More BeOS like file system hierarchy in Haiku

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21

I’m glad to hear it. People like myself will eventually die off and maybe Haiku will outlive us :sweat_smile:

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22

BeOS on real hardware is/was great! A fun operating system ahead of its time back around the late 1990s. Of course I didn’t jump on the bandwagon until spring of 2000 myself.

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23

As it so happens. I have a question about this. If you install your app manually on to /boot/apps. The menu for applications in tracker must be in /boot/system/apps, or in another location or what’s needed(at least to make a symbolic link)?

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Off topic but I have to ask, what bios version do you have on the EeePC 701. I have one too and I’ve been debating updating the bios to allow 900 Mhz.

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Development of operating system itself is indeed slowed down a lot after ~2010.

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No idea, sorry.

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The menu folders are virtual folders that allow to show entries from various places. You can use the “edit deskbar menu” button in deskbar preferences to explore this. I think you will need an entry somewhere in /boot/non-packaged.

I don’t know the specifics because I don’t actually use the DeskBar menu a lot: my most commonly used apps are in an LnLauncher dock, and for the others I just run them from Terminal.

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Next time you are booted into Haiku on the EeePC, could you run About System and see what processor Mhz is reported?

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Ok on this side i suppose there is no need (for a hpkg) to install the program on /system/apps, simply just /home/apps.

I think i like the old method on beos only but in the same way that apple may the .app(that are directories with all of dependencies) to work all correctly. Package manager for me (don’t get me bad) are old and those days the space is not a problem , back in the 80’s or 90’s well it was a good idea but today is more a problem than a great idea.

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630 MHz. That explains why it’s so slow. But it also makes Haiku’s performance on it that much more remarkable.

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I’ve been doing some digging on the internet and I believe I’ve found some bios updates. One of them will boost it to 900Mhz. I’ve been reluctant to apply it, don’t wanna brick it.

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I find this… interesting. Developers of an OS, who selectively do not use major portions of it…

Surely there’s a bit of a problem there? One of my issues with Apple is that they seem not to actually use their own products on a regular basis (what other explanation is there for SO MANY BUGS being delivered in so-called public releases and never being fixed??). I can’t imagine any influential executive at Apple doing much text editing on iOS, for example…

The whole concept of “eating our own dog food” to maintain relevant interest in the quality / usability of the output…

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I thought installing anything inside /system was banned?

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wait until you har about most of the other developers who don’t even use Haiku as their main system…

Anyways, DeskBar is due for an update/replacement, but personally I’m not doing that until R1 is released, because there are more important things to work on.

And I don’t find it anormal that some parts of the OS fall out of use as newer, better options become available.

As for Apple, I believe they are still trying to make sense of the mess created by merging the user interface of classic mac os with that of NeXT. You know, being stuck with a not of legacy that you can’t really change anymore, the kind of problems that BeOS was created to solve.

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I’m utterly unsurprised. Haiku is being built. It doesn’t have enough in it to support average usage for most people, and definitely not specialist work (in non-developer, non-textual fields). That’s how BeOS fell from my regular usage. The tools did not mature for any of my needs other than writing documents, simple HTML websites, chat, web browsing (questionable functionality), and email. There was a sweet spot where it almost made it for me, for several tasks, but it stopped being developed and the world quickly passed it by. (Does Haiku support emoji?)

As a result of being mostly a developer community, rather than an end user community, BeOS and Haiku have both allowed for and invited a lot of what Linux allows/invites, in terms of who is the norm of users: those developing it. It creates a usage culture where its users (often as a necessity) ignore or reject the general purpose user-friendly UI (or its potential to be as such), preferring technical methodologies that ultimately evolve into an habitual aversion of end-user usage strategies. IMO, a strongly end-user-aligned culture needs to be present, otherwise it just becomes Linux again. That’s been one of my purposes in the past, and would be today if I could make this a part of my life again.

I think the issue is much worse than, and much less technical than that. That was present since the initial merging, but, almost a decade later, things were pretty good during Snow Leopard. The most notable shift to me was 2013, where it became obvious that the sole driver was Wall Street pathology (triggered by the wild initial success years of iPhone), not technological improvement or user-friendliness (which they actually abandoned in all but shallow rhetoric).

If the vision and the motive were present, Apple could continue to change the architecture. Any will among their developers to advance technologically is consumed by the pathology of executives and board members chasing the lie of perpetual growth.

None of which are problems for Haiku. The struggle with Haiku, IMO, has been the fight between disposing of legacy (a newer form of which it ironically actually now strongly consists), and the attraction to shortcuts in development made possible by absorbing code and methodology overwhelmingly present in the dominant open source operating system and its culture.

I think Haiku’s leadership or group efforts have done a fairly decent job of threading the needle there, and I feel like cloning BeOS is a major factor in that, as well as the discipline to stick mostly to those original goals and not get so far off in notions of improvement as to transform it into something else entirely. In other words, good job Haiku developers :clap:

Sorry for the verboseness. I’m not wordsmithing and editing much because I’m swipe-typing this on an iPhone while pacing and it’s a most infuriating experience… and yet, the ABILITY to do it at all is too attractive to choose to NOT do it due to the software being so badly designed. Well… That, and my own personality… :sweat_smile:

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I don’t think that’s quite true, we have some developers who are well aware of this, and, hopefully, a culture of keeping things that way.

Yes, sure, the developers cover their own uses first, I think that makes sense. But it doesn’t necessarily means everything else is completely abandoned. I hope that someday I can tell my family (who are not developers) to use Haiku. And, yes, that day has not come yet. At the moment I wouldn’t even tell my coleagues at work (who are developers) to use it…

I didn’t really mean it in a technical way. In fact I think they did pretty well on the technical side, with an OS that implements modern features, is (or at least was) quite fast, and a smooth transition (as much as it could be) from the old to the new OS.

But still ,the few times I had to use a Mac OS system, I found it a bit confusing. IT is an user interface that has lost the uncompromising simplicity of the classic Mac OS, but also lost quite a bit of the flexibility and innovations of NeXT.

On the other hand, Apple has shown with the iPod, and then the iPhone and iPad, that they know how to build a good user experience when starting from scratch. I think the real problem here is that people don’t buy computers as much as they used to do, and so there is no reason to continue building computers for normal users. These have all moved to phones and tablets. And so the computers are left to more specific/advanced uses, but also there is probably not as large a team as there used to be. Anyway, it doesn’t change much: capitalism and trying to get a profit from what you do, can end up ruining the products for a variety of reasons.

Well, I don’t know what you refer to by “absorbing code and methodology” here. For me the difficulties start even earlier. Haiku is set as a continuation of BeOS. BeOS itself was set as a rupture from the previous operating systems, in several ways. So, what made it interesting was the innovation, the fact that it was something new. How do you preserve the legacy of that? Do you continue innovating and doing new things? Or do you try to simply finetune what Be did, and show a “this is what could have been” version of it? Or do you decide that it’s perfect and nothing should ever be touched?

So, right from the start, we are in somewhat of a difficult position, with these 3 ways of seeing the projects somewhat conflicting. It wasn’t so much visible initially, since the first steps were to recreate BeOS. The question arises now that we are closer to that goal (or now that we have reached it, depending on how close you want it to be). What’s next?

There was little to no discussion and thinking about this. For now we pretend that the goal was not reached and we keep circling around it. And also we make some chnages. Things like the package manager, which is now in use for a good 10 years, are still controversial for some users. Can you imagine that? You’d think people would get over it after such a long period of time. But no. This at least show how much people are emotionally attached to BeOS and Haiku. Other changes like USB or Wifi support, of course, went without any problems (in case someone was going to say that this was a fully rational thing :wink: ).

Anyways, we have not thought and talked a lot about our future, there are big plans for Haiku being a continuation of BeOS, but for that, we indeed need to “protect” ourselves from the influence of ported software that brings Linux way of working to our desktops. But then again, using such ported software allows more people to run Haiku as their main system, and hopefully to contribute in a meaningful way. I think we should welcome them, embrace that reality, and at the same time try to keep our culture alive, and possibly evolve it to include some things these people have brought with them (there are not only bad things in existing applications and operating systems, surely!).

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37

Though I haven’t paid attention in years. Is the Glass Elevator project work basically done and archived or will that get dusted off and fired up again once R1 stable is finished and released?

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Well, I don’t know what you refer to by “absorbing code and methodology” here. For me the difficulties start even earlier. Haiku is set as a continuation of BeOS. BeOS itself was set as a rupture from the previous operating systems, in several ways. So, what made it interesting was the innovation, the fact that it was something new. How do you preserve the legacy of that? Do you continue innovating and doing new things? Or do you try to simply finetune what Be did, and show a “this is what could have been” version of it? Or do you decide that it’s perfect and nothing should ever be touched?

Haiku is obviously not an OS that breaks a tradition, and BeOS is obviously not perfect. So only the second path is viable.

But this situation is not unique to Haiku, it’s a normal evolution of any genre.

Also, even BeOS is not that original: if you looks closer, you could see influences from other OSes.

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39

I was JUST about to ask the same question after reading PulkoMandy‘s excellent response to my last message.

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40

Thanks for your insightful and thoughtful responses to my posts. I don’t want to dominate this thread with my commentary, so I’m reluctant to respond to specifics, and also, I feel like anything I might have to say is only marginally different from what you’ve said, and probably not useful for the conversation. I like pretty much what I’m picking up from your posts here :+1:t4:

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