I asked this same question over on Amigaworld forums. Figured I would ask here.
What has attracted me to Amiga OS is the responsiveness of the OS. I click something, stuff happens right away. I see that positive in Amiga OS and the old BeOS. Same goes for Haiku.
Have you found other OS that is equally or even better than Amiga OS?
Also, for those that know the whys, why is it that OS like Amiga and Haiku seem more responsive that other mainstream OS? What tech or special coding is being used that makes these OS faster or more responsive?
Usually the answer to this question is “Pervasive Multithreading” and “Preemptive Multitasking”.
While Haiku not being bloated helps - if you were to simulate bloat (run lots of programs) you will find Haiku still responsive due to the two things mentioned above.
Define bloat… I mean My gentoo install on my Lifebook P1120 boots up with 12Mb ram and 24Mb on my desktop with dwm… 100Mb (125 with a couple pages loaded) with the browser loaded and a terminal open. And thats running the purportedly bloated X.org. Granted I am being a bit of a ricer
Haiku is already over 100Mb just booted up on the same laptop.
I don’t know about other systems, but Syllable boots almost as fast on my machine, whereas ETH A2/Oberon boots even faster. Older, simpler systems such as MS-DOS were also really fast compared to current offerings. On the other hand, Windows XP and linux Mint LXDE can be painfully slow. I think as a system matures, it accumulates a store of old, inefficient fossil code which no longer serves a purpose but which still slows things down. How well a given system happens to match your particular hardware (video, audio, etc.) is also a factor. How the code is written (machine language vs high-level or other options) is yet another thing.
Haiku stems from BeOS, which in its infancy was designed to run on a dual 66mhz PowerPC machine called the BeBox. This inherently led to a very well-designed and efficient system in order to produce good performance on such limited hardware. As Haiku is trying to “clone” the BeOS, it also inherits its optomisations and gains from this by its spectacular performance on morqe modern hardware. Sure, the hardware requirements for Haiku are more than the original BeOS, but that stems from having to deal with more complex hardware and more resource demanding software. Either way, the design choices of the Be developers were very good ones for the way modern hardware has turned out (with multiple cores and multiple threads), allowing Haiku to come into its own on this new hardware, and show off what the BeOS really could do in modern times.
