If I am talking with some people in whatever circle, if the topic Computers or Operating Systems come up, it would be useful to be prepared to make a little promotion/advertisement for Haiku. (Imagine for example me walking into our local hackerspace.) What would be arguments for Haiku?
I am aware so far of these:
open source and gratis
small, lean, fast
not as stable as Linux but more stable than most indie OSs, so for power users worth looking at
stylish icons, generally looking good
uncomplicated (in contrast to GNU/Linux)
can run several OS apps (Windows â Wine, Linux/Unix âown Xlib layer)
large parts of POSIX spec supported
(There was a discussion 2021, but it is only similar, not directly identical.
On a more positive note, write a better widget in haiku and weâll all end up using it.
Write a better widget in MacOS and see Apple steal it
Write a better widget in Windows and ⌠wait, why bother?
Write a better widget in Linux and see the distributions boycotting it in 3 ⌠2 ⌠1. Sure, we have our own conservative streak. But we keep the mutual death threats to an acceptable minimum.
But if you talk to random Joe from across the street all those nerd terms just push them away. For the vast majority of all people itâs about the emotions they have with it. Itâs not about being a good product. itâs about how it feels. So consider talking about feelings, and then jump on technical details only after your peer did.
Talking me as an example here: Iâm surely enjoy a good talk about the pros and cons for different ways to perform context switches between userland and kernel, but what kept me here, having an open eye on Haiku for more than 16 years? Itâs⌠the logo! I enjoy the logo design. The logo was so nice that I wanted to try the OS it represents.
I donât know Haiku is a good fit yet for that random Joe from across the street? âCause that really depends on what Joe does on the computer.
Haiku is small, fast, highly organized and runs like a freakinâ maniac on old hardware. These are good points for anyone.
But: Iâm primarily a sysadmin (or âoperations engineerâ) in my day job, and much of what I do on my personal computer is sysadmin-y stuff as well since I self-host everything for myself and my family.
And I choose the laptop to get for it based on what would have solid driver support in Haiku.
Haiku is great for me; I can do almost everything I did on my MacBook on this laptop; I still havenât taken the time to see if thereâs a decent option on Haiku for Affinity Photo and Designer.
But I would not give a Haiku laptop to my mom; IceDove is pretty solid, but I have to work around too many issues in order to use LibreWolf for my mom to be able to handle it.
And the cursor still occasionally just jumps to the edge of the screen for no good reason.
But I would give a Haiku laptop to one of my kids, because theyâre not overly habituated into any particular usage pattern and can learn to cope with some occasional oddness. (I hope.)
And a whole lot of what they want to do is web-based anyway, so a stable browser is most of it. As long as they had their old MacBookâs to keep playing Minecraft on, theyâd probably be happy getting a Haiku laptop as their next âupgradeâ.
Anyway, you can see how I mean itâs really individual.
Jokingly : Are you tired of Win / Mac / Linux arguments in your tech circles? As much of a joke as it is, Itâs also kind of nice to throw in the, I donât use any of them, so I donât care argument . Albeit a sad point, Iâm genuinely tired of the age old OS debates
Itâs for nerds at this point, so feel free to speak to that. But the nice thing is, it enables fairly ordinary people to live the nerd life.
Always wanted to be a nerd, but donât have the patience to get into a deep junkpile of alternative tech? You can tell your friends âsorry, my web camera doesnât work because Iâm using Haiku!â and theyâll think âwow, colossal nerd here!â Little do they know, though, how little easily you did it.
The man on the street isnât interested in Operating systems, so one wouldnât come up with a good argument to try out Haiku. (we all started out here experimenting with a variaty of OSâs back in the days, and it hold the same today, the new people trying out Haiku are the ones seeking variaties).
I only have one argument when people ask me about this, my answer is simple âWhy not?â, I can do everything in Haiku I want to (aside from EiD), so why would I want to run anything else.
If someone ask me about Haiku, i recommend he try it for fun and learning,
for looks and usability, for cool concepts (packagefs, windowtabbing, attributes/metadata).
I would not recommend it (specially not to a non-technical person) as a daily driver at the current state, even if i use it almost daily.
The reasons are the same i dont use it as my main OS, security (rights management, running as root, missing disk encryption), missing features (Webcam Support, multiple Monitor support, 3d acceleration âŚ)
The exception would be for very old slow hardware, where Linux is not usable
This is why Haiku is still advertising itself as âbetaâ. Eventually we will get there, and be an OS for everyone. Until then, we already have a good product for the people with some tech knowledge and ready to go through some problems with their OS.
It looks like our competitors are consistently trying to do worse than us in that regard however. The last thing I heard is Windows broke Notepad?
My company in 2023 provided me with a win10 laptop which was ugly (my personal taste) but snappy and efficient. Last month, due to win10 end of support, IT dept forced anyoneâs laptop upgrade to win11, a nigthmare OS. 11 is heavy, bloated and even more choosy when it comes to device drivers for USB tools. Even right clicking into an Explorer window takes ages, with the horrible feature that pop up menu populates AFTER being showed - this kills usability! Further, due to CPU often pushed to 100% for no evident reason, battery life is degrading day after day.
I must admit I never liked win10, but 11 looks even worst.
I think WINE is vital to the future of Haiku as an alternative to the commercial hell that is Windows and Apple and the mess that is Linux. And by that I means that Linux doesnât work well unless you invest a great deal of time in it.
We need a working WINE to run the applications that will currently only work on Windows.
If we can get WINE working there is no reason why people shouldnât ditch Windows for Haiku. And there are far more Windows users than Linux or Mac users. So they should be our target market.
Who cares? Everybodyâs using Notepad++ even to open a readme file.
IMHO it is using a Bazooka against a flie but, people are using Photoshop and other beasts the same way. They absolutely want the best tool to finally achieve nothing important but bragging.
With that kind of users, Iâm not surprised if M$ devs are thinking âWhy even bother?â
