Thank you for making Haiku far better than it was the last time I tried it (a few years ago). I remember dabbling with some alphas and Beta1 I think. I had to use a fairly heavy and clunky Thinkpad because there weren’t many decent laptop options. The Thinkpad huffed and puffed a lot—was hot and noisy so I couldn’t stand it for long.
When I came back to this site recently I smiled on seeing that you were now up to Beta4. I decided to have a quick look on the forums to see if a fairly light and slim laptop worked well with Haiku. I was expecting a negative result but the T480s seemed like a good and fairly modern-looking option so I got one of those (with a decent battery). I was pleasantly surprised once I got Haiku booted. There was less heat and less fan noise. That combined with the laptop being sleeknotclunky makes the overall experience enormously more enjoyable.
You’ve made the OS much more stable. I’ve not been to KDL in the two weeks I’ve been back. Using USB thumb drives was a bit dodgy last time but now they work solidly. Drive Setup was pretty flaky for me a few years ago and now it lets me do most of the wizard tricks I did with it in BeOS. I can spend much more time in Haiku now (assuming I can find something to do with it haha). I’ve even experienced a few flutters of BeOS nostalgia at times. So thanks for all your dilligent work over many years. I can’t wait for the next release.
Yes, beta4 was when I started to really see improvements & usability, (I tried a couple of betas before), but with beta4, I was prepared to install to hard drive, & give it a proper go.
I read in one comment on the forum that beta5 is being proposed, hopefully this will encourage more people to give Haiku a try.
Well, the compiled releases on HaikuDepot should work fine on R1/B4. You just won’t be able to compile it on R1/B4. Perhaps, though, we should keep it compiling on R1/B4 for a while after R1/B5’s release.
I’m hoping a more mature system will attract more contributors which will lead to an even more mature system and even more contributors, so that gains start feeding on gains in a virtuous circle. I’m jealous of the amount of input the Linux world gets.
Beta4 is great, no doubt about it. However I had even more success when I switched from Beta4 to the Nightly Builds. A few things I needed are not supported in Beta4 but they are in Nightly Builds. While considered unstable, it proved stable for me so far, so much that I moved from a VM installation to a real one.
After realizing I can build and use the vast majority of my libraries in Haiku, I changed all my Makefiles so that Haiku is now supported as a first-class citizen. And it was easier than I thought. A simple generic Makefile detects the operating system, and sets the system’s include and lib directories accordingly. Haiku is included in the detectable systems. After that, the actual Makefile that does the building job is exactly the same for Haiku, FreeBSD and GNU/Linux.
I did expect problems in this process, but I found none, and that for many libraries written in three different languages - C, C++, and Fortran. Documentation is created from comments in the code using a Python library which also works in Haiku. Performance-wise, I didn’t notice any difference.
If all the above is not great progress for Haiku, I don’t know what “progress” means.
It is obvious developers work hard for this, and I can only be grateful. So yes, not only I totally agree with @K11, but I also add some more.
