What apps do you need on Haiku?

Can be doable, if you bite the bullet and port X11 and the other required tools. Pretty bad i have no time for adventures like this nowadays.

First of all, there is a GTK3 port in progress already. Secondly, Blink (Chromiumā€™s web engine) is also undergoing a port in the form of QtWebEngine which has recently started to render pages and video:

Thirdly and lastly, it is extremely difficult to port full-fat web browsers like FF and Chromium due to their complexity; there are entire platforms (almost like OSes) themselves and it doesnā€™t help that those two in particular use GTK3, a port of which is still (as mentioned earlier) still in-progress.

As for the Haiku devs, they (especially @PulkoMandy) would rather spend their time improving WebKit (which WebPositive uses).

Closest thing to what you want that could realistically be achieved in the foreseeable future is when the QtWebEngine port is finished and something like Falkon can be ported over.

No X11 port necessary for any of that.

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There is a separate thread where you can see progress of GTK / GDK port by 3deyes:

https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/haiku-backend-in-gtk-gdk/9338

Like you and others have already said, the difficulty in this porting is replacing the Linuxisms (X11, GTK, Pulseaudio) with the native Haiku toolkit and the already ported libraries. The biggest problem is the man-power and us being totally unsupported by the maintainers. Therefore we have to do it ourselves.

We donā€™t have to start completely from scratch with Firefox as we have all the required base libraries available to port it properly. We could use parts of the reference BeOS port to implement the native widgets. Chromium, however uses its own toolkit called Aura, wrapped around the native toolkits (Cocoa, Win32, GTK) and using OpenGL to render the webpage, so we would need to implement the widgets using the Haiku toolkit here. X11 here is redundant.

Aside from that, There is no technical limitation preventing Chromium and Firefox to be ported to Haiku.

I donā€™t particularly care for Firefox/chromium. I think WebPositive needs some care and attention. I donā€™t think every web browser should try and cater to everything thatā€™s online. The web is an insanely bloated mess, and I donā€™t think it should always be catered to, IMO. Also, I donā€™t want another Linux distro/generic distro.

If thereā€™s more things I want, itā€™s old applications that were native to BeOS, optimized and updated for haiku. Thereā€™s a big library out there.

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This is exactly my opinion on the browser situation and definitely agree with the idea of updating and improving whatever existing, open source BeOS applications we can for Haiku.

Haiku could become a really nice, lightweight, consistent, open source platform for all the standard cross-platform applications, and that might be nice, but it will be better if it can have some exclusive apps, especially if some of them are resurrected classics from the BeOS days.

I think we will get there, but much of the current people working on things related to Haiku are working on the OS or porting stuff in HaikuPorts and less updating older apps.

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Stable apps, not necessary more apps for now except drivers for optimizing compatibility and performanceā€¦But stable environment and apps from the Haiku Depot cause a lot of apps make some trouble on the beta release I see.

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A ā€œclick and translateā€ program like qtranslate (https://quest-app.appspot.com/) for translating single words or larger text areas in different documents.

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Not really an ā€œappā€, but USB WiFi support is the only thing between me and using Haiku as my daily OS.

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Better to buy a cheap wifi card for 10 Euro. Much faster than waiting and writing and testing an USB driver.

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Currently I have everything what I need. I need better quality for existing apps and ports. For example BePDF canā€™t export single page or in LibreOffice spellchecking isnā€™t working.

I have backup OS - openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE (I donā€™t like dual booting). Mostly for web browsing and digiKam (sorry but Haiku port seriously underperform against Linux). And Minecraft for my kid (no Minetest is not good for him, because he want mods, Pixelmon). I really like X space sim series from Egosoft.

Maybe Kdenlive and GPU acceleration, good Web+. Wine further in the futureā€¦

Take a look on imagemagickGUI on our repository server https://www.software.besly.de

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@stippi
I want wonderbrush 3.0 :wink:

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What improvements do you want to Wonderbrush?

I would be happy with Wonderbrush 64bit atm.

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Thank you. I have read it, and I am no wiser as to what specific improvements you are looking for, or which features in the present version are either missing, not working properly, or could be betterā€¦

Hmmm. I want wine

I just want Version 3.0

Yeah, somebody should fix it: https://github.com/stippi/WonderBrush-v3