I’d love to give my report of what Haiku on a RISC-V computer, however I learned after my post that the RISC-V port of HAiku needs some love, so I offered to test that, but I am not sure how far along if at all it is.
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I find that if Haiku can remain single-user as an OS that would be surprisingly unique and may protect it from becoming sought after by Big Tech. Big tech wants users to own what are effectively terminals and not own anything. I am somewhat interested in keeping Haiku as a machine that isnt connected to the internet and I just order the lastest version CD from Haiku. Once I things settle in my world a bit, I want to setup a network where only one computer is connected to the internet and the rest are only connected via the LAN. Its an idea to help me save time and avoid distraction while working.
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Would be great to see Hollywood expand its platform support to Haiku.
The author, Andreas Falkenhahn, has been asked and said no.
Not far enough that testing is really useful. I’m not even sure it manages to run the boot menu yet? And if it does it can’t start the kernel.
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My interest in Haiku stems from these thoughts:
- I have a number of old 32 bit machines that are in decent working order and that I’d love to put to some real use again. I just hate throwing perfectly good stuff away, just because it’s old and doesn’t get any love anymore. Haiku has 32 bit support (so far…), and seems fast enough to be a good choice for this purpose.
- (as extension of 1) My long term goal would be to have separate machines for certain purposes, so as to reduce distraction (e. g. a laptop for focused writing, another to serve recipes and manage grocery lists, etc.). The simplicity of Haiku’s interface may support this goal.
- Ease of maintenance. I haven’t done enough serious testing to have a clear feeling about this, but my hope would be that Haiku remains simple enough to not need extensive fiddling and tweaking, recompiling and the like.
- I love that it’s something else entirely. Windows and MacOS are already tightly corporate controlled, and while Linux still seems to be a free and trustworthy system, names like Google, Microsoft and Facebook appear surprisingly often in connection with sponsoring and steering bodies. Knowing options and what they can do seems prudent.
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@dcatt, if I understand you correctly, you are thinking of an alliance of alt tech projects to help make a stand for internet freedom. While I share your concerns about big tech companies, I’m not sure I understand the connection. I guess people use the internet mainly for communication and collecting information, for buying stuff, and perhaps for occasional publishing. Most will just want to achieve this easily and reliably, and I think they should be able to do so independently of the software they are using. Isn’t it in the hands of the service providers (social networks, video platforms, marketplaces etc.), as opposed to the makers of ‘client software’, to make things smooth and generally accessible (or not)?
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Well, in theory the correct answer to your (rhetoric) question should be yes, but capitalism and, actually human behavior, brings people and enterprises to achieve the best results with minimum effort. If a service provider or whatever can satisfy 95% of the user requests without care too much of freedom and standards, they will act so… They don’t care of freedom, they care of money. Only a larger userbase can move the direction of the market…
You do remember when Internet Explorer 6 was a major threat to the World Wide Web in the early 2000s right? It took some very brave web developers and end users who saw the possibility of Microsoft single handedly taking complete control of the Internet through proprietary technologies and decided that web standards be established to challenge any single web browser vendor lock-in. Right now, Google Chrome is a threat to the World Wide Web much in the same way though obviously Chromium is supposedly open source, but you’ll need a team of rocket scientists to get it working on anything beyond Mac, Windows and GNU/Linux. The web browser is our main view into the ever growing internet landscape. We’ve all come to the realization that Apple, Microsoft, Google and other big tech companies can no longer be trusted with their massive market power and reach. Alternative computing technologies in general need to provide a way to escape the clutches of big tech in so many ways. It goes beyond client software. The concept of parallel economies has been discussed a lot these days and I think alt tech can play a crucial role here. Would be great for viable alternatives for things like e-commerce and e-payment systems (as an example) to exist and thrive.
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we need to put out the dumpster fire of monoculture
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@dcatt I was just checking if I understood your idea correctly, which apparently I did. It would be great if the use of alternative technology could help restore some real freedom to the web, but I remain skeptical how this could work.
I agree with you about the browser monoculture: The (perceived) dominance of Chrome is problematic in that it could make it even easier for Google to steer the internet into any direction that best suits their interests. However, they can pursue this through their omnipresent web services, too. Client technology is only one of many aspects of internet freedom. The example of Chrome/Chromium is fitting: as with all the things Google creates, the ‘client’ product is indeed open source and could theoretically be forked and developed without a single Google engineer involved. But it’s the built-in regulatory systems, the dependency on services within the Google ecosystem (for the Google product itself AND for any other product wanting to interact with it), the many ‘strings attached’, that make things complicated and effectively closed.
The old browser wars aren’t a complete analogy in this respect. Yes, IE was the predominant browser, and yes, Microsoft used this, as much as they could at the time, to push their technology while making it more complicated for others. So, when looking purely at the browsers, the analogy works (even though as far as I remember, it was only to a smaller degree the valiant efforts of developers or the superiority of alternative browsers that broke the trend, but in effect a couple of lawsuits targeted at bundling IE with the by far predominant operating system. Only then started a relatively slow adaptation of alternatives such as Firebird/Firefox and Opera).
But, back then it was really still a question of client technology share, which is not the main issue today. It was about owning the cars, if you will, and today it is more about owning the roads and vistas. The internet was also very different. Not as commercial, not as centralized around a few services that ‘everybody uses’, all owned by a handful of companies. Not as much a marketplace. Not as politically and legally contested. Smaller institutions, even private people, had a better chance of shaping different parts of the web. I don’t see this today, and I don’t see the will for it in today’s general users. Some techies, maybe, some activists, but not general users. The virtual world that big tech (and I don’t mean the makers of operating systems) has created is too comfortable and shiny. Average Joe just needs a quick fix to put up some foodporn and chat with all of his friends and family, and he can - the API’s closed, though, no matter which browser he uses.
I have already written too much, I’m sorry. Let me close by agreeing totally with you when you say it needs to go beyond client software, and that we need viable alternatives for corporate-owned services. Right now, many existing alternative solutions (like federated social media, peer distributed video streaming, etc.) are niche solutions, unknown to most, their usefulness often held back by being mainly playgrounds for tech-savvy people. Pushing forward in this direction may make a difference some day.
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I guess the real question is whether Haiku can compete with Fuchsia’s non-GPL compatibility with the Linux kernel. With BeOS compatibility tagging along, maybe not, but without WebAssembly, definitely not. Fuchsia is aiming to be Google’s first OS that doesn’t include the Linux Kernel.
If we’re going to bust up the monoculture, we can’t aim at Windows or Linux or even current versions of macOS. My hypothesis is that the Fuchsia-based monoculture will aim to be more powerful than any government can regulate and based on digital currency to further deviate from conventional government controls.
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Maybe now is a bad time to bring up that haiku already uses some fuchsia code.
I honestly don’t see the problem with potentially displacing Windows on the desktop, even if unlikely.
Didn´t know that. Where?
Currently just EFI headers afaik, but there is no reason not to take other quality code if we should want to imo.
https://git.haiku-os.org/haiku/commit/?id=485b5cf8bc00ab5aaee5db81a91d135dc61d9cc3
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As long as we have a unique App Store/Package Manager, it’s fine. My main concern with Google is that their software spies on you, as does Windows.
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i think Haiku should look into a low cost subscription service, the user base is big enough.
Hi, i am new to the community, and after BeOS a long time ago i am new to Haiku.
I think the best use-case for Haiku is really as an “easy allround Desktop-OS”. Best example: My Dad (80 years old and with mild cognitive imapirment) had lately his problems with Windows 10 (even as he was using and programming computers since the early 80s), but after i showed him Haiku (and helped him install it) he was nearly instantly “back in his elements” and can now use the computer again as a productive tool.
I think there is really a market for an easy to use, easy to understand and fast system.
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Same here, my Dad is 80 too, and I still wait for some Haiku improvements to let my Dad use Haiku.
Windows 10 I cannot help him anymore… every month the same forced updates and he does not know what to do.
But Haiku is still not that easy I whished for my parents…
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We all have anecdotes of variuos “hair-pulling / eye rolling” experiences with the mainstream OS’s. This morning on my work PC after an OS update I got new task bar icons/apps for crap I did not request (and who knows what else). No corporate OS vendor, I’m not interested in celebrity gossip/news, I’m not interested in sports results from half way around the world, this is my WORK PC. The same crap will probably arrive on my personal PC later on in the day. This seems to be the default behaviour of mainstream OS’s, shovel bloated crap users really dont need onto their systems.
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system navigation / file management is really good in Haiku. The other day I needed to juggle files across multiple projects, and in the 4 work systems I daily use (Win10, Ubuntu, Mint, OSX), only Win10 offers a good experience amongst them (minus a ridiculous attribute referencing delay when scanning directories with Ogg Vorbis files). Later on the day I rebooted to Haiku to work on some new audio effects for Medo, and managing files was pure bliss on Haiku (thanks to Tracker).
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System administration is really good in Haiku. It has old school visibility, it doesnt try to protect the user from themselves, with the benefits of a read only package FS. I don’t feel as if I’m walking on egg shells when managing the system.
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Having said all that, some simple things which could really improve Haiku are:
- fixing the usability of the Deskbar (single click window select, quick launch, shortcut categories)
- adding a “bookmark” menu bar to Tracker for instant navigation (one less navigation step so you do not have to drill through the Favourites menu). A bookmark item can also be a folder for xray navigation.
- file quick preview add-ons (for images, video, sound, text). OSX does this quite well, I think we could do the same for Haiku.
- The rest is just apps / drivers. The situation is improving every year. On a sunday morning, Haiku is the first system I boot.
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