What do you like in Haiku, but dislike in other systems?

Only the best (that’s lasted for over 20 years now), the community! :clap:

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I’d like to see Haiku become modular.

That approach is found in KDE and EOS and if you don’t like something you can swap out and create what suits your workflow.

That would come at the price of consistency and a classic desktop.

@NormanF , I think you’ve got the thread topic backwards. :thinking: You’re supposed to say something you like about Haiku that is different from the others, not what you don’t like.

Now, regarding modularity, in 1993 my A1200 came with one of the most modular operating systems in computer history. The problems with incompatibility between add-on components were similar to DLL hell on Windows. The main reason for this was that the Commodore management was soaking up money for doing nothing while the engineers were playing games. When Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, the Amiga was already a lost cause.

Due to the community being self-supporting while Commodore management was “missing in action”, business to us went on without them because we didn’t need them anyway. Now there are not less than 3 rival factions trying to be the next “Amiga” while using different plugins to fill in the gaps.

If the modularity of AmigaOS had curated and moderated APIs, modularity would have been sustainable. The lack of standards led to the rival factions having no accountability but to themselves.

Having only one GUI framework is a good way to avoid factionalism. Linux has many distributions and frameworks. Each has its own ecosystem. This leads to rivalries similar to Amiga. Linux having conflicting API frameworks are not sustainable.

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Haiku is the only BeOS sucessor because all the other camps stagnated or died out :slight_smile:

(that’s somewhat poetic in itself, the only BeOS daughter to survive is the crazy one that wants to be opinionated and have its own kernel and everything, all the other ones to “port this cool api to userspace of linux” eventually did die. It certainly would have been an interesting time if one of them didnt die and maybe even became a dominant api on linux, haiku certainly wouldnt be where it is now if that had happened)

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  • My computer is still an actual computer, no phone with a 20 inch screen or kids toy (looking at you, GNOME)
  • There is a consistent UI and UX across most applications, even ported Qt stuff mostly behaves similar
  • Its UI is better than everything else I’ve seen so far, I absolutely love using the title bars as tabs
  • There is no Flatpak
  • There is no systemd
  • There is no Snap
  • There is no Wayland
  • There is no [insert other Red Hat/Canonical shit I may have forgotten]
  • There are near to zero proprietary applications

Haiku makes my computer behave as it should. It gives the control to me, as the user. It still has the same feeling as in the good old days, when computers were still fun, when you could even use Winblows without running away and crying.
I used to like Linux, now I try to avoid it whenever possible. Well, it isn’t the Linux kernel that’s at fault, but 90% of the distributions promoting and shipping by default commercial bullshit from Red Hat or Canonical. And also that the user interfaces have lost so much of their usability and features. GNOME went from “well, if you come from Windows, you have to learn everything again, but it actually works” in GNOME 2 to “hey kid, I’m your new toy, leave everything as is and I’ll give you some basic features, but don’t theme me, don’t add plugins, don’t change the defaults” in GNOME 3. KDE is still better, but also goes a direction I’m not a fan of. The only desktop here which is still fun to use is Trinity, a fork of KDE 3 and that’s packaged in nearly no distribution.
Nowadays I try to use the BSDs and OpenIndiana more than Linux, those systems feel much better, but they share their desktops with Linux so their user experience in the graphical part isn’t that much better.
Wow, that post has become longer than I wanted, but I urgently needed to say that. After all, Haiku is just better in every way I can think of. And I absolutely like the recent developments which bring more features, more apps, and support for more platforms.

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