ‘Linux’.
P.S.
Each Linux distribution is effectively it’s own operating system, even if most have a great deal in common.
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There are good reasons for the tree in Unix (and Linux): shared libraries are shared across different pieces of software so that you don’t have multiple different copies and different versions, so they need to be locatable. On Windows every program is duplicating shared libs. Binaries are all put in one place so that they are all in the path. Etc etc. No, it’s not immediately intuitive, but it does make sense from a design perspective. Haiku duplicates much of this but uses different locations, and due to the packaging method this is hidden from the user. Mac os is doing a sort of hybrid approach where there is a unix (or bsd) tree for some things and bundles for others. Windows is actually the odd one out here
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I would agree that there is often a lack of coherence, but the problem mostly comes down to a particular distribution having a desire (or a lack of one) to introduce additional coherence. By which I mean that the primary developers behind that project are effectively the one’s responsible for making such a decision (or not) and acting on it.
You don’t need to read man hier to be acquainted with the general pattern of the file tree on Unix or Linux systems. Although it might be helpful at times if your expectations only get you part-way to where you need to look for particular files.
I can’t really address the underlying factors of how application software is distributed, installed, and so on the operating systems you have referenced without going deep and off the rails. But Ithink that you are looking at a very limited cross section of the history of all these operating systems and consequently missing out on the details of how they got to be the way they are today.
As an example: prior to Windows 95, most applications for Windows shipped their software configuration settings as a bunch of key-value pairs inside program-specific INI files (e.g. config.ini). The operating system itself does the same with it’s own system-level INI files. These initialization files and their format go back to MS-DOS.
With Windows 95 and later releases, Microsoft tried to get everyone to use the Windows Registry for those options/settings. That was okay for a time, but the registry has it’s own issues. These days you will, if you look, notice that there is stuff splattered all over under C:\Users<username>\AppData too.
Windows is an incomprehensible mess in this respect, not some bastion of virtue. Such is the price that we pay for the crazy degree of backwards compatibility that is a hallmark of Windows operating systems.
Likewise it was once quite common to see Windows programs install themselves at the root of the system boot drive. By that scheme, C:\Mozilla Firefox would have been at the same level as C:\DOS or C:\WINDOWS…
That isn’t really true either. Windows has shared libraries in the system32 folder and a path where you can (and do) put binaries as well.
The way they handle it is slightly different, with the dlls for each application being hardlinks to the ones in system32.
On Linux, things are also more complicated than you’d firs think, since it doesn’t really matter that libraries are all thrown into the same directory. What matters is that they are picked up by ldconfig and added to its database, so that the runtime loader can find them.
It just shows how many different ways there are to solve a similar problem. DLL files, and Amiga shared libraries in their own ways, are also different from the way its done on UNIX in various other aspects. I don’t think there is a clear winner here yet? But it’s nice to have some diversity and people still experimenting with different options 