What's stopping you from using Haiku? (as a primary system)

1

(This thread is not meant as a feature request, but more as a way of sharing solutions and workarounds to issues we might find while using Haiku that would otherwise require booting to another OS) (Also, a way to vent some misc PC frustrations)

Some background first:

In the last decade+ I’ve been running a number of systems triple-booting Windows/Linux/Haiku and switching between them according to whatever task I needed to work on atm.

At first, when Windows was still 7 and Haiku still in Alpha, Haiku would be the shiny new toy I’d play with for a bit before going back to more usable/useful OSes.

Things have changed dramatically in the last decade as post-7 Windows is becoming more of a shiny turd with each release. 10 is a horrible system in so many ways and with the world moving on to the even worse 11 I realized I can’t take it anymore and dropped Windows entirely.

So my primary system is now Mint 22.2 but, as “liberating” as Linux can be and as competent as an OS Mint is, I don’t exactly feel “at home”, I can’t put my finger on what it is, but Linux has always felt clunky and cumbersome to me.

In the meantime Haiku has made several strides into becoming a reasonable OS for daily-driving, it’s still a relatively young OS with a number of pieces missing, but it’s getting there and I can’t wait to see the day when I can start using it as my primary OS.

But what’s stopping me from making that switch now? A number of things, some small, some big, but most requiring me to reboot into Linux atm:

1)-No media player on Haiku (that I know) works well with subtitles and multiple audio tracks (Haiku Bug #8496)

As a language enthusiast, consuming foreign media is the main way I keep on practicing languages, and for such uses (at least) subtitles are extremely useful. I’ve tested multiple media players for this (Mediaplayer, VLC, MPlayer-based ones) but none of them can handle it on Haiku currently, some of them crash, some of them can’t see subtitles.

Workarounds: Maybe some other player not currently in the repos might work? Let me know :slight_smile:

2)-A good, reliable, modern OS-agnostic file system with proper R/W support on Haiku

Kind of a necessity when multi-booting, I’m currently using NTFS for this but it’s less than ideal, Haiku doesn’t like unmounting them if it has R/W access and the FS can become compromised in ways only Windows can fix, which is a situation I definitely want to avoid in the future.

Workarounds: Fat32 is probably the best supported fs around but I can’t live with its limitations, so afaik the main alternatives are exFAT and ext3/4 but (according to forum posts) they don’t have the best support on Haiku. Is there some other supported filesystems I should check? Or are exFAT or ext3/4 working fine already on Haiku? Let me know what’s your experience on this.

3)-3D hardware acceleration

While there’s some professional environments who would absolutely need this, as I desire this feature simply for gaming, for me it’s rather low-priority in the grand scheme of things. Sure, it would be nice, but there’s not a lot of games available on Haiku that would benefit that much from it anyway. Things might get considerably better in the future, as talented people in the community have already managed creating some working (albeit experimental) drivers for modern AMD and Nvidia GPUs.

Workarounds:

- Curb your expectations: Doom 2016 surely can’t run on CPU-only (and is not available on Haiku) but if you’re looking for some FPS action Quake II runs great within the same constraints. Half-life 2 is a no go? Half-life 1 and its many spin-offs are totally playable, why not take the lesser known “Blue Shift” for a spin? It might surprise you.

- Go for software mode / retro-gaming: Up until 1996-1998 good dedicated GPUs were a rarity so most games released in that era were designed with software rendering in mind. Plenty of DOS games were still released within this timeframe too. Dosbox is your friend and, if you can look past low-res, “dated” graphics, you’ll find there’s plenty of diamonds in the rough when it comes to DOS gaming. Some modern source-ports also include software rendering as an option, which can make a huge difference. (GZDoom on hardware rendering here is a slideshow, but on software rendering is totally playable even if it makes my dated CPU scream)

- Upgrade your CPU: Since your CPU in Haiku effectively doubles as your GPU in these use-cases every bit of extra power from it counts. 2 extra cores can make all the difference.

4)-Wine 9/10

After Mediaplayer lacking subtitles, this is my main issue currently, while also being what lets me confidently ditch Windows entirely.

Wine is often presented as a way to bring a plethora of now not-available applications to Haiku, but I see it in another way: when it comes to general purpose software most things you’d want from Windows applications have already been replicated in the FOSS space so either those alternatives are already available on Haiku or will eventually be.

To me Wine is invaluable for 2 kinds of software: highly-specialized or vendor-tied software (ie. flashing utilities for specific hardware) and, you guessed it, games.

One can totally ditch MS Office and use LibreOffice, but there’s no “Libre Age of Empires 2” for instance (and even if it was a thing I doubt it’d be half as good as the original)

Windows prides itself on its compatibility but when you poke it around enough you’ll notice it’s really shoddy when it comes to pre-XP binaries (not to mention Win16, they dropped it all entirely)

A great example of this is “Max Payne”, it came out in 2001 and Windows 7 already barely supports it, with fan patches galore to fix it there. On Windows 10? Missing codecs, missing music, missing sounds, weird glitches… and the Windows 7 patches don’t work, how’s that for compatibility?

On the other hand, if you take those same game files and put them in a Linux + Wine machine? A flawless, Payne-less experience

In short, Wine is a better Windows than Windows. I’d love to have it on Haiku.

Workarounds:

- While Wine 7 is in the repos I find that version, window draw bugs or not, unsuitable for my uses but hey, maybe you’ll have more luck with it than me

- BoxedWine is an interesting alternative but the overhead of running a tiny Linux core with it is very unappealing to me. Maybe if I had more cores… :slight_smile:

5)-Steam in some form?

Not really an issue, more like wishful thinking on my part. I have a handful of games on it and going Haiku-only would mean I’d lose easy access to them in the short term. In the long term it’s really nothing important, the windows client could run on Wine or maybe somebody could cook up an utility ala “lgogdownloader” or some tiny client for it, who knows. If this was the only “issue” left in this list I’d bite the bullet and make the switch with little regret.

So… that was a long post, anyway, that’s what’s stopping me from using Haiku as a primary system.
What’s stopping you? :slight_smile:

2 Likes
2

Have post a few hours ago about it, in fact, asking for help.

For me is the security, but it is not yet an absolute no. The answers, if any, to my question will make up my mind for using it as a daily OS.

2 Likes
3

I’ve seen your post earlier and read it all but I’ve refrained from making any comments there as yours is a very peculiar use-case and I know next to nothing about pc security.

The only thing of value I can tell you is that viruses at least shouldn’t be a worry, but that’s just because of “security through obscurity”. In other words, nobody’s going to write viruses just for Haiku (at least not just yet)

4

I am currently unaware of any problems like this in the NTFS driver. If you have an easy way to reproduce, please file a ticket.

2 Likes
5

To be clear only the R/W part applies to Haiku, the “FS becoming compromised needing Windows intervention” has only happened to me on Linux so far, but just the fact it’s possible means I cannot rely on NTFS if I ditch Windows.

About the R/W issue, I experienced it twice today and will make a ticket after testing it a bit more.
To reproduce it:

  1. Mount an NTFS partition as R/W
  2. Copy a file to it
  3. Try to unmount after the copy is done and the system will say that the device is busy writing and unmounting could cause data loss
6

Some writes may not flush immediately. Does it still give that message after manually running sync in a Terminal? If so, then it’s still a bug, but a more general one (and probably not too hard to fix, I hope.)

1 Like
7

I’ll answer these in the upcoming ticket :grin:

EDIT: Nevermind, I can’t seem to reproduce the issue anymore.

1 Like
8

Short answer here, nothing :slight_smile: (but maybe my expectations are not as high as others).

Only one thing still makes me boot into W11 and that’s for official documents where I need EiD.

1 Like
9

Lots of things prevent me from using Haiku as my daily driver. Let me give just one example, and please don’t take it as criticism. It’s just how it is right now.

One thing I need all the time is FTP and SCP clients. Tried the native Haiku client, FTPPositive I think? It’s really nice, but has a huge security problem: it auto-saves my credentials to disk in plain text and can’t be told otherwise. Tried FileZilla, same client I use on Linux. In my Haiku VM, it always crashes on startup, making it completely unusable. The only thing that works is Midnight Commander… except with a spurious error message after each transfer. That’s good enough to let me copy files between Qemu and my host system, but would quickly become annoying in daily usage.

This is no different from struggles with Linux 20-25 years ago. I powered through then, and it paid off big time. Going to power through with Haiku, too. But it’s going to take patience.

1 Like
10

A more robust Firefox port.

Multiple monitor support.

Better port of wine.

Some security. At the moment it’s the wild west out there.

Speed. The disk access is the slowest of all the OSs I use. By a order of magnitude. Most noticeable during compiles.

FTP and SCP clients

I think the very first BeOS software I ever released was an FTP client. Seems the files have gone missing tho. After fixing my libraries I’ll have a crack at resurrecting that for Haiku.

4 Likes
11

No VOIP/SIP app.

12

It’s the primary system on my NUC Intel, so nothing to stop from using it :wink:

3 Likes
13

For me, one of the things that stops me to use Haiku as a daily driver is… presence of Linux. There is nothing wrong with Haiku, I just found an useful OS to do all my daily work in it. No complains about Haiku still.

I found it practical, even with RW support for different filesystem, to always use RO support. This works as following:

  • Have different OSes as multiboot on the same PC, each has its native FS.
  • Each (most of) OSes have RO support of other filesystems on disk. So, I can create files in some OS which can handle such file format. After that, I can access the given files in all other OSes on PC, there is no need even to copy the files from one partition to another.

Another approach I found useful is to use network attached storage with some common interface to read/write. The filesystem of NAS is completely irrelevant, only the way the disk is accessed: SSH, FTP, etc. More than that, you can configure different services for different OSes, and still access the same files from different OSes.

1 Like
14

I imagine this one flying over the head of many users, nevertheless, it’s a valid concern.
Ever thought about compiling code on a ramFS drive instead? BiPolar made a nice forum thread about using it to compile haikuports recipes, you can find it here.

Is there any opensource VOIP app around? If that’s the case, maybe somebody can try and port it over :slight_smile:

A minipc sure looks like the perfect fit for Haiku, most of them have respectable CPUs and not having hardware acceleration for whatever integrated GPU is there is usually irrelevant for most tasks you’d run on them either way.

@alpopa A NAS would definitely be an interesting solution for file-sharing between systems, I’ll have to keep that in mind for the future.

15

Linphone, for example.

16

I’ve looked a bunch at Linphone’s documentation and, as far as I can tell, a port is very much possible, its requirements are mostly Qt, python, some python modules and a couple of other tools, all of which are available on Haiku iirc.

I’m currently working on a couple of different ports, when I’m done I could take a look at it if nobody beats me to it. No guarantees though.

(Somebody with actual python experience would be better for a port like this I think :slight_smile:)

17

Is there an issue for this at HaikuPorts? If not you should report one there.

After a lot of fixes (mostly not to disk access) compile performance on the nightlies is “only” 50% worse than Linux in most situations (years ago we were at 100-200% or more). How bad is it for you?

18

Ok so actual real data… it’s not an order of magnitude anymore. When comparing apples to apples. Typically I’m running in a VM with less cores and memory than my actual hardware. But I changed both the Linux build and Haiku build of my IDE to use the same core count (16) and timed the build:

Linux: 9.35s
Haiku: 18.98s

So half the speed of Ubuntu 24.04. That’s ok I think. It was definitely worse before. Thanks for the speed ups! And to keep the guilty out of the picture I won’t even time the Windows Visual Studio build. It doesn’t use all the cores anyway.

19

Nothing is really stopping me from using Haiku.
I develop for Haiku and I’m doing so exclusively using Haiku,so I’m using it pretty much already.
The driver situation improved very much since I first tried Haiku,but I could use Haiku in even more situations with a few more drivers.
I’m writing this using a FreeBSD laptop,I always use this in bed while watching TV,and I can’t use it with Haiku since neither the touchscreen nor the touchpad are working and using it with only the keyboard is also not a solution.
That’s more a convenience issue,actually.
I own more than enough laptops that run Haiku perfectly fine and I could use any of them for writing here,but I prefer the compact fanless one with a touchscreen in this situation,for obvious reasons.

1 Like
20

It’s a good question. Why can’t I drive Haiku daily?

To use Haiku full-time, I’d need a truly haiku native browser that supports modern web technologies, not a port. There have been significant efforts to update WebKit, but it remains a work in progress.

I’d also need full 2D and 3D acceleration, better graphics driver support, reliable Bluetooth audio, and proper multi-monitor support.

With a capable browser, I could manage with web apps like Slack and Discord, even though I dislike how little their apps respect each OS’s design principles or any of the tech

I don’t like dual-booting, so to fully replace Windows or macOS, I’d need Photoshop, the Unity Engine, and a simple but powerful video editor.

I know, those are still quite far off