If I were to use Haiku over Windows, what benefits would I get?
With my little experience, Haiku is much faster. It’s quite noticeable on older hardware. And, IMHO, it’s prettier (especially vs. Windows 10).
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Would the same apply to Redox OS as well (if you know by any chance)?
No offense to Haiku and the developers behind it but honestly Haiku looks like Windows 98 and/or Windows ME.
I’ve seen Redox OS GUI in a few youtube videos but never touched it in real.
And I see nothing wrong in that Haiku’s GUI looks “obsolete”. Who cares.
It’s simple and fast - credit to developers behind it. I don’t need fat and clumsy
GUI like KDE or Gnome
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I care more about speed than looks also, and if you say it is fast then that is great for me, I just hope Hiaku does not lag for me like Linux does. Windows seems fine, no performance issues, but for some reason Linux distros all lag for me. I don’t think I am able to figure out what is wrong over here. I did try to install drivers that did help but still a huge total mess.
Recently KDE had a huge performance improvement and managed to reduce all the way down to around 400 MB (in total along with the OS).
Gnome seems to use a lot of RAM still, but yeah.
Are you using an Nvidia graphics card? Last I remember lagging was a problem on their proprietary drivers…
Haiku still render’s it’s UI in software, but it is also much more complex in what it does render than BeOS so there are some tradoffs, Haiku isn’t quite as fast there, and it underperforms in heavier applications compared to windows or Linux due to that, just try scrolling in any browser on Haiku and you’ll see it is much slower. Or drag a window around quickly… you’ll get tearing. Granted I get tearing on a 4k display on Windows also, but it isn’t all roses on Haiku for sure. I only say this to temper your expectations it has many other advantages.
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Yes I am.
Using Nouveau was a lot worse in my case, when I switched to nVidia proprietary drivers, it did improve the performance by quite a bit but it still lagged.
That is a bit of a shame, but it is not ready so I hope this does improve in the future.
There are quite a few Linux distros that have screentearing issues for me as well (not all of them).
What other advantages does Haiku have?
Desktop centric design philosophy, a nice API (though perhaps a bit dated in areas), Stack and Tile window management, BFS queries at the filesystem level. Typeahead filtering in the file manager. The package management system is unique and works decently, and supports rolling back of updates, I’d prefer it were officially supported to use it without rollback support for lower end systems though since there is some overhead and inconvenience in certain corner cases.
It is a matter of debate if filesystem queries could be better implemented as a database… I’d believe that when I see it… no other OS has done it adequately in a system wide manner.
Also I suggest you graph an AMD graphics card it will serve you much better on open source operating systems, and RX480 or so would be cheap and should work with Haiku and Linux very well. Cards after that won’t work with Haiku yet but will likely eventually be added.
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Oh yeah I heard that it mounts the package onto the OS and if you uninstall it it unmounts which is a lot quicker than uninstalling a package on Windows and Linux if I am not mistaken.
Sure I should never get nVidia in the future. How come in general nVidia graphics card does a terrible job at supporting open source operating systems compared to Windows?
They don’t publish any documentation unlike Intel and AMD, also Intel and AMD have teams that work on open source driver development, Nvidia’s reverse engineered nouveau driver is almost entirely a hard fought reverse engineered driver by volunteers.
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If nVidia doesn’t have documentation then how come Windows runs much better compared to Linux when using nVidia graphics cards? How come Windows can run better without nVidia drivers compared to Linux with nVidia drivers?
Because they provide a proprietary driver and massive amounts of developers and testing on windows. Without it NVidia would not have the market share they do. AMD would easily take it… since their driver is often nicer than NVidia’s in many ways even on Windows. AMD’s hardware for the past few years has just been a little slower than NVidia’s.
As far as why Linux runs worse with Nvidia… it just comes down to less effort invested into their driver on Linux and frankly Linux developers by and large don’t like Nvidia so there is not much desire to help them make their proprietary driver work well. If Nvidia released documentation and helped develop the open source drivers… the story would change.
That makes sense but I still don’t understand one thing, see I ran Windows 7 without nVidia drivers and it was not laggy at all, it was just fine. But on Linux with nVidia drivers it was worse than Windows 7 without nVidia drivers. That is so strange.
No you probably didn’t Windows grabs Nvidia drivers from windows update and installs them by default automatically without user intervention. They just come with only the very minimal control panel.
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Haiku is very fast installed on real Hardware
Backup and restore is very fast and easy
No password flood (since Haiku is no Multiuser! Which is good…)
E-Mails are easily exchanged between Haiku.
Powerful search function.
Native apps are very fast loaded
Haiku will work on older PC’s (BeOs was faster)
20 year old BeOs/Haiku Programs still work. ( for Haiku it is for less years… 13?)
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The first time I installed Windows 7 before updating it, it was running pretty smoothly, I pretty much remember this. Yes the updates did automatically give the nVidia drivers but before updating it it was running smoothly (I have had to reformat this PC many times due to Windows 7 breaking down all the time).
Whatt does that mean exasctly?
How does it differ from Windows and Linux exactly?
The windows installation media itself also includes a basic accelerated Nvidia driver though it is much older than the one pulled down from windows updates. So you still have acceleration out of the box.
dunno why your window 7 box would break down that much… my laptop at work has been running without incident for 3 years and it was a year or two before that when I rebuilt it last. Recently updated it with an SSD and windows 10.
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Sorry that part I missed by reading the post first…
you cannot use! Haiku like Windows atm! Haiku is not finished yet!
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Oh, that explains it, would the same apply to Windows XP and Windows Vista as I used to use those two operating systems?
This PC does seem to have a serious issue running Windows XP and Vista, they would very quickly break down and were very unstable, I have no idea why.