Alder Lake (12th gen) CPUs probably work, but I personally haven’t tested anything newer than Kaby Lake (7th gen). UHD works via VESA drivers, even though it’s a generic driver it works fine and the system still feels snappy.
I don’t have HDMI on this rig but I remember HDMI audio working last time I tried it. (Not sure though, I might be misremembering)
HDMI audio is not supported yet and it’s not trivial to implement it.
It needs support in the graphics driver and the audio must be routed through the graphics card,from what I understand.
Nothing! I am using Haiku now as my daily driver for a few weeks now.
I do have a secondary boot drive in my Thinkpad Ultrabase so I can boot up FerenOS to do stuff I can’t do in Haiku, and so all the deficiencies of Haiku such as yubikey and veracrypt incompatibility are covered by that Linux distribution.
Using Haiku as my daily driver is a conscious decision to not go for the latest and the greatest. Just having color and multiple workspaces and all this free software is like a dream if you compare it to the late eighties state of Mac OS classic with the frequent app crashes & the bomb dialogues!
The single most significant app that made Haiku usable for me as my primary system is the Floorp browser. It’s basically Firefox with bells and whistles, but I much prefer it to Iceweasle because I just don’t like the name Iceweasle with its weasly connotation…
Floorp is great as a password manager if you set a primary password to protect your logins, and mozilla sync to sync the sites and logins with Floorp and Firefox installations across your devices. Its made it so much more realistic to use Haiku as my main system.
nice to have, support for ARM boards like raspberry pi or something from pine64.
I play 7 Days to Die and Baldur’s Gate 3 with Steam. I’ve already paid for the games so I don’t want to pay a second time to play them outside of Steam. So no ability to run Steam or to play games I’ve paid for inside of Steam without having to buy them again outside of Steam.
I bought an Apple 27” Studio display. Yes, give me shit for paying $1600 for a monitor. I’m not a good health so I can’t ride motorcycles anymore so I gave that up and bought something FAR LESS expensive than a $30,000 motorcycle. OKAY? Whatever. Is there a video driver that would work with this monitor? Because If I would go away from Apple, I would want to be able to use my $1600 monitor. Would it work? It is a 5k monitor (an upgrade over 4k) with 5120 x 2880 pixels. Again, more than 4K.
I can’t think of anything else that I couldn’t do in Haiku that I currently do with my 27” intel iMac.
Mostly I:
Play games in Steam (7 Days to Die where I turn off zombies and use it as a sandbox to have stress free fun and Baldur’s Gate 3 for when I want stress).
I write about 10,000 words per day. I wrote short and long stories that I don’t publish. I start with a scenario and I see where my mind takes me. I start with the same scenario for a full month and every day the story ends up totally different. I can do that with Libre-office though it certainly doesn’t look as nice.
OH - I WISH WISH WISH that I could run a program called Scrivener on Haiku. It is THE best program for writing stories because inside of one file you can have ALL of the notes in tabs on the left side of the program so that you can easily find notes that you have about a scene, a plot, a character, etc., whatever it is you want to remember, with easy access so that you can refer back to it at any point.
As a comparison, think of a calculator program and think of a spreadsheet program. That is the difference between a program like Word (being the calculator) and Scrivener (which would be the spreadsheet program in this scenario). Just as a comparison of how much more powerful Scrivener is compared to most document programs. So I would want to be able to use Scrivener.
Because of him I started watching mens Gonzaga basketball games. And I love stats probably more than basketball. And I go to all the different player and team rating websites and I copy and paste all of that info into spreadsheets on my computer and I keep track of how good they think both the team and the individual players are plus all the stats those sites keep track of. And I could do that in Libre-office though it wouldn’t look as nice as in Apple Numbers.
As a note, I HATE Microsoft. ABSOLUTELY H*A*T*E Microsoft! But for my job I had to help people with Microsoft products and I was a VERY advanced user of crappy MS Word (I’d give MS Word a “D”). In fact, if I somehow was able to buy Microsoft, I would literally throw away everything except Excel. That’s the only good piece of anything they have. And I got REALLY good at it. And there are things in there that I wish that Libre-Office was/is as good Excel. It just isn’t. Excel is the gold standard which Microsoft bought from the person that created it. So it isn’t BECAUSE of Microsoft. They just saw a really good product and bought it and kept making it better. But if they had created it, it would be a piece of ****.
a) I wish Libre-office LOOKED a lot better. It is ugly but it is functional. I’d rather have something that looked a LOT nicer and if there is something that looks a LOT nicer than Libre-office that has advanced functionality and runs on Haiku than please let me know by replying to this.
b) I wish it had some of the advanced statistics capabilities that Excel has. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then you aren’t REALLY big into statistics. I’ll leave it at that. Because if you are, and you’ve tried using both, you know about the limitations of Libre-office.
I worked in a company with over 17,000 employees and let me tell you, we had WAY more problems with Android security than iPhone security. That and just “issues” that cropped up with Android. We had maybe 4,000 Android phones and maybe 25,000 iPhones and we had more calls from people with Android phones OVERALL than with iPhones which was 6.25 iPhones for every 1 Android and yet we had about 17 calls for every Android phone for every 1 call with an iPhone. One just worked, the other had issues for people.
And I just want to say, if you think I’m an Apple guy because I “LOVE” Apple. Well I’m NOT an Apple guy. I’d RATHER be using IBM’s OS/2 which is still updated by https://www.arcanoae.com/ or I’d rather be using BeOS (now Haiku) than Mac or Windows. But I couldn’t because of my job that I had.
Now I’m retired and I’m trying to figure out what would allow me to have the LEAST AMOUNT of issues where I could do what I want to do which is play a couple games that I have in Steam, be able to write 10,000 words a day, and spend maybe an hour a day playing with spreadsheets AND have SECURE messaging which syncs with my iPhone.
I have about 18,000 songs plus movies and TV shows that I bought in iTunes that I currently can ONLY export in a reduce quality format. I WISH I could export the songs, movies and TV shows, which I paid for and did NOT steal, I would like to NOT have to pay AGAIN for what I already bought without a reduced quality form.
I assume that I could bring over my 10s of thousand of pictures that I’ve taken during my life. About half of them from film (yes, I’m OLD - 65 years old) and half with digital from Cannon cameras and my iPhones and video from a high def cassette non-digital movie camera that I haven’t digitalized yet but will. And yes, I know that cassettes degrade so I need to do that sooner rather than later.
Then there are all of my emails, at least 5% of which I NEED for historical reasons and the rest I didn’t delete and I don’t trust AI to know what I need and what I don’t need so I would want ALL of my emails.
It would be nice to have something like Apple or Google maps.
I have a 2020 Tesla Model Y which I bought BEFORE I knew that it would help fund Elon to f over our government by helping some a**h*** elected. I wish there was a Tesla app/program that could SECURELY communicate with my Tesla. Yes, there is an iPhone app for that which I use. But it would be nice to have a desktop app too. You asked so I’m responding.
PS: If my wife wasn’t totally against it, I would sell my Tesla and buy an (obviously) used Citroën DS from 1972 (with air conditioning which was new as of that year). Look up that car. It STILL looks like it was something built sometime in the future. In fact, TV shows from the 1970s, anytime they were trying to make episodes that tried to look like the future, they would use Citroën DS cars because they look so futuristic.
The ride quality is those cars is STILL second to none. To give you an idea of how SMOOTH those cars were. After WWII France’s roads were HORRIBLE and so Citroën built a special suspension that was so great that even with some of THE WORST roads in the world, you could put a tea cup on top of the car, drive for MILES at 30 mph and most of the water would still be in the cup. The suspension was so good that Rolls Royce licensed the suspension for their cars. The suspension used a special kind of oil and air (look it up) that made it feel like the roads were PERFECT because the ride was so good.
One of the things that my wife complains about with our Tesla is the harsh suspension because it is a “sports car” so it had to have a suspension that could corner and well … handle sports-car like driving on a twisty road. Well a Citroën DS didn’t have as fast as an motor as a Tesla but you could drive faster in a DS because the suspension smoothed everything out where in a Tesla you would feel like you were being thrown hard all over the place. And I just think they look REALLY cool. So speaking of something that I would like as a daily driver (like Haiku as a “daily driver) I would pick a Citroën DS as my car and if I could afford it, put Tesla electric motors in it to replace ONLY the motor but not the suspension and find a way to put the screen from the Tesla into the DS. Talk about a cool car! THAT would be a SUPER COOL car!
YOU ASKED “What is stopping you from using Haiku?”. Well I gave you my answer. If you don’t like my answers, that is on YOU and not ME because you ARE NOT me and you aren’t interested in what I’m interested in. At least the odds of you being like me are remote.
If you are using the Apple standard settings, that monitor would give you 2.5K most of the time, otherwise text would be unreadably small. It only switches to full 5K for a few graphics programs that know how to switch it on for part of the screen. Apple drivers are smart that way.
Will it work on Haiku? Only one way to find out. Drivers work wirh GPUs, not monitors. It will all depend on what is in the box you connect to the mirror.
It’s a commercial product, so that is not something we can help with. Sorry.
We have Firefox-derived browsers for Haiku now. I would experiment with running the web-based versions of Office365 and iCloud in one of those and see if that will do.
If you use Libreoffice for a few months you will find that it is a perfectly satisfactory replacement for Excel. Macros used to be a weak area, but they are much improved. However, Excel macros may need rewriting.
The existence of Libreoffice has forced Excel to raise its game. For example, file sizes in Excel used to be much bigger but they have been slimmed down drastically.
That’s kind of funny. I’ll be honest, last version of Office I clearly remember using was the year they added the menu ribbon.
I did use Excel, like 2 years ago, in an actual workplace and remember nothing about it, but other than that I’ve been using Open/Libreoffice on all OSes for over a decade and never looked back, compatibility and usability are so good that I never had any chance to.
(For me at least, YMMV)
I DO set it to the max resolution and then I just make the font in the cells “big enough”, this way I can get more cells on the screen than the default settings. I know where all the icons are and if I have problems finding something, Help is “some” help or else I switch resolutions until I find something then I switch back.
I totally understand that Scrivener is a commercial product and that you can’t do anything about that.
Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s I was a significantly better programmer than I am today. I used to be able to write in about eight different programming languages and maybe I could have written something for Haiku that had the basics of what Scrivener does but anti-pain medication for diabetes (plus probably age) has diminished my programming skills. I just can’t concentrate like I used to. Pain and anti-pain meds really messes that up! 
Back in the ‘90s I was desperately trying to find something to replace OS/2 (and Windows that I was forced to use for work) and spent over 200 hours on each of a dozen Linux distributions but never found one that I liked. I was really good with Linux, but Linux just was never my thing. Not like OS/2 was or what I could see in Be’s potential.
Not a lot of people know that it was because of the federal lawsuit against Microsoft because in part that companies “were not allowed by Microsoft” to install ANY OS other than a MS OS on storage devices that computer companies sold. It didn’t matter if the OS was hidden or not. I could NOT be anywhere on the storage devices per Microsoft’s contract with PC companies.
When the Feds interviewed Bill Gates about this he almost had an emotional breakdown during the interrogation until MS’s lawyers stopped the interrogation. Bill Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft shortly after that and companies could install ANY OS they wanted to. But by then it was too late for Be. Be had run out of money and the Be assets were sold to a Japanese company which is letting Haiku make a new version of BeOS but you just can’t call it BeOS.
At the time IBM wasn’t outsourcing OS/2 … yet, like they have been and they’ve never concentrated on users, just companies. And BeOS, which I tried HARD to be able to use with BeProductive suite which doesn’t work in Haiku and is really outdated anyway. But BeOS at the time was more graphic artist focused and didn’t have what I needed so with me thinking that OS/2 wasn’t going to be updated (like it has been) I looked for the best available option which at the time was Apple. Again, I just never liked Linux for whatever reason and I was just frustrated with LOTS of different things including my job (new a–hole boss) and other things going on in my life.
I’ve been watching everything that has been going on since Michael Phipps started the openBeOS project. I think I found out about it within a few months after he went public and I’ve been following ever since. I’ve had extreme pain with diabetes since the early 2000s and just stopped trying to keep five computers (four PCs and one Mac) working and once the power supplies on the PCs died I didn’t replace them and just took out the hard drives, destroyed those, then recycled the rest of the PCs.
After trying out as many OSs as I could in the ‘80s and through the late ‘90s I got more and more frustrated about what options were out there and really only chose Apple because is disliked it less than Linux and I HATE Windows (for too many reasons to list) and IBM hadn’t outsourced OS/2 yet.
I should buy a used PC or try to figure out what computer parts would work for both Haiku and OS/2 (I’m NOT asking you or anyone else for help on this). Diabetes is still frustrating the hell out of me which stops me from doing a LOT of things.
I’ve also battled with depression my whole life because of both parents who always seemed against me. I didn’t find out until my 40s that my parents had really f’d up childhoods and apparently that goes back generations in both sides of my family, which explains why I was treated the way I was and why I NEVER wanted (and don’t have) any kids of my own. I wasn’t going to pass on to any children what I went through and didn’t know (and still don’t know) if I could have or would have treated them better. You never know until you have to do something. Thankfully I never have.
I’m still around because of my wife who has made it VERY clear that she wants me in her life until we get really old together. Or else I wouldn’t be here. I don’t know why I’m saying this here but I am.
I struggle with feeling whether or not I deserve “good things” like a PC that can run Haiku. And yet I spent $1600 on an Apple monitor. I KNOW it doesn’t make sense. All it took to buy that monitor was a few clicks.
I built a couple hundred PCs for friends in the 80s and 90s but I really haven’t looked at PCs and PC parts since then. So finding a good inexpensive computer that can run Haiku (and OS/2) that I can use for five plus years and replace parts as needed like I used to do, takes more effort, which I’ve been meaning to do but just haven’t done yet…
I haven’t used any MS products since I retired in 2023 and I will NEVER use ANY of their products ever again. I will stop using computers entirely if they ended up being the only option. I think the biggest deal is moving all my data to a new OS. Because if I DO like Haiku then I wouldn’t buy anything more from Apple except for cell phones.
As for macros, once I retired and stopped using MS products entirely, I already had to create new macros from scratch and have. I just haven’t been able to dig as deep into Libré macros like I did with Excel which I did for work.
In the last couple of years that I worked, I wrote a program for excel that pulled data off of eight different servers for work and processed that data in Visual Basic which is probably THE worst programming language I’ve ever used though I was very good at programming in that language. I was off that project for just a few months when a co-worker, who I taught how to program, was asked to update my program because I had six or seven of major new programs they needed me to write and he asked me about part of the Visual Basic program and when I first looked at it I didn’t recognize it at all. Three years before that NEVER would have happened. So while I don’t have dementia (I’ve been tested for it and Alzheimers and I don’t have either), something is definitely going on with my brain and they’ve done multiple MRIs on my brain to try to figure out what it is and so far they don’t know. But that just adds to the frustration. That and having a lot harder time remembering the names of things which I keep having to find ways to look up on the internet to find the right words. And I LOVE to write and have written almost every day of my life since my early teens. So that is scary.
It is also causing me to write longer posts and emails. And despite what you might think, I’ve edited this down to this.
I think I speak for everybody when I say that Haiku would love to have someone with your experience around. If a major app like a Scrivener-workalike is too much for you, then perhaps something smaller.
Why not? That’s what we’re here for. This is a community. Like back in the 80s and 90s on BBS’s. Sure, we quibble and argue, but you won’t see the kind of extended flamewars that are depressingly common these days.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.
There’s a lot of things Haiku Beta 5 can’t do. But the community is very helpful, like back in the early days of PC hobbyist BBS’s. I think that if you look at Haiku as a Windows or Mac OS or Linux alternative, you might find that the proverbial glass is half empty. But if you look at Haiku as a rather useable hobbyist OS, mostly for personal rather than work use (although a lot of parts of work can be done on Haiku), then you might find that same proverbial glass is half full.
I like it that even non-programmers like me can feel somewhat useful by chipping in with translations for Haiku apps.
For someone who is able to contribute code, I think Haiku can be a fun thing to get in to. Incidentally I’m running Haiku on a Thinkpad X230 Core-i5. It runs fine, although bluetooth and webcam don’t work, and a few other things which is why I have a FerenOS installed in a SSD in the Thinkpad’s ultrabase, for when I need to do web conferences or run Steam.
Look into the keto diet, the carnivore diet, a healthy diet, and the detoxification program organized by Narconon.
What I said in my post was a VERY simplified account of my pain which isn’t just my feet, but is also just as severe in my back and I have to use a medical (inflatable) cushion to sit on a cushioned chair for more than ten minutes.
In 2001 I spent months going through what I described then and definitely describe now as torture on my feet in order to get my mind “reprogrammed” so that I could get out of wheel chairs. But even then my pain was a constant 8.5 or higher all of the time and I was doing my best to try to find ways NOT to take anti-pain meds.
But when that is your “normal” and it wasn’t just my feet but my back and my rear end, where I was VERY suicidal because of my pain, I had no choice but to take anti-pain meds.
Yes, I’ve done everything that I can outside of anti-pain meds to reduce my pain but that is what got my pain down to 8.5.
I’m not going to sit here (literally) and say that I’m more in pain than a LOT of people are. Personally I don’t know how they keep on keeping on because I got to the point that I couldn’t deal with my pain without anti-pain meds. I still had to be the bread winner because my pain was 65% of our income. And I couldn’t hardly think or concentrate.
Imagine hitting both of your feet, your back, and your rear end with a hammer every five minutes 24 hours a day every day and see how long you go without anti-pain meds. I couldn’t take it any longer and broke down and started taking them and they are the ONLY reason why I’m still around. Even still I wonder if it has been worth it. Oh, and I was a computer programmer/systems analyst that had to work with complex programs every day and be at my best.
Oh, I even went down the rabbit hole and had an electronic medical implant to help reduce my pain. I’ve done that too. I have to have special screening when entering airports or court houses and hospitals because of my implant. It helped but it is a HUGE hassle to get the charger at the EXACT almost millimeter position for the device to charge. If I move while sitting the charger loses its connection with the device and I spend another five minutes or more getting it exactly where it needs to be to charge. The design of the charger could be so much better but the company that makes it won’t listen to me or probably all the other people that use the idiotic charger design.
So YES, I would LOVE to be off of anti-pain meds but I wouldn’t last a week, literally wouldn’t last a week going through withdrawals and then falling through that to the VERY DEEP basement that would be my life.
Hopefully that gives you a better idea of the pain that I live with. I go to bed every night more so falling to sleep from pain exhaustion than anything else. I wake up after five hours because my body is in so much pain that I can’t sleep anymore. And I’ve been going through this for 25 years.
My wife wants me around … so far. So I’m doing everything that I can to keep from welcoming an end to my life. But when that time comes I will be VERY happy assuming that I don’t have to deal with this pain through eternity.
I think I speak for everybody when I say that Haiku would love to have someone with your experience around. If a major app like a Scrivener-workalike is too much for you, then perhaps something smaller.
I WISH I could do that. I recently tried learning Rust and Swift. Not at the same time but the second one after I got to a point that is embarrassing low and hoping that maybe learning another language, just to see the level of my ability that I have deal with my pain and while I understand all of the basics, there was a point in one of the examples that you are to write a program for, that I could understand the logic of what it was asking for. The problem was keeping enough in my head at any given time … let’s put it this way, I use to be able to juggle seven balls, both literally and figuratively with programming. Now I can barely juggle three balls and not for very long.
With programming, you need to be able to juggle more than that and I can’t anymore. I’ve gone as far as having a medical implant surgically implanted into my back to help “turn down” the noise from the multiple parts of my body that barely lets me sleep five hours per night with me falling asleep sitting up many times every day only to move from a comfortable position into an very uncomfortable position and I wake up feel like I just got tasered.
I used to LOVE writing quirky programs, starting with an Atari 400 back in 1981. That computer had 4k of RAM. 4 thousand bytes of RAM. Try programming with that little bit of memory and you’ll see you don’t get very far. But I did create a minimal 3D “hall” game with pathetic graphics but my classmates got hooked on it.
Later in the 1990s a company called Electronic Forms Systems, Inc created a product where you could create electronic versions of any government or business forms like the forms you have to fill out to get a mortgage loan or any kind of form you fill out, they were one of the companies that help you create electronic versions of your forms. A PC was then put between your server and your printer. Then you wrote a program and you included a code that would pull up the form and you then send it coordinates and the data you want to print at those coordinates and you never had to throw out anymore pre-printed forms that became obsolete.
Well the bank I worked for at the time didn’t want to buy a second printer and if you tried to print from any program it went through the server, through that PC with the electronic forms, and all of the spaces, the new line codes, everything but the text or numbers was stripped out and what you got was everything together with no spaces, no spacing, no fonts, no anything but the text and numbers from any program.
So I did what I always did for that bank and the organization I left the bank to go work for after the bank. I wrote a program that got around the issue. I’d never written print drivers before but I learned HPCL (“Hewlett-Packard Control Language” which was/is the programming language for HP printers) to make it so everything that got deleted due to that EFS printer between the server and the printer was able to pass through that EFS PC to the printer.
We had a mix of DOS, Windows 3.1 and OS/2 computers at the time and so I wrote print drivers for all three of those. With Windows and OS/2 programs you only have to write one print driver for any specific range of printers. But with DOS you have to write a printer driver for each and every program because they didn’t share print drivers. So I wrote about 40 print drivers in all, having never done it before and saved my bank the cost of a couple dozen laser printers. Nobody asked me to do it. I just did it. Did I get a bonus for it? I SHOULD have but I didn’t.
The bank ended up with another problem. They wanted to create a lease for something that the program they paid a lot of money for (programs used to cost a lot more money than they do now) was one decimal point too short for the lease and the company said it would take two months to fix that. Why? Because you have to account for every possible amount of ten million to 100 million dollars penny by penny. Meaning ten million and one cent, ten million and two cents.
The programming to convert numbers to words, required for any monetary contract, takes time to write. Or normally would take a more than two months.
But I did something abnormal so that my bank wouldn’t lose the lease which they needed to finalize in two weeks or lose it.
So I created a document that exactly replicated the form the bank used with the 3rd party software in Word Perfect. Note that Word Perfect was a MUCH more robust program than MS Word in those days. And it would have taken too long to write this program in C. Well the forms part of it. This was back in the ‘90s when we didn’t have all the fancy tools that we have now for programming.
I wrote a program in C that created all of the lines of Word Perfect code to convert $10,000,001 to $99,999,999 into words. Back in the day it took quite a few hours to create all that Word Perfect code. Then I took that and I put it into Word Perfect and I took an actual lease and typed it into my Word Perfect program (which did NOT use Visual Basic back then) and expected it to take maybe an hour or longer for it to convert the numbers into words but unexpectedly it took only a couple of minutes to create the words for the amount no matter what dollar amount I put in there.
Oh, and I didn’t do it starting from $10,000,001 but I started it from $0.01 and went all the way up to $99,999,999.99.
I called the company that owned Word Perfect at the time and asked them if there was a simpler way of doing what I was doing. This was while my C program was creating the lines of code and they asked me to repeat what I was saying about fifteen times.
“You’re trying to do WHAT?!”
To their knowledge, nobody had written a Word Perfect script/program that large before and they weren’t even sure if it was going to work. And I ended up talking to more than a few people “up the chain” at Word Perfect about what I was trying to do and all of them didn’t think that Word Perfect could run that.
Amazingly it did. And FAR quicker than any of us expected. I sent the code to them and they studied it and called me back and they asked me how I created all that code and I told them about my C program that created it and I sent them that too.
That was the kind of things that I LOVED doing and I tried to write an adventure game similar in idea to D&D but with totally different combat equations and totally different magic (mine magic was based on radiation and the “tricks” that you can do with it including modifying evil “magic users” modifying DNA through radiation to create all of the monsters over centuries in the game’s back story/history as an explanation for how all those creatures existed plus how use to radiation to create all of the magic spells that weren’t just slight of hand.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find other people that were willing to take stock in the company and put off being paid in the beginning to create the game. Actually I found two programmers but over three years they really didn’t do much and I just didn’t have the skills for writing graphics (still don’t) so thousands of lines of code for the game has sat there on 3.5” “floppy disks” and will be lost forever. That was my only failure in any of my attempts at writing programs.
Unfortunately, I’m in too much pain in several areas of my body that I can’t just concentrate anymore and because of that I can’t keep enough in my head to write anything more than simple programs which I would have felt humiliated “back in the day” to be limited to what I’m limited to now.
Believe me, if I could write even a simple Word Processor today that is better than what is a better native program than what is available in Haiku I would have LOVED to do that. If this was the 1990s before my health problems I would have jumped at the chance and would have succeeded. Now … sigh.
To be clear though, most of my programming was in C where we maintained a custom “Automated Loan Processing System” or “ALPS” which our loan officers and assistants used to created mortgage loans for over 250 types of loans.
But overall we had about 60 totally separate programs for other functions in other departments which just a team of us two programmers plus a trainer plus hardware person. We were all kept pretty busy but when we weren’t, I was always looking for ways to make the bank better and the same to the next place I worked out.
That was a fun read, thanks.
Loved reading all of this! Hope you feel better soon, as pointed out above, fasting and keto diet might help. Having said that, don’t let me derail the topic here.
Not my main machine as such but using Haiku almost 7 days a week on my sub machine, a quad core 4770k with 32GB RAM and it’s pretty much solid.
IceWeasel’s release is the reason why I now use Haiku rather than another linux box as an additional screen to access 3rd party web apps for complex games such as Star Citizen, Stellaris, Satisfactory, Elite Dangerous such. Web apps such as Inara.cz, EDSM, EDGalaxy and EDSY etc. are fairly sophisicated apps and some contain 2D and 3D star fields. And while the 3D aspect in not lightning fast, its perfectly acceptable and doesnt feel sluggish given the age of the machine.
Also use it to play web radio and print PDFs to the one printer that works (Epson B500).
What’s stopping me using it as my main OS? Lack of multi screen multi resolution support. Epson Ecotank ET-8550 support, Steam / GOG support and Pimax VR support and HOTAS / Pedal support. Basically I still need windows 11 because even Proton on Linux can’t manage some of my wierd-ass peripherals so it’s nothing against Haiku but it will have to remain my side OS.
https://i.imgur.com/MJrRiO6.jpeg ← A kinda meta image of me writing this post.
Ngl, that’s a pretty nice workstation you got there. Granted, part of me wants to tell you to ditch Win 11 but on the other hand if you’re still using it there must be some app there that just wouldn’t work in Wine/Proton. (EDIT: nvm, I missed the part where you explained that)
We don’t have any sort of official support for GoG but we do have a command-line utility that can interact with the service, lgogdownloader, I often use it to download games that have source ports on Haiku or that I want to run on DOSbox.
Of course that usually means downloading .exe installer files but the ones GoG uses can be extracted using innoextract so it’s all good.
I do hope we get to have at least similar tools for Steam someday, there’s probably a bunch available somewhere in the FOSS community but I haven’t checked tbh.
May I recommend you Smalltalk? Interactivity and state persistence may help to avoid keeping too much stuff in your head. Though, building something big without enough focus would still be hard.
I ported opensmalltalk-vm, so you can play with Squeak and Cuis on Haiku. I also plan to port Pharo someday, and maybe even Glamorous Toolkit.
RE: Wine/Proton - Can you play any AAA games using this? I mostly play “Seven Days To Die” (I turn off the zombies because I personally like playing in a sandbox) and Baldur’s Gate 3.
I’m assuming that neither of these can be played. But just checking to see if anyone knows. If you’ve read any of my posts above, I mostly play games to help me concentrate on something OTHER than my health/pain issues. Games gives me a distraction.
And if anyone wants more stories about the unusual programs/scripts I created, just let me know and I can tell you about more of them.
For instance, I played Dungeons and Dragaons during the ‘80s and ‘90s until I got stupid and let pain derail some friendships. But during the time that we played, I took ALL of your D&D books and put EVERYTHING into a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet.
I then created the best/closest character sheet to the D&D version that I could. And then I made it so that if you typed in an item name or a spell name it would show you all the information for it plus modify any status like Armor Class, Health Points, etc., etc., etc..
The plan was to eventually write a program in C (or JAVA) but this spreadsheet cut down the time of creating a character from a minimum of hurrying through which took maybe 45 minutes down to about 10. Or a fully fleshed out and thought out character from a couple hours to 30 minutes. And since spreadsheets have multiple sheets, I could have as many characters as I wanted in that file and quickly and easily switch between them and update them anytime I found an item (including gold pieces of whatever) and my stats would change (if the item changed anything). It made playing D&D much more enjoyable because I could spend more time focusing on my personality of my characters since it took such a lot less time in creating them.
My typical character was a cleric/thief. Kind of a Robin Hood character that was also a medic.
Unfortunately when I stopped playing D&D that file has backups on 3.5 “floppy disks” and I have over 3,000 of them and nothing to read the disks with and I Lotus 1-2-3 went the way of the dodo bird so I could have to rewrite all the functions to work again. It gave me maybe ten years of great fun with D&D.
I realize that all of these have little to do with writing programs in C or something like that. But C can do pretty much anything if you put the time into it and people know that. But who thought you could have a fully functional character sheet in a Spreadsheet that saved you a LOT of time and made it more fun? I think nobody.
As for my “day job”, with the bank I work for I started out on IBM and HP mainframes writing in COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG and of course BASIC.
When the bank I originally worked for sold the mainframe we had to move to PCs. No big deal you say? Well this was in 1983 when FEW people knew DOS and neither my boss and I knew DOS or PCs, we haven’t seen DOS yet. And we had to convert everything from COBOL to C PLUS learn how to use a PC and PC networks and troubleshoot programs AND teach all of the employees how to use a PC. And we only had six months to do EVERYTHING.
The only thing my boss and I didn’t have to do was run the mainframe which was done by one person and we had a trainer that didn’t know PCs either and she was responsible for training all our mortgage loan officers how to use our custom Automated Loan Processing System that is used when you go and try to get a home mortgage.
But my first job with the bank, my entry level job, was writing, from the ground up, ALL of the programs that the Loan Accounting Department used because they did everything on paper and didn’t use computers yet because nobody had written the programs for them yet. That’s how I broke into a job writing programs.
If you want more stories, I have them. If you want me to move to a different topic I can do that too.
