Hello everyone,
Today, I watched an engaging YouTube video by Michael MJD, where he discussed the history of BeOS and showcased its functionality on an old computer of his. As he said in the video, Michael originally intended to create a Haiku video, but he decided to make a video about BeOS first. I hope that his upcoming Haiku video inspires more people to try out Haiku. Do you think this video will have an impact on the number of Haiku users?
The link to the video: youtu.be/MzosnPSETzk
Haven’t watched yet, it’s ~45 minutes long.
Probably not in a measurable amount…
I don’t think that a video of Haiku will make any difference, personally, as the people who might be interested will already be looking at it themselves. The video may get lots of looks & likes, but very few people will actually install it, having watched the video. Word of mouth is more likely to increase interest in Haiku.
I think it will grab niche users in a few categories:
Word of mouth is more or less exactly what these videos are. Each of these videos will maybe reach people that could be interested, but didn’t hear about Haiku yet. Or people who didn’t think about it, but see the video and think “oh hey this seems cool, I should try it”. Yes, it will not be the majority of people viewing the video. But even if it is .01% of them, and it brings us just 1 or 2 new users, that’s a big increase of the Haiku userbase 
When I started using beta4, I found some videos online about it, at least 3 of them, but I don’t think it caused a rush of new users… 
I have a tag line on my posts in another well used computing forum, but again, it didn’t produce a rush of new users either - I think it has to be the personal touch, show it to your friends, & they will hopefully show it to theirs. 
We need a good balance between new users and new developers (who are users themselves in the first place).
We should aim to onboard new developers who stay in the project and contribute to either the OS itself or to third party native apps.
On the other hand, A wave of new users (non-developers) should attract new developers to be sustainable.
I sure hope Michael truly researches Haiku before making a video. And I am not talking about researching the projects history by reading on Wikipedia, which everybody does, but actually reading the documentation, use the os and asking questions on the forum and on irc.
This ^^^
With the greatest respect to ActionRetro, all of his BeOS PowerPC and Haiku issues were easily avoidable if he has reached out to the community - or at least, after the first video on BeOS, had asked more questions. I gave him a bunch of pointers… I guess it would have been a lot worse, but he still didn’t;t manage to quite hit the ground rolling till his third BeOS video… and the Haiku one was all about trying to use features not exactly supported properly out of the box on the nightlies.
MichealMJD seems like he does a lot more research, so my expectations are that they will be good. The BeOS one he already did was pretty good, save the CD drive probably not having the CD Audio cable connected.
For what it’s worth:
I would expect people to test certain kinds of things and be frustrated if they encounter anything but trivial issues. After all, most people making YouTube videos have their particular audiences and aren’t always making videos from a perspective of neutral interest.
It sure would be nice if they stick to officially released beta versions though, because who knows what’s broken on a nightly build…
I think he wanted the video to be 45 minutes long and he did everything he could to draaaaaaa…aaaaaa…aaaaaaa…aaaaaa…aaaaag things out to be 45 minutes long. This is after all “Retrospective & Demo” which had me skipping and skipping and skipping forward in the video until … well it took too long to get into anything interesting and I eventually gave up on finding something interesting about the video.
I bought BeOS direction from Be (actually two versions) as part of my (successful!) attempt to find an OS OTHER than anything that MS makes to be my default OS.
As a note I also have SIX (6) OS/2 boxes (my second favorite OS after BeOS, MacOS being third, Linux fourth, Windows somewhere around 15 million 892 thousand, 461st favorite OS), FIFTEEN Linux boxes (Corel Linux, Mandrake, a whole bunch, and every MacOS box between 1998 and when they stopped shipping Mac OS X in boxes).
I ended up settling on MacOS because … well I have WORK to do and Linux just isn’t my thing and Windows is ABSOLUTELY not my thing and sorry but Haiku is not there yet (not all the apps that I need let alone want).
As much as this feels like it is going on and on, that video felt way much more like that. So anyone that I think would be interested in BeOS will give up before finding something interesting should instead go back to Be’s own formal introduction to BeOS at BeOS DEMO VIDEO - YouTube or wherever you can find it. This tells you everything you need AND WANT to know about BeOS from the source.
I think including that link or your own to that video from Be would go much further to get people interested in BeOS and Haiku.
Just saying…
Nice video…
I will say that 99.9999% of videos about Haiku is some one reading the Wikipedia entry on BeOS, starting Haiku from USB and then loading the teapot demo and saying “Look it works”
Before I reinstalled Haiku to seriously use it, I look for video of powerusers demoing the command line, showing off little known features or just creating something. I wanted to know that I wasnt going to install and be stuck with something that is little more than a hardware demo.
The other thing the current videos don’t get right is that the demonsrations are almost always on a VM.
I think Haiku needs good solid object lessons in demoing a bare metal installation and then demonstrations of Haiku doing niche things for specific use cases. Even if these cases are not exacly what viewers would do, it will show that it in fact is versatile enough to do what they want to do.
To be honest if youtube had more of this, I would have installed alot longer ago.
Nothing fancy, just a small video showing a build for mesa on Haiku R1B4.
Yes!!! this is exactly what I’m looking for 