Last week, Late Night Linux podcast episode 149 discussed Haiku! They had some great comments:
“The documentation is excellent”
“My first impression was that I really liked it, it felt like I was discovering a new operating system. It was fun to explore. It was interesting to learn about the way that it works, and the features that are just sort of hidden beneath the surface. I had a really nice time exploring it and learning how to use it.”
“[got Telegram working]. It was remarkably simple. They’ve got quite a good packager depot… [Telegram] worked like a charm.”
“When restarting after the install, I blinked and missed it and it was back to the desktop before I could take the USB stick out. Amazingly fast.”
“The file manager is neat, how you can drag windows on top of one another and they become a tabbed view.”
“I was very impressed with the selection of software.”
“Ultimately though, I think there is probably a place in my life for Haiku: on an old laptop that I could just sort of sling in my bag and use as a low power getting stuff done browsing the web machine. I really like the speed of it, I like the lightness of it, and it’s just fun.”
“Yeah, it’s definitely fun.”
“It’s a fun, different approach to things, and I would highly recommend people check it out.”
Their suggestion: better advertise how to make a new partition table in the installer.
The only negative was their experienced slowness in getting packages to install.
I just listened to it. That was probably the first podcast I ever heard, but it really interested me. They seem to be very happy with it I don’t know how big their audience is,but probably this will also bring some new users.
I have to comment on the slow package downloads, however:
Some months ago,when I still used Haikus servers to download stuff, it worked really reliable and fast, but maybe that depends on the location. But there’s a alternative to it: Cloudflare offers a mirror of the whole Haiku repositories using IPFS. I’ve been using it for months already to take some unneeded load off the Haiku infrastructure (I have three machines to update lol). Cloudflare, being the largest CDN provider with over 100 data centers, provides fast speed everywhere and has nearly unlimited bandwidth. Maybe setting these repositories will make it faster:
Haiku: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/hpkg.haiku-os.org/haiku/r1beta3/x86_64/current
HaikuPorts: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/hpkg.haiku-os.org/haikuports/master/x86_64/current
Just tried updating with the Cloudflare IPFS repos and they’re a bit behind the main EU repos. For example, they have hrev55623 while EU repos have hrev55625 for nightly. That being said, the CloudFlare IPFS repos are much faster.
Just a word of warning about the mirrored repositories: the reason they are not officially advertized next is that there is currently no signature verification on package or repository files. So you have to trust CloudFlare (or potential people attacking them) to not change anything to the data distributed.
It is one of the items on the TODO list to add the code to the package kit to verify the repository file signature (the signatures are already in the repository file and the keys to verify them already distributed with Haiku). Then we could consider officially advertising Cloudflare and setting up more mirrors for the package repositories.
This already works, they mentioned it not working, but unless they make a bug report that isn’t something we can really fix.
I’d rather fix https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/17107 as an alternative though, it should cover most cases of “I have a disk, just install it”
