What apps do you need on Haiku?

Software
229

Oh yeah, at this point in time it is exactly that. :smiley: But theyā€™re not foolish dreams. Look at what happened during the last week after Valve announced Steam Play with Proton (based on Wine):

So you see, just 6 days ago the gamers could get their hands on the Steam BETA client and there are already almost 5000 reports in the Google Spreadsheet, with 1674 reports marked as Completely Stable and 1200 marked as Stable, although Valve only officially supported a short list of titles at the time of their initial announcement.

It took a long time to reach this point, but the result shows how fast you can catch the peopleā€™s attention when you offer them something that works. Obviously, there are many others who didnā€™t contribute to that spreadsheet, myself included. I just wrote an article in my Linux (Mint) community, listing more than two dozen games that I tested and what the results were, so the people can try the new beta themselves.

Gaming is very exciting for many people, which is why even if I daydream about it on Haiku, itā€™s still not out of place to envision it in a much better position once thereā€™s some work being done in this direction. Pick one graphics provider and just a few cards, have some initial work that enables a handful of games to run reasonably well, even if not with sound or gamepad support, and youā€™ll still get the gamersā€™ and the developersā€™ attention.

Yes, itā€™s a pain to develop and maintain drivers and libraries for sound, video, networking, and so on. But the thing is, regardless of when this work starts, the pain would be virtually the same. So considering investing some time in 3D rather sooner might be beneficial to the project, because the underlying pieces of the puzzle would also enable other apps to run, or run even better. And I might be daydreaming again when I say that if Haiku officially commits to supporting some popular gaming titles for the initial 3D support, you might just find a few developers interested in contributing.

When is it better than the starting point of 3D support for a developer to contribute, for them to forever enter the history books as the forefathers of Haiku gaming? So a little bit of strategy in making the plans and the announcements will surely catch some serious attention and potentially some hands on deck. Iā€™d say you should try this rather sooner than later. :smiley:

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230

It depends what that means. They are not enabled everywhere (bfs being one notable example), and Haiku is built for the lowest common denominator (Pentium on 32-bit, SSE2 on 64-bit). Building with march=native could result in a much snappier system, but last I checked (ca. 3 months ago) it didnā€™t even boot.

Itā€™s not happening for official builds due to compatibility anyway.

231

Not really. I run Haiku on a high-end and commodity 3D workstations. You get used to certain issues when people are building things.

Various apps are best left to emulation software. Other techs like WebGL and SVG are a ways off.
I run various 3D software and games/demos on Haiku. Besides the high-speed hardware acceleration Iā€™m used to, Haiku is fine for most things. Just yesterday, I was thinking of Sega Dreamcast games I can run on Haiku for a demonstration. I already had porting the Valve Steam client to Haiku on my list.

I think Humdinger and others developed some great animation software and paint programs (i.e. Exposer,GrafX2, WonderBrush, ArtPaint) so we tend to overlook those when we discuss Deluxe Paint, GIMP, and other related software. SMplayer and Kdenlive are available or possible on Haiku.

Don;t stop dreamingā€¦the sheep are restlessā€¦

232

I think you mistake me for someone elseā€¦ :slight_smile:
I may have contributed some inconsequential things to a few apps, but the real code slingers are others.

234

That was in a certain context, as a reply to PulkoMandy talking about writing drivers for those devices, and supporting libraries for them, like libSDL and stuff. It was about the driver-development related pain. :slight_smile:

P.S. I rephrased that bit in order to avoid further misunderstanding.

238

Hello,

If I just think about my need :slight_smile:,

Calibre is a very useful application to store ebook collection. I tried to compile, byt my knowledge is too poor, to be able to do it. The receipt exist.

I also use Joplin as Notes taking application.

PHP will be definitly something great :slight_smile:

239

Hello. There is already a ā€œwork in progressā€, trying to bring Calibre into the HaikuDepot:

240

It needs plenty python packages. They are easy to make, as their recipe is almost the same in every case, but iā€™m too busy currently.

@Everybody: Feel free to create a Pull request for one or some. That would help.

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241

nethogs or any such tool, showing the top users of the network bandwidth

242
  • Slack
  • Spotify / Apple music
  • A stable browser (for watching netflix, hbo, cmore etc)
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243

I respectfully disagree. One may loves a OS experience, but needs (few/some/many) apps from the outer sea for their everyday productivity. Having ā€œlibrariesā€ would be a win-win solution. And btw, why sdl is good and gtk is not? :slight_smile:

Btw, jumping in the realm of more-or-less native applications, this is my wish list:

  • docker (iā€™m dreaming, i think itā€™s almost impossible, here. It would need a whole virtualization subsystem or a virtualbox port at leastā€¦and this is not going to happen, right?)
  • kubernetes
  • gcloud sdk components (there are in python, so this would be possible)
  • inkscape
  • calibre
  • atom
  • tableau (ofc this is impossible, itā€™s closed-source)
  • a modern web browser

with those guys, i would probably be able to perform 99.99999% of my everyday work in haiku

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244

GTK has some fairly terrible coding practices they use to fake having objects in Cā€¦ passing things around as void everywhere for instance.

They also have a history of not being very nice developers to work with.

QT applications are certainly nice to have, and QT is pretty robust and portable, but native is far preferable. And also as they historically have sold QT commercially they have a bit more tempered mindset toward end users and developers that makes it less of a nightmare to talk to themā€¦ although QT is a horribly fast moving project take too long to work on a patch and someone else will have completely redeisgned and reimplemeneted the functionality you were working on ha!

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245

This is definitively a good point, tnx for the explaination. Now I see the whole picture and I (mostly) agree about the decision.

Pls donā€™t forget that thereā€™re also ppl who are not developers, in this forum, after all :wink:

246

GTK2 is good working toolkit, and apps written in it has a good level of performance (in my observation), and it is in C, what is an alternative to C++.
And it is wort of porting at least for Gimp.
Iā€™d like to see it on Haiku.
ā€¦gtk2 Haku theme:



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247

I canā€™t comment on the code quality of GTK2 but having GIMP available on Haiku would be awesome.

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248

Yep, GIMP would be nice to have, failing that perhaps just GEGL and a native HAiku front end for it. All of GIMPs image filters etcā€¦ is powered by GEGLā€¦ so it would theoretically be possible to write a native applcation using it.

GIMPā€™s UI isnā€™t exactly celebrated anyway and thatā€™s mostly what youā€™d loose by going that routeā€¦ all the good stuff in GEGL could be used.

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249

Oh yea, and we can call it HIMP.

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250

A program I rely on and the ONLY reason I still have XP running is Encore music notation software. There are custom fonts that microsoft apparently created (Anastasia) for using music notation and associated symbols. I would love to see a clone or something with equal funtionality but this is not likely I know. The nearest equivalent is Musescore bit it leaves much to be desired, so much so that I still rely on Encore.

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251

Gimp is a really good program, there is no doubt about that.

But it would be nice if people do not always ask for program that there are on other systems, but would sometimes deal with the programs that already exist. Wonderbrush is hard for me to understand because i have not enough expirience with working with layers, but this is where people could start with simple tutorials instead of asking for alternatives. I think Wonderbrush is worth a look and people who are familiar with layers would get ahead quickly.

There was a old port of gimp back in beos times, but it needs x11.

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252

Iā€™ve read some good things about Wonderbrush. Never really used it because itā€™s not available (as far as I know) on 64bit Haiku which I mainly use. I do have a VM with 32bit Haiku around, will take a look at it.

On the whole ā€œnative vs. ported appsā€ topic: I understand the arguments for both sides, itĀ“s really nice to use native apps that are well integrated with the operating system. On the other hand I have to say Iā€™m a big fan of cross-platform apps. I use Linux, OSX (or whatever it is named at the moment) , Windows, and Haiku. Depending on where I am and which computer I have at hand. So I have to learn how to use the application only once and can use it on all my computers. And can use and edit the files that Iā€™ve previously created.
To sum it all up, I think it its not about native vs. ported but its good to have both, the more the better.