Good day,
I while ago I started the move to Haiku (using mostly Linux, sometimes Windows), and while it’s not yet complete, we are getting there, and it’s not an easy road to go through… Nonetheless, this is by no means a complain, it’s just the way I do things in order to use Haiku as “daily driver”, whenever possible. The only thing I can complain about is not having enought time to address all the tasks in My task list…
Regarding Software, this is a table comparing the applications I use on Silverblue and the “equivalents” I use on Haiku:
Action | Silverblue | Haiku |
---|---|---|
Text Editor | Gedit, Vim | Koder, Vim |
Code Project Editor | VSCodium, Builder | Koder, Vim |
Interface Designer | Glade | QtCreator* |
Hand painting | MyPaint | Krita& |
Image Processing | Gimp | Krita& |
3D Modeling | Blender | Blender** |
Vector Graphics | Inkscape | Karbon?? |
Game Engine~ | Godot | Godot** |
Score writing | Musescore | Musescore+ |
Soundtrack and FX~ | LMMS | LMMS+ |
Audio Recording and processing | Audacity | ++ |
Icon design | Inkscape | Icon-O-Matic |
Thunderbird, Criptext, Tutanota | Mail&& | |
Web browsing | Firefox, Brave | WebPositive |
CAD (not so much) | QCad | QCad |
IRC | HexChat | Vision |
Messaging | Telegram, Signal | Telegram |
Screen recording | Peek, OBS Studio | BeScreenCapture |
Office suite | LibreOffice | LibreOffice |
Video editing | OpenShot | OpenShot |
Cloud | Dropbox, pCloud | ?? |
Virtual Machines | Boxes | AQEMU |
(*) QtCreator does not make interfaces that abide the Haiku API, though it’s close enough at the moment
(&) Krita can finally use the Wacom (A6 size) tablet with pressure sensitivity. The Huion Giano 1409 (100€ compared to equivalent Wacom-490€) still not usable, even causing KDL at times.
(**) Blender, though it’s in HaikuDepot, it’s not usable in my box. Also Godot, though it’s there, not usable either (yet).
(??) Haven’t used Karbon that much yet, but I’m used to Inkscape and find the interface a bit weird.
(+) Musescore and LMMS work, but I get no audio out through displayport on the Radeon card, and can’t drive them with an usb Korg microKEY keyboard.
(++) Though there are recording programs in HaikuDepot, Haiku still does not support (AFAIK) audio through USB so can’t use any USB audio device, too bad all of them are USB (AKG microphone, ZOOM guitar/bass FX, Korg microKEY).
(&&) No way to use Criptext nor Tutanota’s apps. They are not available on Haiku and for Linux, they are AppImages.
(~) Actually, I’m using Godot and LMMS on Linux because I got to know them thanks to Haiku. They were in the HaikuDepot, so I checked if they were also available on Linux.
Recently started to use AQEMU to test OSes in virtual machines, let’s see how it goes.
For the mail part, if Mail would have HTML support that would be enough, as most emails I get are HTML based. Criptext and Tutanota… well… patience and research.
To be honest, I used VSCodium (mostly for Godot), more before than now. As no VSCodium on Haiku, I switched to Vim on Linux, thus using same software with similar setup on both OSes.
Also, I started to use QtCreator just recently. I found that the Haiku API Python bindings didn’t work with Python 3, and started to fail on Python 2, so in order to do some “rapid” ( ) development, I decided to use QtCreator and PyQt5 for interfaces, at least for now. Let’s see what comes out of this, and if in the “near” (
) future I can use the native API.
Regarding hardware, there are many things I can’t do just yet:
- Hear anything through display loudspeakers (Display Port connection; already ticketed).
- Record anything with the USB AKG microphone or the USB FX processors (no audio USB support yet)
- Use the USB Korg microkey with Musescore nor LMMS
- Use the Huion digitizer (also ticketed)
- Use the Asus tablet as no option to rotate screen and no pen input (someone already asked for the rotation on dev.haiku-os.org, I have to prepare a setup to run some tests and report, instead of rotating my head to use the tablet)
- Not using the proper video driver (Radeon), using Framebuffer.
- Printing on the network printer (I need to carry some test before filing a bug though)
- Scanning on the network printer’s scanner (this is going to be hard, as even on linux has issues)
- Connecting to the SMB file server (I tried a couple of times using FuseSMB, never got it going, needs more research and testing)
- Network connection is a bit slow, about 17% of the speed available on Linux and Windows. Seems the RTL81xx network driver needs update (there are tickets on this too)
I also have a Canon Selphy wireless printer that doesn’t work properly on Linux, so I need to use Windows for that. I don’t expect it to work on Haiku, and never worried about it.
The hardest part of the switch is not being able to hear a thing and use the audio hardware and the digitizer at the moment. Maybe if Godot and Blender would be already available I would say something about “framebuffer” video, though, as of now, I have no complains yet.
I could do the recording on Linux or Win and mix on Haiku, though with no audio out it’s still a bit hard. So this I still do on Linux.
As most of the time I use the computer is to try to make some videogame, I can’t do that on Haiku yet, though hopefully will soon. I keep researching on the topic to evaluate the different options available, though I still lean towards Godot. And now that I found out that I can use Python with Godot…
If available, I try to use Haiku native software. Also, I try to use same software on both platforms to ease the switch, if they are available on both, though trying to use them “the Haiku way” on Haiku, if I know how to, of course.
Biggest issue is jumping from Linux to Haiku back and forth, jumping from GDScript to Python back and forth, mostly because time slots are limited and I tend to forget things if I don’t keep using them on a regular basis.
The switch is taking time, of course, as my pace is quite slow and there are a lot of things to learn on the way. We’ll get there though, hopefully.
Well, and with the Pinephone running Plasma Mobile, I can run same Qt apps on the phone as on Haiku… How 'bout that?
Thanks!
Regards,
RR