What apps are you missing?

Software
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What software do you consider necessary for daily use on a PC that is missing on Haiku?

Are there any absences that force you to use another operating system against your will?

Dreaming a bit,
what would you want the most?
:grin:

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I think for me it’s not any specific software but the ease of mind:
I’m currently on Debian. Where the following assumptions hold true for me since Etch (4):

  • There is a security team doing a good job.
  • If there is a bug, someone will fix it. Even more: bugs are generally fixed in the next release even without me needing to report it myself: the community is big and active. So even if everyone only report the bugs that actually affect them, all bugs are reported at some point and all those tiny noisy ones go away as well.
  • There is software for all of my tasks that I do know about.
  • There is software for all of my tasks that I do not know about yet.
  • Easy to install, run, administrate (the internet knows an answer to all questions :wink:
  • I can use it for all my needs (personal, business, server, desktop, clients, friends, customers, small, big). No need to check license terms, hardware, or taste beforehand. It may not be the optimum one for all use cases, but it will work and be a good starting point.

This ease of mind is what I’m looking for. Haiku clearly can provide some of that. It’s a good system. But for me it’s not any specific software, it’s the overall picture that keeps me in orbit, but doesn’t yet let me want to land.

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For the things I use (or want to use) Haiku… I don’t miss much apps, mostly driver stuff… I would certainly benefit from improvements on the following areas:

  • CPU frequency scaling (the equivalent to Linux’s acpi_cpufreq would be great).
  • Better support for I2C touchpads.
  • intel_extreme driver:
    • support for Gemini Lake iGPUs (mostly just for screen brightness control).
    • detection of external screen at boot, and switching output to that (I have 2 Atom N45x netbooks, without a screen, that could benefit from that).
  • Multi-monitor support.
  • Video playback (h264/h265 decoding) acceleration.
  • Power usage / battery life (even on a netbook with working frequency scaller, battery life is far lower than on Linux or Windows, not being able to lower screen brightness explains a big chunk of that, thou!).

We’re getting better debugger, profiling, and development tools by the day… and even hardware-accelerated virtualization is being worked on. All pretty awesome stuff that points to an even brighter future for Haiku :slight_smile:

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A web browser that is stable enough. Like, 99% of what I do nowadays is on a browser.

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LibreWolf or Pale Moon or something like that.
A browser with tons of features and support for extensions.
That’s the only reason I’m still using OpenIndiana on my main computer.
Besides that, the whole UI and workflow on Haiku is very much better than anything else I’ve seen so far.

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Firefox would be nice (would make librewolf possible), especially a stable version of firefox, not the crash-fest that is falkon, and a more complete wine version. Can’t think of anything else I can really miss

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The “crash-fest” that is Falkon isn’t an unstable version of Firefox,instead it’s based on Chromium,which is more difficult to support since upstream rejects all patches for systems other than Windows,MacOS and Linux and it requires enormous hardware specs (CPU and memory) to try compiling Chromium after you did changes to try improving it.
Also,Firefox wouldn’t only make LibreWolf possible,but it’s essentially the same thing.
LibreWolf is exactly Firefox,just without all the spyware,commercial bloat and bad decisions,plus preinstalled uBlock Origin and Fingerprinting Protection.
If Firefox were available,we could reuse exactly the same patches to also build LibreWolf.
That’s what I’ve done at OpenIndiana,where Firefox has always been available (being the default browser there),and I added LibreWolf then.

About Wine,I read some days/weeks ago that WOW64 support is currently making very good progress.
Then you can use 32bit WIndows applications and libraries on 64bit Haiku,which is required for many applications.

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The things I want are: Palm Syncing, a IIGS emulator and a RISC OS emulator. I am working slowly on the Palm syncing app.

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9

Can you test the BeOS IIGS emulator on Haiku 32-bit? Let me know if you can’t find it.

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Hello! What is that IIGS emulator? Basilisk II ?

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I would like to port GSPlus which I use on macOS and Linux. It’s a good IIgs emulator based on KEGS.

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I think Basilisk is a 68K emulator for running System 7.

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I have to check by BeOS machine. But no, it wasn’t that.

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It might have been Sweet16.

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Beat me to it. Yes it’s Sweet16. I have that and a rom for Apple IIGS. There is also an Apple II+ emulator.

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I just ported GSPlus,
Patch: https://0x0.st/X9yR.patch

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And as for RISC OS, what about QEMU, emulating a Raspberry Pi?

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Thank you @christech and @_AP for the answers! I found some information here:

I was able to download the Apple II emulator, from that site.

About the Sweet16, I found some files here:

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Small update: I downloaded the Sweet16_12_r45x86.zip file from PulkoMandy’s BeOS archive and it works:

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