Ok, if what you just said is true, then why is R1 not available yet? BeOS R5 is soooooo far behind where Haiku R1/B4 is, it’s ridiculous. Or is it? Am I missing something? Name one thing BeOS R5 did/does that Haiku can not yet do or does. Haiku has more/newer hardware support. I assume BFS is more stable and works on newer hardware. I’m assuming the Media kit and other kits are just as stable or better than what BeOS R5 was running.
Now, this is the 64-bit version I’m thinking about, which actually totally dismisses BeOS R5 entirely, as it isn’t binary compatible… but… has the x86 version of Haiku been neglected BECAUSE of work on other platforms (x86_64, ARM, RiscV, etc.), to the point it still doesn’t run as well as BeOS R5 did?
And, that being said, how relevant is a BeOS R5-clone nowadays? How many people still WANT it. How many people still NEED it. I think some hard numbers need to be considered here. A vote. As Haiku Inc. is not a corporation with registration cards to all the owners of Haiku, do we even know the actual user-base of Haiku? Is there a way of finding out?
I used to consider myself a purist… “Haiku should only be developed on a BeOS R5 system”. But over the course of years, I came to realize, more and more, how pointless that was, especially when the feature set and modern hardware made the gap wider and wider. And, eventually, it became hopeless and abandoned. And there was a reason. Technology marches on. BeOS R5 is dead in the water, where it was. We simply could NOT move forward, trying to drag BeOS R5 behind us. And now, I kinda consider BeOS R5 a bit of a pariah… it represents the past in ways that Haiku is seeking to do so much better. But, apart from being the forebearer of what we have today, the template from whence Haiku was fashioned… it really only represents ancient technology. The look of BeOS R5 still gives me chills of fond memories, but to try and actually USE BeOS R5 today… it’s like trying to use an Atari 1040ST nowadays! Even if you CAN… how good is that experience gonna be? It becomes an effort in futility!
So, to say that Haiku R1 is designed to be the equal of BeOS R5… come to realize the actuality of that statement. Are we not actually MILES past that point? Or… are we MILES past that point, in a lot of ways, but still BEHIND that point in others? Where exactly DOES Haiku stand (in any version) today, relative to where BeOS R5 is (and will always remain) in the past? Hmm?
That’s easy: 3D acceleration.
Sorry… not buying it. If you consider 3D acceleration of hardware you probably can’t get anymore (Matrox or Voodoo cards or whatever) or can’t use anymore (who is still using motherboards that have PCI or AGP slots?), as relative, you’re living way in the past.
When I still HAD that kinda hardware laying around, I complained “why won’t Haiku work on this or that”?, but over time, I finally realized holding onto old hardware was a pointless venture.
If you can’t afford a couple hundred Euros to buy a working laptop (yes, you can get an i5 laptop for 300 Euros! I’ll point you to the link in Finland, where my Lava Crew developer lives), then ask someone for help. I’m helping my dev pay for a Windows 11 laptop, so he can help me finish my Luposian game, written in CopperCube 6.6).
There is NO reason for people to hold on to ancient hardware anymore. So, “3D acceleration” of the ancient past is irrelevant as a metric. Besides, I’d like to see a game written that runs on both BeOS R5 and Haiku, using 3D accelerated graphics on whatever card it uses in BeOS R5, and then see if software rendering on a modern system today (via Haiku) could outdo it. I’m sure software rendering could out-perform it, on a modern CPU (4 core/8 thread or 8 core/16 thread). I’d almost be willing to bet money on it.
Why should it be an ancient hardware?
Oh, thanks dear @suhr …
that’s the point.
I don’t understand, why so HARD to understand and make a difference between stages of an OS or an application software development.
Haiku is in Beta stage and it is legit.
BeOS R5 was an OS and it was released in a Working stage.
Their developers RELEASED it as functioning as best.
Possibly remained some bugs in it.
Possibly there were room for improvements
(that remained for new level releases those would be in R5.x or R6, R6.x and so on)
BUT it was released as R5 as completed what was their goal in R5.
This simple I think. They had not asked their users what think they about R5 should be (at least I think firms should be work this way)
Otherwise Haiku
is not a product , but a project
users only can be grateful that devs made possible more than the original goal that was determined in the past - at the begining.
(Also it might not polite well, BUT …
I’m glad that all modernist, urging people finally were kicked in the butt with this short sentence of answer that is a hit on the bull’s eye)
About Beta stage …
I’m struggling with Haiku recently. I have this THIN R1B4 installer with 1.4 GB and in the last weeks I built my 14.0 GB FAT installer USB keys countless times.
It FAILS. I felt myself lucky many times , but at a stage I must reinstall Haiku on it (again and again ) as I get USB disk errors and sometimes strange errors as I use the Haiku parts I rarely use(d) or not used at all.
I also experienced that installing from GUI or commandline on R1B4 is not the same anymore.
I saw a ticket about my experience recently with SoftwareUpdater
#18873 OS “stalls” during SoftwareUpdater execution
Description
Fresh installation of haiku-r1beta4-x86_gcc2h-anyboot on VirtualBox VM Run SoftwareUpdater, identifies 142 packets to be updated. Stalls at 72 (LLVM) and system becomes irresponsive.
The difference was
→ I installed on bare metal
and
→ 64 bit Haiku R1B4
moreover
→ my THIN staller image from I install R1B4 pimped a bit , have
haiku_extras, thememanager, mc, genesis_commander installed in it
and additional Webpositive bookmarks - expanded with my useful Haiku links and some personal
Anyway recently I update the “fresh” FAT installer I use SoftwareUpdater instead of pkgman commands.
For me it stalled at last package -83th - and Haiku freezed so much that I had to use the Force Reboot button on the App killing panel - that worked alone.
When rebooted, I wanted to use checkfs command in Terminal, but Terminal had not come up, but debugger window with Haiku cannot open Terminal and I could chose to Terminate or Create a report. I iterated some times, but as I had not use commandline to check syslog what is in I finally smashed this install and iterated a fresh install rather.
Otherwise this ticket above was closed due to a known bug in the VM software, so I had not get interested as I do not use SoftwareUpdater generally.
If it were open I would shared my experiences happened on bare metal as well with an Intel wired and wireless adapter too. Anyway, I could not do further test with that install as meanwhile I smashed.
Also my statement about difference installing in GUI and with pkgman …
On previous weekend I had an almost polished FAT installer finished.
Then I applied some scripts to reinstall packages and some commandlines to compare what installed from installed packages from an earlier install that died 5 weeks ago (now 6 weeks ago)…
My base was an activated packages file from that dead Haiku, that contains those packages in hpkg format, so the versioning can be different what first I had not took in counting.
I made a list from hpkgs in packages directory, and used a grep command on activated packages using this file as a filter and the result I redirected into a file versioning them with numbers. After that always used a wc -l on a filter file to check how much packages to be installed still.
I found that once in the middle there’s so much packages remained, however once I got into HaikuDepot and I installed almost all Proposed apps - at least I thought I installed.
In HaikuDepot - previously , on 32 bit - I experienced so the clicked install got into a “queue” I mean I can click on a next package to install before I should wait 100% in the progress and appearing “Done” or “Ready” I dunno what written in english version I have a translated one that writes means “Completed and activated”. Now it turned out - it had not worked. I should have to be waited to be completed and click on next I want to install. It may be due to slowly came up the dependencies I had to enables to install, and it does not install until I do not click on … maybe that caused this … Anyway I had not observed well. So I thought those packages installed.
With pkgman I got some error messages as some package could not be installed as already this and this are installed. If it is a direct install I can understand it has a reason … but if it is a DEPENDENCY ??? it makes no sense for me… It seems it is a recipe issue/problem … I dunno.
Well, I saw that then I cannot install this way, so finally I trimmed hpkgs to package names and I installed so and used such filter files.
I left out packages those reported errors, and I admit first 2 of them was simply removed from packages directory. Yeah , and I installed fonts and fonts related packages with using a ‘pkgman search font’ command and its output I selected the package names I wanted to reinstall.
Hurrah, finally against these hardships I got spent many hours on reinstalling everything that I had in my daily driver … I used neofetch to be pleased with reported 882 packages were installed …
… when usb_disk errors and vm page faults also re-appeared in my merrily happy {Haiku R1B4 64 bit + apps} installation,
and I could not found out which installed package cause this
as so much package installed …
I may hurt them with simply removed with ‘rm -rf’ command or I have really HW error …
I dunno …
With a sorrow feeling and a light smile I closed the lid and started to anything else as I felt myself as a loser (again).
This weekend since Friday - during this holiday - I did countless install, experienced some new other fails, but stand up, and restart always - hoping :
it will succeed.
Yepp, anyway, just as nightlies get many fixes/improvements I changed that previous R1B4 install finally to current nightly
to erase USB disk errors and VM page faults, as I could not decide which USB related or even non-related package(s) dragged in that issue …
I rebooted with that current nightly -
but finally that new revision also had not helped, … it was the same. it had re-accured,
so this issue can be a combo of Haiku and and 3rd party package/library. I dunno.
Someone might not understand what you say, as they interpret in their meaning.
You and me thought
3D acceleration as a term (indepently on the old age or actual one)
He may wanted to resist and continue disputing the facts on their way,
denying the reality that 3D acceleration supported/existed in BeOS R5 for then existing cards and Haiku still cannot provide the same that developers could stand out for actual HWs …
It is not a problem for many of us, as except the 3D games and 3d modeling it is not relevant for most of us
as video rendering (encodind/decoding) still mostly done by CPU in most cases on other OSes as well, however serious computing power exists in modern APUs/GPUs - and finally those once called as video cards.
NO reason? That’s like saying there is no reason to keep an old tool, old teapot, or old car. Some people love history and like to keep things around. For whatever reasons, of which there are several (not NO), people keep old things working.
There is no beneficial reason for complaining about an operating system, that originated from BeOS, having BeOS qualities. It’s what makes it different.
There is nostalgia. But nostalgia won’t give you a computer that you can use TODAY. I loved my Atari 1040ST/Mega ST4/Falcon030, back in the 80’s/90’s, but do I have them today? No. Why? Because, as much as I fondly remember my time with them, BACK THEN, they are virtually USELESS today. Same with my Power Macintosh 6100/60, or my Power Macintosh 8500/120… technology marches on and computers like those are generally rendered obsolete and completely useless with time. So, too, with graphics cards and graphic card slots. Try getting on the Internet with my Power Macintosh G4 QuickSilver. Try using a Pentium II/III computer today to go online with Windows 98SE… good luck.
THAT is what I’m talking about. Keep your old computers and fondly remember them til your last days, but don’t expect them to function in today’s technological environment/games/3D rendering apps/OS’s, etc. You’ll only make yourself suffer. And if you can’t still use them… what is the point of having them any longer? What good is an old teapot (in your example) that has rusted through and can no longer hold water or still be used? What good is an old car that uses leaded gas or is no longer legally allowed to be on the road, but must simply sit under cover in your garage for the rest of your life? A picture of that car (or teapot) would be just as useful!
THAT is what I mean by there is no reason to keep ancient hardware any longer. Unless all you want to use it for, is for what you COULD use it for, back then (games and whatnot), it will quickly show it’s age and uselessness in today’s environment.
I’ll give you three.
Webcams. Since the pandemic, online conferencing has become a BIG DEAL. No, we can’t expect a Zoom port or an MS-Teams port, but at least we do need webcam drivers and a browser that will run the online versions of those programs. Having to boot into a different OS because the boss needs a word is just not cutting it in 2024.
Online storage. My entire life is stored on Dropbox. And I have bits and pieces on Google Drive, Box and iCloud as well. Get one of them working, at OS level, not via a clunky web interface. Any one of them.
More printer and scanner compatibility. I know, this is a moving target. The one program I am willing to pay good money for on any OS is Vuescan. Those guys write their own scanner drivers and whatever weird scanner you have, it works. It really is superb.
Get stuff like that working, through a port, through an emulation layer, whatever, and there will be no reason to boot out of Haiku anymore.
Can you please open a bug ticket assigned to HaikuDepot with the steps to reproduce this from cold.
BeOS R5 didn’t do any of those, though. You replied to someone asking what BeOS could do and Haiku can’t.
There are things, but they’re basically irrelevant now - Firewire video, primarily. The 3D acceleration mentioned is for, depending which method you use, Voodoo and Radeon R100 cards or for nVidia TNT → GeForce 2 / GeForce 4 MX cards. All ancient; and possibly none available for PCI Express.
You are correct. My apologies to Luposian. The point on webcams still stands, but after that I got carried away. 
But in a broader sense BeOS fit into the computing scene of the 1990s. Desktop Publishing was still big, and Gobe Productive gave us that. Media was the buzzword, and BeOS was the “MediaOS”. If Haiku is to have a fighting chance, it needs to work with the realities of the 2020s.
Realtime multithreaded file writing without 10s+ random freezes. Stability. Incomplete Media Kit implementation.
There was no 3D acceleration in BeOS R5. There were some experimental drivers released later. So, wrong answer.
Because my needs are not everyone’s needs.
If we look at the current roadmap, there are about 600 bugs and feature requests. Feel free to have a look, and if you see something that shouldn’t be in the list for R1, we can discuss about the specifics of each ticket. This discussion seems to happen over and over again, yet few of these specific tickets were discussed.
It is impossible to encode anything (audio or video) with the media kit. It will crash or error out. And that’s just one example out of 600 known problems (not even mentionning the problems that are not known yet).
Yes, that sums it up pretty well. Now is a good time to pause for a bit in terms of new features, and make sure everything works as intended (which isn’t the case). This, however, is very boring and not shiny work. So if we do this, users will say that development has stalled and that nothing is happening.
Actually, I am using BeOS on a laptop today. I take minutes for various organizations with GoBe, do some light gaming, and read some articles online. Not missing much online, that’s for sure.
Many old devices may not work today, but some would easily work just as they had 20 years ago. Depends on what you do with them. Teapot rusting through is a bad analogy. More accurate would be tea kettle you have to put over a stove vs an electric one.
My nearly 50 year old car never used leaded gas. It handles better on the road than any modern car, and even the cars that did use lead, they make substitute additives. Also, I can’t think of a car that isn’t legal to be on the road. Even horse and buggy are legal on the road. Maybe it’s different in certain… collectivist countries.
Neither the car, or BeOS, make me suffer. If a modern car company made a car that was a recreation of an old car, with modern conveniences, that would be cool too. (Except for stupid laws about flip up headlight covers or boot ornaments) I think that’s the idea, or an idea, of Haiku. Why try to change the goal of it?
BeOS R5 runs all third-party closed-source BeOS-related software collection(s) and device drivers…
And BeOS R5 had webcam support? Online storage options? More printer/scanner support? I was making a direct comparison between BeOS R5 and Haiku today. Not between Haiku and any other OS.
While I’m pretty sure that BeOS didn’t support that,it should be noted that Haiku does of couse support online storage very well with Nextcloud and their official Qt-based client application that is available in the Depot: https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/nextcloud_client/haikuports/haikuports_x86_64/3/11/1/-/3/x86_64?bcguid=bc218-UYNN
Also,don’t use proprietary US-based services like Dropbox for your private data,that’s a very bad idea: We took a dive into the Dropbox privacy policy — it’s not good | Proton
Google may be even worse,Box on a comparable level as Dropbox.
It’s great that we don’t have to worry about spyware like that on Haiku 
Haiku (today) is chasing after a moving target. BeOS R5 had its own, specific agenda. And, as far as I’m aware, was doing pretty good at doing so. It had a limited set of hardware it was going after and trying to be good at working on it. They even hired Intel employees to help them make it work better on Intel Pentium III’s, as I recall! That was an exciting move!
Haiku would do well to focus on what it’s going after right now and get the bugs worked out. Stop chasing the moving target. Stop finding new shinies to get dazzled by. If R1 = R5, then we need to get R1 out the door at any cost! THEN, we can chase all the new shinies for R1.5 and beyond… or whatever. Haiku needs to focus on incremental improvements, not trying to get on top of the latest thing. R1 has this set of features/driver support. R1.5 has this set of features/driver support, etc.
And I think system stability is of primary concern. A ton of features inside a house of cards on a windy day is not going to go over well.
If I had $1M right now and the authority to direct things, I’d say, “STOP!” Focus on what’s right in front of you. Make Haiku a reliable, stable OS, FIRST! What is the point of an OS that has a bazillion features and functions, if the OS is crashing or locking up or freezing or being completely unreliable at any given moment? Who wants to USE it, if you can’t TRUST it?
As it is, I still can’t use Mail! At one time, I could GET mail, but I’ve NEVER been able to SEND mail (or maybe it was the other way around, I forget). Like I said… isn’t 20 years long enough? We have GOT to start thinking like a team and stop going after our own itches to scratch, unless it’s NECESSARY to keep going in the same direction with everyone else, to get R1 released. I, frankly, couldn’t care how limited Haiku R1 was, if it was able to install/boot and run reliably. If I could trust it with my data. If I could browse the web and get/send my mail and a few other basic functionalities. The stuff we generally do EVERY DAY. Having a stable, reliable OS is the priority. Why are we not to that point yet? Honestly. That’s what’s so frustrating.
If we lack someone (or someones) who can work on specific functions of the OS that are related to making a stable, reliable Haiku R1, then we need to pool financial resources to find/get that person. Not in funding the next platform (and all it’s issues). Do we focus on x86 (BeOS R5 compatible version) or x86_64? That should be the limited range. One or the other. Not both… unless they can be developed simultaneously (they each get the same function/stability improvements, etc.), because they’re based on the same “foundation”. I believe we are spread too thin and too distracted to ever reach R1, if we do not start looking at R1 on one or the other of those two platforms as THE goal to reach, at ANY cost. If we are entirely selfish and ONLY want to do what WE want to do, then R1 will remain elusive. How many more betas? How many more years? Haiku is not “let’s make BeOS R5 for just ME”… Haiku is “let’s make BeOS R5 for EVERYONE!” We must ALL benefit or NONE of us will benefit.
Now, realistically, Haiku is significantly better than BeOS R5 in many ways. Be we need to know where to stop the feature-creep and focus on making an OS that we can boot and use on a daily basis without having to complain about it crashing or corrupting data or whatever.
If all we want to do is just keep doing what we’re doing and to H with how long it takes to get to R1, then let’s not fool ourselves (or anyone else) with false hope of getting to R1 in anyone’s lifetime. 20 years of waiting has taught me plenty. And that’s “plenty” I did not need to learn.