I used to read OSNews regularly, until the owner of the website stated in an article that you must agree with his social views or leave the website. I have never visited it since.
Out of interest, was that David or Thom? David is the owner I believe.
OSNews is a bottom tier publication now. It used to have a lot of news, but it is now recycling HackerNews most days. It started when Eugenia left. Thom and that other guy who was a web developer tried everything to keep readers happy, but somehow it started to degrade.Then the whole bit platform rewrite they were taking about for years. Then it became a Wordpress blog. Thom is also quite a character and his rampant opinion soaked original content was never great.
1 Like
It was probably Thom. I just looked him up and he seems to be even worse these days.
Good thing you did. I never read anything on that site aside of Haiku news. Never read the article youāre mentioning. My opinion is that I find sites like OS news or these OS review Youtube channels strange. Itās still an OS not really a big deal. Not that Iām innocent of obsessing over Haiku usage. Atleast Iām productive with it.
This is my personal opinion, but the article about how Haiku no longer is the succesor of BeOS really is badly put together. His argument boils down to, from my second time reading, the fact that the default applications in Haiku lack behind that of ports. Despite the fact that most software pre-installed on Haiku releases are amazing for what theyāre designed to do. Haiku isnāt BeOS anyway, my personal opinion is that an OS should serve the user the best way possible. Not the other way around. If that means that there are solid ports then thatās great. I use Haiku daily for my school, to program on and everything else and without the vast amount of ports I would never even try it out.
Obsessing over BeOS is pointless is my opinion and should just be used as a refrence, not a roadmap.
That article alone should be enough to write of OS news. Not because it bad-mouthed Haiku as an operating system, but because itās against progress of said operating system.
Edit: I should second read my posts.
Edit:
Iām sorry, I shouldāve read a third time, I left out one good argument and that was what is the point of using Haiku if all software isnāt native. The answer for me atleast is that Haiku is just far more consistent even with ports. The ports arenāt what makes Haiku. What makes Haiku, for me atleast, is the design of it. Its native graphicstack and just work installation is something you wonāt get with any Linux distro. Even those made for it like Linux Mint. Linux Mint is depended on apt and flatpack, these are already 2 software managers. Has 3 flavours (DEs) all with their own quircks, and two setting menus. With barely any software on it made for Linux Mint specifically. Iām not against choice, but Iām for consistency. Haiku has just one graphicstack (Open-Tracker) optimized for Haiku. With one consistent file manager (also Open-Tacker), native software which is good enough to display most media and if it doesnāt, then there are the ports. The ports add to the already strong foundation. Even if Linux had open-tracker, it would still look stitched together with no software made with open-tracker in mind. While the ported software often donāt fit with Haikuās default design scheme, it still is far more consistent than any linux distro can ever be without the config files to modify. There is one clear way to install software, one obvious DE, a straight forward installation and no finnicking with config files. Not even mentioning the vectors icons, but thatās more a gimmick.
I also would like to use this post to ask why decorators arenāt getting any love? Iām working on a windowsXP one and love the OS 9 one and flat control-look. Iām just saying decorators are pretty cool, but lacking.
2 Likes
We probably will kill the decorator api at some point (We atleast talked about this in irc and came to that conclusion) because the api if overly abstract and complicated for the task of āDraw me these couple UI elementsā.
There is for example a Mac decorator in the tree that is disabled because we need all decorators to do stack&tile, and adjusting it would be quite a bit of work.
An alternative would be a more straightforward api that asks some layout questions and then gives you the rects to draw in. Maybe even move that to the controllook? But nothing is decided for that yet.
What do you mean by graphic stack here? Iām a bit confused. Tracker does only the file manager and desktop, the graphics layouting and rendering is done by the interface kit, layout kit, app_server, agg, and the controllook.
1 Like
Meant it as desktop enviorment, just used the first word that came to mind related to Haiku.
above deleted because it didnāt reply to the post
bloody hell I feel like a retard. It does reply but if it is above it doesnāt appear as
If you remove the colors, that belongs to Haiku for me, then it will remove the the only remaining soul that lift up Haiku among all the uniformed other OSes that the crowd uses.
Friendliness will fade away ā¦ and you can face with a dark, lonely, soulless any OS ā¦ that may will work perfectly but do not attract me.
I hated that most that less customizeable stuff remained time-to-time, and finally, we users, must be accomodate to alien tastes -
I rather will stay on that level before introduced and stop upgrading/updating Haiku.
I donāt think you understood what I wrote. I was talking about a change under the hood. Not sure where you think colors come into playā¦
1 Like
Are there any plans for a replacement? It would be ideal if a replacement could be added in, as the old Decorator API is phased out.
Well, I think I know what I am writing about ā¦
however I am just an end user generally, I remember well if I read something about
HERE you are >>>--------------> The bowels of the Theme Manager, or How to make Haiku as ugly as Zeta | Haiku Project
I use Theme Manager ā¦ I ment that for ācolorsā as default theme of Haiku is just boring like Windows 2000 default style : grey and blue ā¦
I wrote also ācolorsā as this is primal for me as I generally satisfied with icons, I checked some other window styles, but I had not found that I like better.
So it is not the first time to read about to remove the decorators, and not only that but many feature with it -
Also above blog post is not an only example , it was discussed once in the forum as well
As you can see, yepp I had knowledge about what I wrote about is coming from the same source ā¦
āDecoratorā can be an object-oriented design pattern. I believe thatās what @nephele was talking about. Window decorations and themes are another subject altogether.
What I wrote has nothing to do with ThemeManager, which is a third party application.
I guess I learned a lesson that discussing technical changes on the forum is a mistake since everything leads to some abstract fear of āthe developers want to take something from usā
When the reality is more: āthe developers want to remove this hard to develop for api and replace it with a simpler thingā
The end result is that more decorators can be developed, not less. I only mentioned this to Cell as they wrote they are working on a decorator (currently), for the āoldā api.
Next time I will send them a private message, guess then we can be accused of developing the OS in secret. uff.
Yes, there are plans to replace it. But how it will look will be decided when somebody actually works on this.
You wrote (Iām quoting exactly how you started your post) āwe want to kill the decorator APIā. Maybe by ākillā you meant ārewriteā, āreplaceā or āimproveā, and maybe people who have been part of previous discussions know about it and understand it this way. But ākillā is definitely the wrong word here. Can we really blame people for understanding this to mean removing the API?
3 Likes
I wrote in the same post what the alternative are to the old api, and yes it will be ākilledā as the replacement is not equivalent, but more suited to what is actually needed.
I do expect that atleast my post is read completely, and if it not understood what is ment to ask about it.
I also didnāt say anything about removing colors from Haiku, so I donāt see how this is related.
Seems more the problem is that it was not understood what a decorator api is and instead of asking about it (and the implications of itās removal) assuming that itās removal would remove all customization from Haiku.
Edit: to elaborate a bit on this, I donāt like calling thins that donāt serve the same purpose by the same name, so Iād probably not name the replacement decorator api, but something else.
While it may replace exactly what we want to do with it, it is not equivalent and is less flexible. (In the name of having S&T always available)
Hence why I used that word. But perhaps āreplaceā would have been suited indeed.
1 Like
Getting back on the topic of OSNews (which is of course mostly off-topic here):
Iām a long-time OSNews reader (since about 1998). I actually donāt mind Thom letting his personal opinions on technical, political, and social matters ring through in his articles when being relevant to the subject. Eugenia did this too, back in the day, and also sometimes caused controversies IIRC.
But it seems like something happened to Thom in the last months, maybe the stress of doing OSNews for a living is causing this, we can only speculate, which is really not what I want to do. The tone of his articles is now often radicalized to a point where it is too much for me. Donāt take the articles about Haiku as an example, they are mostly positive, even if sometimes a little weird, but the recent article about Gentoo dropping Itanium support. He rants about freemasons and communists, all because his seemingly favourite processor architecture is being phased out for good (Iām not making an argument against or in favor of Itanium but by now it is clearly on itās way out). Did I miss some irony or is this supposed to be modern tech journalism?
The breaking point for me was his reaction to the Ladybird controversy, going from a long article full of hope and praise, to removing the article without notice and stating on social media he wonĀ“t report on Ladybird anymore. Now, of course you donāt have to agree on how Andreas handled the situation, but I thought this was a childish and very overblown reaction.
How is all of this relevant to Haiku, you might ask? Well, I think we can learn from it as a community if we keep calm, friendly and positive even when discussions get heated from time to time. And not go along with what seems like a trend of getting more radical, narrow minded and short fused everywhere and on all sides.
7 Likes
FWIW, the extremely over-the-top tone of that article makes it hard (for me at least) to see it as anything but a completely tongue-in-cheek piece.
1 Like
Not really related to neither OSNews, maybe slightly since they bad-mouthed it, nor what you were saying, but Ladybird and its developers really donāt deserve the insult it is being given on tech forums. Itās a shame that SerenityOS lost a very good browser and letās be honest, will fall in even further obscurity without its figure head and browser. That doesnāt exempt the fact that there is a browser in development, not depended on Google in any way licensed under BSD without the corprate dumpster fire that Mozilla is!
2 Likes
Remember when journalism was about being objective and impartial? 
2 Likes
Yep, it doesnāt make me feel young. 
Unfortunately, it takes time and sometimes money to go to the bottom of things. Good information has become a luxury.
Nowadays, lot of journalists, even on mainstream channels, are just rewording what they find on social medias, sometimes without verifying their sources.
Knowing that, what can you really expect of people who have about an hour when itās not less to post somethingā¦ They have a glance at concurrent websites and start laundering, like their eldersā¦
2 Likes
No, not really, of course. But Iāve got the nostalgic feeling that it used to be better than right now. At least if we are talking about online tech journalism.
Alright, thanks. Iāll recalibrate my irony detector 
1 Like