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

101

I took a brief look at abiword haiku port several years ago and I would recommend to throw it all away and strart from scratch to save some time.

It completely ignores that haiku runs windows in separate threads, causing constant crashes and corruptions. If I remember correctly, it uses archived windows for most of the layout, and there is no sourcecode to generate them, or the tool to do so is lost. And Abiword itself isn’t that great, and at the time it wasn’t actively maintained. Add to this the hositiliy of the maintainers towards keeping an extra port (at the time, things may have changed).

And in the end you end up with something that is native (by some definition), but does not even feel native. And with LibreOffice being available, you don’t even solve a problem for Haiku users.

I decided to put my time elsewhere.

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102

Thanks for the clarification,that changes the situation completely.
A application that has a native UI but otherwise doesn’t work in the Haiku way doesn’t add much value.
At that point it wouldn’t be much better than LibreOffice that looks almost native due to the high-quality Qt port,but doesn’t open and react as fast as you’d expect from a native app (probably due to it being ported,or maybe just because it’s a very huge application).
I currently have enough active projects to not also get into AbiWord development,knowing those facts.

103

When there are already established alternatives that work well, like Libreoffice and Calligra, there is little incentive to try something else that doesn’t work very well.

Whilst it would be nice to have a native WP program, the advantages probably don’t merit the effort that it would need.

104

Well, not really an stopper, but something that annoy me pretty much:

Since some months, the Haiku forums are barely usable under Haiku 32 bits. Not sure if was related to latest update in the forum software, or some weird regression on WebPositive, but browsing the forums became painfully slow and buggy. Using Falkon is not much better.

Hope some day we could have a forum that is not an steaming pile of javascript…

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105

Qemu is emulating the CPU in software, which is very slow. Hopefully the NVMM hypervisor port will address this when it’s more mature.

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106

I am unable to provide update to haikuwebkit for 32 bit because the build on beta5 with the old memory allocator doesn’t work. This means you are stuck with an old release of webkit until beta6 is available and haikuports builders sart using it. We’re way overdue for a release…

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107

I used Lotus 1-2-3 and then unfortunately IBM stopped updating/supporting Lotus Office and had to switch to WordPerfect Office as much as I could but for work I had to use Excel (the ONLY good product MS has - the rest is sewer grade including VisualBasic) with me programming in VisualBasic (one of the languages I programmed in).

My point is that Libre Office has too many things that are just SO different than anything I’ve used before and I’ve spent probably 200 hours trying to convert one of my “complicated” spreadsheets (just the formulas without getting to VB yet) and there are things that Libre Office just doesn’t do nor is there a way to do some of the things that I do a LOT in spreadsheets. And the list isn’t short, I came up with over 50 things (and stopped counting) of things I just couldn’t figure out how to do in Libre Office that I did in Lotus 1-2-3, Quattro Pro (WordPerfect Office) and Excel and even Apple Numbers which is pathetically inadequate in a lot of ways which I’ve complain nicely and BETTERLY to Apple about, both with the speed of the spreadsheet program and automation.

I stopped trying over a year ago with Libre Office. IF there was a way for me to do “everything I NEED” to do in Haiku, that would be one of the HUGE sticking points as even though I’m retired, I keep traffic of a basketball league with stats and just don’t see how to convert my current spreadsheets to it.

For instance, I had tables that have pointers to other tables. I don’t see how to do that EASILY in Libre Office. Something that is very simple in other spreadsheet programs is just very hard in Libre Office. I REALIZE that they feel they have to be different. But I think they took it TOO far.

108

Yes, I used M$ operating systems. Note that I was born in 1960 so “growing up with” isn’t the same for me as you. But I didn’t just “grow up” with M$ but I also used on average four different OSs every month with over 50 hours for each including OS/2, Linux and Mac while also “trying” to use other OSs for as much as I could with me switching as time went on and some options died and others appeared.

At one point I had a spreadsheet of 50 operating systems noting everything that I personally did and what the OSs could do. I also kept track of speed, crashes, over 30 different things that I was interested in.

My FAVORITE OS all time is OS/2, second was the “ideas of BeOS” which plenty of people love and hence Haiku, then since 1998 it was more Classic Mac → Mac OS X → MacOS and my least favorite of all OSs I’ve ever tested is Windows for a LOT of reasons. I’ve used more than a dozen different distros of Linux trying to find one that didn’t irritate the heck out of me. I always had too many programs I was working on in different languages and different OSs to have time to “fiddle with Linux” as much as you have to. I personally like OSs where most of the things “just work” out of the box (so to speak).

One of the best, and in some cases the worst possible thing to ever happen was the internet. It made it too easy for viruses to spread. But at the same time we didn’t have to go to stores to buy software like milk where Microsoft spent more on shelf space than everyone else and they threatened that if you stocked OS/2 or other OSs that they wouldn’t see ANY of their software in that store.

I don’t know if you know this, and you might not even be aware of the federal anti-trust case against Microsoft during the last year that Bill Gates was CEO of Microsoft. M$ had a contract with ALL major PC hardware makers that they COULD NOT put, not even hiding, another OS on hard drives if someone bought a computer from them.

BeOS had MULTIPLE companies, at least 7 but I think the biggest one was Toshiba, that tried to hide BeOS on their “Windows” computers that they sold and M$ threatened to stop selling them Windows. That cut off any way for BeOS to get into the public eye. Be did everything they could to get noticed but nothing was enough and they went bankrupt. It was emails to Toshiba from M$ and other companies that got forwarded to the feds that started the anti-trust case against Microsoft which now allowed ANY PC company to install ANY OS they are willing to support without Microsoft able to use racketeering methods to stop them. If not for this, you wouldn’t see much if any PC hardware that ships with anything other than a M$ OS.

Unfortunately it was too late for Be by the time that Microsoft was forced to rip up the contract with all PC vendors allowing them to include any OS on their hard drives, hidden or visible.

Back in 1995 I first found out about BeOS (if you’ve never see the BeOS Demo Video → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ ) I was STUNNED and amazed to see it running 24 videos (albeit short videos) at the same time. And you could INSTANTLY click from one to the other and the sound would INSTANTLY switch to the new video that were all playing in small windows all at the same time. That’s when I bought a PC specifically to run BeOS though I don’t think they were making the Be Machine by that point. BeOS is my second favorite OS of all time after OS/2 with MacOS third ONLY because it does EVERYTHING I “NEED” to do. Windows is lower than #50 on my list. If I tested out more OSs it would be lower still.

Once a year I watch that BeOS demo and cry because of “what could have been”. Also, I LOVE the BeOS song. Listen to the BeOS demo video to hear it. The song is a catchy tune but also tells you what BeOS could do. :slight_smile:

I would have loved to help out with Haiku but was working on average 14 hour days for a bank and then another organization and I’m married, between the two I never had time to help out. Then pain from diabetes forced me to retire, that and the things the pain and the medication did to my memory (which is maybe 25% of what it used to be which stopped me from being able to program. Formulas in spreadsheets is the most I can do now unfortunately. If there was a way for me to help with Haiku I would love to but I honestly don’t know what I could contribute at this point.

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109

I should be very interested to see your list of things you can’t do in LibreOffice that you can do in MS Office.

Have you also compiled a list of things that you can’t do in MS Office that you can do in Libre0ffice?

Where I have encountered differences, there has always been a workaround, or the problem was trivial.

BTW, I agree with you about OS/2. I bought it when it first came out. You would go to your desk, start your computer, then make a cup of coffee and discuss your plans for the day with colleagues. At that point OS/2 was ready to use. In fairness, that was the first version. It improved after that.

But once it had started it was excellent.

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110

I will work on creating the list of what I do in Apple Numbers and I’m trying to do in Libré Office and reply to this. The basketball season is very busy but I got stuck pretty quickly on some things that I do and I will let you know what they are in the next few days.

OS/2 got faster and faster with each version. When I first was introduced to OS/2 through them contacting me and asking if I would be interested in something “new” that they were presenting. It turned out to be OS/2 2.0 beta.

I wore five hats for the bank I worked for at the time.

  • I was the primary contact for any problems anyone was having on both are mainframe and our PCs and PC networks. We had both but the mainframe was sold and then it was “just PCs and PC networks.
  • I was a COBOL and C programmer as the main parts of my job.
  • I had emails that went out to everyone letting them know about any updates to any of our systems.
  • I created digital versions of ALL of our forms using EFS (Electronic Forms Systems)
  • I managed a bunch of spreadsheets using Lotus 1-2-3 which is still my favorite spreadsheet
  • And a bunch of other thing.
  • We didn’t have leased lines going to all our Home Loan Centers (HLCs). Every day the HLCs would create or update loan applications. Downtown where I worked multiple departments like the Escrow dept and the team that sold loans to investors updated loan information (mostly notes to the loan officers). All the new/changed data from downtown had to be sent to every HLC every night. And every new/changed loan application had to be pulled from the HLCs to downtown.
    • I could do ONLY one thing on Win 3.1 or it would crash my compile, disconnect from dialup, **#$*# up printing, etc., etc., etc.,
    • With OS/2 with yes, double the RAM, I was able to do ALL of my jobs on one computer. I could, LITERALLY all at the same time.
      • Update compile large programs
      • Tell spreadsheets to recalculate cells which was VERY slow compared to now so you ended up having to wait up to minutes on large spreadsheets.
      • I could literally connect to FOUR HLCs using four modems connected to serial ports to the OS/2 computer and they ALMOST never failed.
        • Later I found a board with EIGHT serial ports. A guy from IBM had written a program that was buggy but if you had this specific board you could connect EIGHT modems to EIGHT different computer through dial up. It took me three months but I fixed his bugs and I was connecting to EIGHT remote computers through dial-up every night and it was FASTER than eighth DOS or Win 3.1 computers trying to do the same thing. OS/2 was AMAZING!
          • Later I was able to made that program use TWO modems like one so I could sent more data to one location at a time. I was working on being able to connect eight modems at one time work as one and then they notified me that they had bought leased lines and all that work was not moot.

I got probably 20% more work done using OS/2 than any combination of any amount of computers that I was using by myself to do things. Why? Because it ALMOST never crashed and I could quickly switch between different things to check on status of things I was doing.

Later I wrote a program that was able to monitor everything I was doing and a message would pop up that my compile was done or my spreadsheet was recalculated, that print jobs were done.

The 1990s were BY FAR my most productive years (mostly because bosses knew that I knew what I was doing and they left me alone to get things done) as a programmer with me learning new things and new ways to do things every week. It was easily THE BEST decade of my life!

I setup a computer with the OS/2 2.0 beta copy that I got to test it out. Yes, I did put double the RAM in the OS/2 computer because:

  • With DOS and Win 3.1 I had to have a separate computer for each main thing that I did (four computers). Why? Because back then you could only do one thing at a time in DOS and Win 3.1 was unreliable if you tried to do more than one thing. I had BIG spreadsheets and LARGE mortgage software that we supported.

Some things that I created back in the 1990s I had no clue that I could have created a company around them. The bank I was working for had no interest in licensing the software but it never dawned on me (I was too busy and just was never around anyone that told me things like that. It was mostly me and my boss who did his thing and I did mine and we were both VERY productive during the 1990s.

I’d literally let someone take my legs and body parts if I could go back and live those days ago. Of course it would be harder to get around and I needed all of my body to do some of the things, well a lot of things. But just for the programming that I was doing then. I was an amazing time and I wish I could have known that I would have been allowed to help people with OpenBeOS and so forth. I was too busy to realize that kind of thing. Unfortunately everything I’ve tried to remove the pain I have with diabetes only makes my memory worse or means I end up in more pain. There are some things wrong with our DNA that we have yet to figure out how to reverse or to make it so that things don’t happen to you like cancer, diabetes, etc., etc.,

111

Here’s a quick thing with Libré Office. If I try to copy and paste from any other spreadsheet program and try to paste it into Libré Office, what happens is that it doesn’t paste the cell contents into the row of cells where I have highlighted the first one of about 15 I want to paste into Libré Office.

How do you paste things into Libré Office INTO the cells that I have clicked on or I have clicked on the first thing in a row of cells I’m trying to paste into Libré Office?

Right now I would have to copy and paste each item to get them to go into Spread1 and not “over” Sheet1. I have too many things I would need to do that with to move things to Libré Office and use that. That is my first problem.

Maybe we could move this to another part of the forum for Libré Office?

I have about 15,000 cells to move over. One at a time just is NOT going to work. Also, when I pasted the cells into Libré Office, the cells it overlaid did not line up with the cells in sheet1 underneath them.

As for exporting a CSV file is an issue because in Numbers I have multiple tables on each sheet. Exporting to CVS creates a big mess of my tables and removes all formulas and formatting. That’s another issue I’m having.

112

TL;DR I could feasibly run Haiku on my laptop if power management/battery usage improved to be in the ballpark of linux.

On my main PC, quite a lot. I would need fully working wine/proton/steam and GPU acceleration and chromium based browsers (brave) as well as a huge amount of linux only things. Hence Haiku as a daily driver on my PC isn’t really possible. I do however have Haiku installed on a secondary drive to test the GPU drivers, which I’ll do the next time i’m ready to reboot.
On my laptop, on the other hand, most of what I do there can be done on Haiku. I think all I’d really need would be power management, and I think I could use the firefox and thunderbird ports in their current state, or hopefully in a better state. There are things that I cannot do on Haiku that I do on my laptop, but that is usually when I am not home with my PC and, and I could probably boot into linux when I’m away from home.