Hii, i’m glad that you’re reading this and I’m here to get your opinions on about using Linux or haiku, so the first question that I’m going to ask is do y’all like the fact that it’s easier to choose with haiku when it come to it bit support or do you find it more easier or better for it to be distributed rather than supporting bits?
The second question is more of in your experiences of using both OS from haiku 64/32 bit to Ubuntu and etc do y’all find one of them to be more disk heavy or more heavy at one specific thing, like is this OS using a lot of cpu or GPU or ram or disk?
And finally, the third question is, what do you use both for and if you had to choose one ultimately to use for the whole year which one would it be and why?
This is more of a survey rather than information
For everyone that has helped with the survey, I’m am thankful currently I am doing a comparison with Haiku and Ubuntu the version that will be tested is Haiku R1B5 and Ubuntu 25.10
the rule I have set for this comparison is
Both must be ran on the same hardware to make it fair and there will not be no nerf to either operation system to make it purely firmware based and this will make sure there will not be no unfair advantage as using virtual machine cause latency and using nightly or bleed edge OS make it unfair cuz it like comparing a unfinished house to a made one along with this they both will be ran on a Acer Chromebook CB315 fully Intel based and emmc which mean haiku will be ran off of a High powered sd card and Ubuntu will be ran off the disk
Each OS must use its own native software format.
Ubuntu → Snap packages (.snap)
Haiku → HPKG packages (.hpkg)
Only the built-in package ecosystem is allowed no steam or etc
Emulation is allowed but restricted to PSP emulation only.
Linux hardware support is great (eg multi monitor support), Haiku just doesnt have the dev support.
Linux is also very fast, thanks too many passionate devs. Lots of Linux native apps, from Haiku perspective Linux is mainstream
However, Linux desktop experience is stuck in the 90’s. Package management is stuck in the 90’s. Still better than what Windows and Mac offer, but way behind Haiku.
Haiku does a few things great, better than Linux. With better HW support, more devs, more apps, Haiku usage would be better.
Linux is slower than haiku to be exact haiku barely uses any ram and can be booted from any sort of external device and haiku has touchscreen support along with the ability to outspeed any OS by far and has low RAM usage and has a rollback feature that Linux doesn’t have and rarely breaks but mostly everything else you said is right
I personally think Haiku offers the better personal desktop experience - like Android offers the better smartphone experience and Linux (or BSD) is great in a server or multi-user role. As others have pointed out: There is the right tool for the job and that tool can even be Windows if you are in a corporate environment that has - just as an example - a grown structure around active directory and Microsoft services.
Haiku from what I seen really does have very low RAM usage almost has zero bloat and does beat a lot of OS latency and it has a lot of optimized app, this is more of a compare and contrast situation rather than it being a competition and I make post like this to get people opinions or experience
As is so often the case, it depends heavily on the task at hand and the individual. For many years, I’ve been trying to warm up to one Linux distribution or another, but so far, I haven’t been successful
I use Linux as a server and for specific services, but as »desktop«, the effort tends to outweigh the benefits - at least for my personal needs (design, UI, audio, writing).
Installing Haiku can be a bit more challenging on certain hardware than with popular Linux distros, but in return, I’ve found that I have significantly less work to do with Haiku during day-to-day use than with Linux.
There are not that many native Haiku apps, unfortunatly, most of the software is ported from linux/bsd, like like kate, okular, libreoffice, blender …
It will use about the same amount of ram as it does on linux / bsd, even if libreoffice on my haiku is starting faster than on my linux notebook.
We all love Haiku, otherwise we would not be here. but it is no magic bullet, lacks certain security features and a lot hardware / driver support compared to linux or even bsd.
That said, it is perfectly useable for many tasks, and a lot of fun
Saying Linux is stuck in the 90s is as far from the truth as it can be. Haiku and Linux have different UI philosophies and even different desktop environments on Linux have different UI philosophies (most extreme example would be tiled window managers). Haiku has a particular way of handling certain UI tasks to be honest. In my opinion the amount of clicks necessary to achieve a task is important for how flowing a UI feels. In general Haiku needs more clicks to get to the same result as for example KDE requires. Maybe that’s because I’m from the game development realm. There working with multiple applications at the same time in a fluid way makes or breaks your workflow. The problem is not performance. Haiku is good in this department but the desktop cluttering up in a hard to control way is the bigger issue, at least for me. But in the end it depends mostly on what kind of realm you are from and what kind of workflow it requires. So for me Gentoo is the main system I use with different other OS used for certain tasks (mainly cross system compatibility).
I really agree with Zenja on the desktop experience and Linux is stuck in the 90s still supporting X.
I’d say: Get rid of it, Atari (GEM), Amiga, RiscOS, Mac OS, Be and even Windows were right in not having a “window server”. It’s a nightmare to program for it, unless you want a bloated application, which uses Qt.
But I certainly agree with you, that Linux is way ahread of many others, especially regarding file systems and security.
Luckily we only have app_server, a protocol that works in a similar fashion to X
Why do people keep dismissing stuff as “old => bad”? That entire Attitude is the sole reason why Linux has so much movement, constantly changing libraries and servers for no reason, when the old one was perfectly fixable.
But the X11 protocol can’t easily be changed because everyone uses it as part of the “Linux ABI”. Whereas we have changed the app_server protocol in backwards-incompatible ways 3 times in the last 12 months. Nobody noticed, because we don’t treat it as part of the ABI.
Because Linux has such a wide ABI surface that “fixing things” sometimes becomes so difficult that making something new is actually easier. Haiku, despite preserving more ABI compatibility than Linux, actually has a smaller ABI surface in many ways, and so is more flexible.
X11 is mostly extended, with, well extensions, And indeed could have gotten an API bump. That’s how it arrived at X11 in the first place, after X10.
And there also is something like X12, which is mostly backwards compatible but fixes some things.
All applications having to implement a new API is certainly easier to push through than agreeing on how the protocol should be improved, but still, it was done before and it can be done again if wanted.
