Just started to use Haiku! Thanks for the great system! I am a mac user and there are some convenient things in mac, which would be great to see in Haiku, as it is posited as a friendly system. First of all, almost all the applications in mac are packed in aaway, that a user sees just one single file, you just drag it to the applications folder and that is it. It is installed. Of course it is a folder with many files, but for a user it is just a single file. If it is implemented in Haiku - it would be amazing! And the second: when one has to tune the prefernces it is not convenient to go to the tracker and open new set of preferences (mouse, network and so on.) It would be great if it is one panel with all the pref icons, and when you finished with one sort of preferences you can just press the back button and choose some different sort of preferences. Like in Macs and windows - it is very useful. And of course, the biggest pity is that on my dell e5400 none of the network adapters were recognized… Neither wifi nor ethernet, so I hope to get it fixed.
The single preference app idea has been floated before, and I remember seeing a screenshot so some work had been done, but I do not think that anything came of it.
The broadcom driver(codename: bge) really should work on haiku. You should create a new ticket on dev.haiku-os.org that it is not working/needs updating.
I’m not convinced a one-for-all-panel is the way to go. Actually, if you think about it, having all the preference panels as icons in a window, as it is now, is already what you want:
you have all panels/icons in one window
double-click to open, do your settings, close the panel, and you’re back to the all-panels-window
Plus, you have these advantages:
in Icon View you can resize and rearrange icons to you liking
you can remove panels you never use anyway (those are all links, the originals are safe in /boot/system/preferences/ (you could even put a link to that folder and call it “All Panels”)
you can use ListMode if you prefer that
you can have several panels open simultaneously, allowing you to compare, copy or screenshoot settings.
Basically all of what you said is already being considered, worked on, debated, implemented, or anything else similar.
Like any system, Haiku has it’s own way of making things easier. It would probably be beneficial to find some guides on BeOS and do a little reading up. Once you see some of the differences, you may find them to actually be easier.
Wanting Haiku to be more Mac like, at least in my opinion is a bad solution. There are things Apple has done better, but copying Mac for the sake of being like a Mac seems kind of pointless.
Talk to any Pro-UNIX individual, and they will be against packing program files into a single folder per program. Both ways are friendly and unfriendly. Unfortunately the differences in preferences makes it hard to come to a clear cut choice, which is why we vote on things.
Yes, may be someone considers single package apps not good. But in Mac for example you have a choice: you can view the apps natively, like folders with files, or like a single file (the difference is just in added folder name extention, which tells the Finder that this folder must be represented as a single object.
I understand about Linux, but Linux never says to be a friendly OS. And more to the point. Having a choice is always better than not having one. So this function would be IMHO very useful and friendly, if you don’t like it - you can always uncheck the box and return to a standart view.