In Qt 4.x days, Qt used QtWebKit, which is a port of WebKit to the Qt infrastructure. In Qt5, they switched to QWebEngine, which is based on Google’s Blink (the engine running Chrome) instead.
QtWebKit is still maintained on a 3rd party github fork (not by us!), but applications are switching to QWebEngine one after the other, which means we will have to port that as well.
I want to use Haiku as my daily driver but the biggest hurdle is Web+, it’s such as crashy piece of software, particularly on pages with video (I’m looking at you, youtube). A word processor would be nice but google docs works OK, if I can keep the thing from crashing.
@johnblood, I use Haiku in an Oracle VM and natively on an Intel i3 3220 desktop. I’ve liked BeOS since v4.5 was released and was disappointed when Be decided to change its focus to Internet Appliances.
I’ve recently returned to the BeOS/Haiku scene. I originally left BeOS because the web browser became too obsolete. A web browser is the primary App that I use, and it was nice to discover that WebPositive works fairly well and even has some Java support now. To me a killer App is a current web browser.
In a virtual machine, mostly. I have a few open source works in progress that I want to work on everything, Haiku included (and most likely Windows excluded because it just has to be the special snowflake of OSes and I’m not rewriting half of my programs just for it).
I have played around with Haiku on real hardware though, running a full install from USB on my laptop (which worked surprisingly well). I’d probably use it more if I had an old Thinkpad or something to spare.
The OS has a long way to go before it can replace macOS or Linux on my machine, but it’s interesting. WebPositive works pretty well but Safari still wins by a mile so my browsing still takes place in macOS. And I haven’t gotten around to see if Python 3 works on Haiku so I still do that in macOS or Linux
I run Haiku exclusively on bare metal for most of my routine desktop situations such as light web browsing, IRC, and listening to music streams. My desktop is a fairly meager machine from 2006 but it’s been customized to be as silent as possible. I’ve only been using Haiku for a few months now but it has been very enjoyable. For me it is computing for the sake of relaxing. The killer app for me would have to be Vision, I really love IRC and it is a good client.
I use it on my old laptop Samsung N150. It used to run smooth, but recently it started working slow and there are many errors. I like Haiku as it fills the gap between high performance but non-user friendly OS and sluggish but user friendly. I would be so happy if it would get more popular.
At the same time, I hate MS, especially their support, so much, that I would do everything to stop using their products.
Unfortunately, Haiku is still too unstable to use it as a daily driver and has too many bugs.
I use Haiku on an old Pentium III because Linux (with graphics) bogs down too much on it (unless I use an extremely old version of Linux).
I also use it on a more recent AMD 64 machine (3 GHz, N-68 ASUS motherboard). It works well on the AMD machine, which normally runs FreeBSD. What’s nice about Haiku is that I can boot it via a CD or USB image very snappily for a quick internet session, and not expose (very much) my underlying HD based OS.
Web+ can try the edges of my patience level on some sites, but it does just fine on forums. So, typically I’ll quick-boot it for a peek at a forum. Some time ago I moved the machine to a place where the ethernet cable doesn’t reach. So, I was not on Haiku for a while. Finally, I bought an old NetGear, Atheros chipset based PCI wireless WiFi card (WPN-311, circa 1999) - for pretty cheap, and so can use Haiku again from the remote machine (what I’m using right now).
Have used JOSM (open street maps) on Haiku, and Scribbus. It’s also a handy tool for putting a new partition table on a drive, and for creating partitions (which I may later use for non-Haiku purposes). So, Haiku has a few niche uses for me (and internet almost every day).
I run Haiku in both VirtualBox on my Debian desktop and on bare metal, using an old IBM ThinkPad T42 with 2GB RAM and a 32GB SSD. Haiku boots and runs super fast on it, and I’m using nightly builds on it, putting it through the paces with some light web browsing and the occasional game or two thrown onto it.
While most of my use is hobbyist, I’m also exploring alternative OSes and weighing strengths and weaknesses, as well as researching operating system design and infrastructure. Besides being a predominant Linux user, I’ve also explored the BSDs, as well as running the AmigaOS-like MorphOS and AROS.