Do you use Haiku as your daily driver? Do you have Haiku install on bare metal or in a virtual environment (like VirtualBox)? For you, what is Haiku’s killer app? How long have you been using Haiku/BeOS?
I’m asking this because I’m writing an article about Haiku and would like to get a sense of who use it and why. I mostly write about Linux and FOSS but may write more about Haiku in the future. Your help would be greatly appreciated.
yeah right in the hardware on a lenovo.
I use haiku mainly on virtualbox… sometime test it on usbstick… because my hardware is not supported yet so i tend to use via virtualbox…
i have been use haiku since alpha4 until now…
I guess I’ve been around a loooong time…
I was a BeOS dev back in the day, and I stuck with the platform. My old BeOS machine is still the one that is on and at hand all day, as it happily does my mail, reading the BBC, looking up the TV schedule and so on. NetPositive is only adequate for maybe 70% of my browsing, but BeZilla does another 20%.
My laptop is dual-boot Haiku and Ubuntu – with the latter only being used once every week or so, usually when nothing but Firefox will work. Aside from Haiku development, probably my main use is for music. I’m not much of a musician, buit I like to play my (two) MIDI keyboards, and I use my MusicWeaver app to make a much more satisfying sound!
What model do you have?
I found out about Haiku only a few months ago, and I think it’s really cool! I mostly run it in Virtualbox. Even though I like it, I don’t think it has enough software to use daily.
I run Haiku on a mom-'n-pop-store i5 desktop, on bare silicon. I also have a Haiku partition on an old Dell laptop, mostly for testing purposes. I don’t believe in doing serious development work in an emulator, but that’s just me.
I come way back from BeOS R3, so I lived through the “focus shift” and the demise of Be, Inc . At times I’ve given up for a while and try to get enthusiastic about Mas OSX or Linux , but I always come back.
My main activities are yab programming and porting ancient BeOS apps (and some modern QT and Java apps) for my repo. But truth be told, I am probably more a yab fanatic than one for Haiku.
If you haven’t seen them before, perhaps these blog posts may be of use in your writing.
http://clasquin-johnson.co.za/michel/haiku/blog/2014/why-you-should-be-writing.html
http://clasquin-johnson.co.za/michel/haiku/blog/2014/how-you-can-contribute-to.html
NB. It looks like Disqus has lost some of the comments on those posts
I’ve been a BeOS user since 1998, I think (when R3 came out for x86).
I can’t really say since when I’m running Haiku natively, it must be around 7 or 8 years, maybe more…
There’s Linux (Ubuntu? or maybe Mint?) on a dual-boot, but I only boot into it every other week for some LibreOffice etc. for some years now.
I don’t think there’s a “killer app” for Haiku, unless you go into an extreme niche like the radio broadcasting app of TuneTracker.
To me, Haiku itself is the killer app. Being a complete OS, we have the opportunity to seamlessly integrate every part of the system. Sadly we’re limited by the low number of active developers…
Of course, I’m biased through almost decades of using BeOS/Haiku, but I continually miss features when I have to use other OS, e.g.:
All that said, I do recognize that my main computing is for the Haiku project itself. A bit of coding, a bit of documenting and translating, connecting to the nicely small community…
Haiku is ready to be used as main system, but only if your interests align. It’s not for 3D artists or video editors or 3D gamers, but if you’re interested in computing for computing’s sake, like the early days of Amiga et al, Haiku is here for you.
Of course, as the software environment grows, more uses become feasible. It all depends. Pete is doing OK with making music right now, others need way more feature-rich or easier to use apps for that. Pete is a coding musician, so not exactly mainstream. OTOH as we’ve seen with Be Inc.'s Cotton Squares, it doesn’t seem too small a niche…
That’s just my personal opinion, of course. There are probably as many as users of the system (and possibly twice as many from people that haven’t used it…)
I run Haiku natively on most of my machines as well.
There is no single “killer” app (or “tractor app” as Jean-Louis Gassée prefers to call them) for me. What makes Haiku nice is how you can combine and integrate multiple applications in interesting ways to get things done. It feels a bit like the UNIX shell philosophy brought to a GUI based system.
My use cases are a bit specific since I spend most of my time coding applications for Haiku or working on the OS itself. So all I need is a good IRC client, terminal, and the usual bash shell. Nothing too special here.
Let’s look at it in another way: what are the things that force me to boot another operating system? At the moment, this would be the lack of an office suite, and sometimes the limitations of the web browser. I think everything else I need, can be done with Haiku.
Oh, yes, this idea can be added on first Haiku project page.
There are many things i need to boot windows. A browser who displays all sites they should bedisplayed so i can use them correctly. (haiku forum). Grafic apps who makes it possible to reduce colors of an image to a minimum. Office, video editing, music editing, gaming, mass of documentations…
I not really have any need to boot haiku. Only to make tutorials for haiku and scripting in yab. Only my hobbies now.
I have Haiku running on my secondary PC on my desk. For light web browsing, SSHing into hosts and email it’s fine.
If ever I need to do something a little more 'complex" I’ll use rdesktop or VNC client to log into another machine.
All Haiku needs is a decent (ish) office suite, which I’m hoping will come along with the QT5 port that’s being worked on by @3dEyes, and I won’t need to remote into my Windows machine ever again!
(I tried Linux several times, KDE, Gnome, etc, but it’s still nowhere near complete!)
I am planning on using Haiku for software development. I always found it a cute OS and I’d like to find some machine to run it natively on (I am now but I’d like to get a dedicated machine for it).
I like the distraction-free approach of the design of the desktop environment.
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…I’d like to find some machine to run it natively on (I am now but I’d like to get a dedicated machine for it).[/quote]
Take a look here:
http://www.besly.de/menu/search/archiv/artikel/chaotic_hardwaretests.html
http://www.besly.de/menu/search/archiv/misc/haiku-hardware_compatibility_list.html
This is right, but not a part of the Haiku team itself. This is a work by 3rd party programmers. I hope so long to get a working office suit in Haiku.
QT5 works perfectly already. I have several apps in my repo that require it. 3deyes is working on making it look more Haiku-ish, I believe.
That I didn’t know! Thank you!
Do you know if QT Creator works fine in Haiku? I’d say one of the main disadvantages of the OS right now is the lack of an IDE with an integrated debugger.
It launches, but I am not a QT developer, so I don’t know how well it runs.
Hm, that’s a start; where can I get it from?
Hello. Just need to install the Qt5 (development files) package from HaikuDepot. After that, you will se a Qt sub-folder in the Applications menu.