I always liked the BeOS interface—at least, in the context of the early 90s, when its popularity peaked—but I find it pointless to clone a 20+ year-old UI. With Kinect, Leap Motion, and other forms of input, it seems like there's a huge opportunity to get away from the traditional windowed UI that has dominated desktop OSes.
Not to knock Haiku OS—I just feel that if someone is going to create a desktop OS from scratch, it's a chance to do something really different. I see this as a missed opportunity.
It's not the UI that excited technologists enough to recreate it from scratch. It was the design of the operating system and its API.
BeOS was state-of-the-art when it was written, in the sense that it took the accumulated wisdom and academic research up to that point as its starting point. And in many ways it is still state-of-the-art.
They didn't set out to create something new and wonderful, they wanted the operating system that they loved to have a life after Be. Recreating that OS was a design goal, because if they had decided to create something new and different then they would have had to sit down and figure out what exactly that means and nothing would have ever gotten done.
Haiku has always been about recreating R5, just a bit more modern, because it's a goal everyone can agree on and no major design work was necessary.
Can anyone comment on the code quality in Haiku? From the FAQ it appears most of the code is new and little was carried over from BeOS. Also, will it include the GNU toolchain and standard libraries such as SDL? How difficult will it be to maintain cross-platform applications?
No code was kept from BeOS except for a few high-level components that were open-sourced while Be was still around (e.g., the Tracker). I've general found the new code to be high quality whenever I've delved into it, but I have only ever run Haiku in a VM, and then, only in short bursts. In other words, my experiences were all good, but there are few of them.
As far as development: the GNU tool chain exists, and is indeed the foundational tool chain. There's also a high level of de facto POSIX compliance (though neither BeOS nor (current version of) Haiku are multiuser), and many libraries you'd expect are available just fine. Even some large ones, like Qt. This makes porting fairly easy—and much like on OS X, it's easy to wrap a native Haiku GUI around existing tools.
The one bad part of development on Haiku is that the old-world C++ API has resulted in some compiler weirdness. Haiku aims for full binary compatibility...with C++ apps written on GCC 2.95. But developers, of course, want GCC 4. So what happens is that, much like OS X has fat PowerPC/x86 binaries, Haiku has fat GCC 2.95/GCC 4 libraries. This doesn't actually make development a pain, but it requires a bit of heads-up to navigate the linking situation
Well, I see Haiku becomes more and more popular. I wonder on one thing - why would I be interested in next operating system if I have Windows 7 and Linux? What does it have that those systems haven't? I think authors of Haiku should find that and make sure that people that visit their site will read about that.
IMO BeOS was to operating systems what Opera is to browsers. Innovative, good ideas, efficient, ... but few people use it.
I remember demo-ing BeOS to a friend by opening a ton of videos at the same time. He replied that Windows did that as well, until he tried it and the system was trashing after the 3rd video. The "pauze" button in the copy/paste progress bar ... a revelation.
There are literally millions of smart hackers out there and only 1 entity has ever managed to put a state-of-the-art UI on top of a Unix core: Apple.
[I will get flamed for speaking that way about Gnome and KDE, but they fall a little short, IMHO. This being said, I don't blame the Gnome or KDE teams for it. I blame the gazillions of distributions that add nothing beside a theme or a background picture to the base packages they get from Ubuntu or Red Hat. At least these Haiku guys seem to be adopting a more ambitious approach.]
Why is that?
I think an awful lot of people take on projects solely to make a name for themselves...or because they truly believe they know better than Linus or some other pundit they happen to despise.
A prophecy: The first entity to put a state-of-the-art UI on top of Linux will have an opportunity to compete with Apple directly.
You are not getting down-voted for speaking ill of Gnome/KDE but rather for making a completely subjective statement as though it were established, objective fact.
I have used OS X as my primary OS for long periods of time (totaling about 15 months) on two separate occasions and I currently use XFCE. For me, OS X is unusable garbage.
Am I somehow fundamentally defective as a human being? Or do I just have different preferences than you? The latter seems far more likely to me.
> A prophecy: The first entity to put a state-of-the-art UI on top of Linux....
Already been done by Google with Android. It's state-of-the-art in the sense that it's a touch-based mobile UI, and it does compete with Apple directly...
Although, if you mean Linux in the sense of a full-fledged traditional GNU/Linux Unix userspace..the closest we've got is probably something like Ubuntu.
> There are literally millions of smart hackers out there
> and only 1 entity has ever managed to put a state-of-the-art
> UI on top of a Unix core: Apple.
I wouldn't say ever. At some point in time, IRIX and Solaris (at least!) both had state-of-the-art GUIs on top of Unix. Apple's state-of-the-art GUI-on-Unix was inherited from NeXTSTEP.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "state-of-the-art", but I think you're over-representing Apple's relative quality. I've used various versions of OS X for significant amounts of time, but I've never seen what makes them so much better than everybody else. Gnome and KDE aren't perfect, but Apple isn't any better. (Seriously, I can't have a full-screen program on one monitor and normal programs on another, and that's the state of the art? I hope not.)
On top of that, I've found that most of the problems with KDE (I haven't actually used Gnome much) have been consistently eliminated in newer versions. When I started using KDE around 4.4, I was annoyed by several little details. Somehow, even without any input from me (I'm really lazy), almost all of these little issues were fixed in subsequent versions.
For example, the GTk build of Emacs can only be resized to the nearest character--you cannot have a window that overlaps has half a character off screen in either direction. This actually makes sense for Emacs; certain normal commands and interface elements would not work properly if you could resize that way. Normally, this is not a problem; however, if you used KDE's fullscreen shortcut, it would properly hide the borders and maximize Emacs, but it would leave a strip of desktop visible because Emacs can only be sized to the nearest character. This was a little annoying, but certainly not a horrible problem, and yet it was actually fixed shortly after I found it. Now fullscreen mode fills in any stripes like that with the correct background color, even taking things like transparency into account.
Over all, KDE is still the best desktop environment I've used anywhere. Given the relatively smaller amount of resources behind the project, I'm very impressed.
To compete with Apple directly on the desktop you need more than a good UI. You need Microsoft Office, Adobe Create Suite, and other staples of the computing world.
This is why many argue that Microsoft agreeing to produce Office for Apple back when Apple was nearly bankrupt was far more important to them surviving than the money investment.
The final polish tha you are looking for gets the implementation into patent hell from what I understand.
I have been using OSX for as long as it was available, and I am starting to get tired of its look, but I am increasingly switching to just running as much as possible in iTerm 2 to be me as operating system agnostic as possible. Adobe software is holding that process back.
> A prophecy: The first entity to put a state-of-the-art UI on top of Linux will have an opportunity to compete with Apple directly.
I think this is Canonical's current strategy: they're not relying on KDE/Gnome to get their act together, rather they're trying to roll their own with Unity.
They had a shocking start (very unfinished when launched) but they're moving really quickly. I personally find it nice to use now. Still not at Apple levels of state-of-the-art or polish, but if they keep the pace up they'll overtake Win7 before long and within a few years might offer serious competition to Apple.
Everyone wants to (re)build their own pyramids (often from scratch) instead of just uniting to finish the top of the most promising one. But I don't judge too harsh the developers: my contribution to free & open source is quite small until now and free & open source it's a lot about free will and passion and not necessarily for the benefit of the world.
[+] [-] joshuamerrill|13 years ago|reply
Not to knock Haiku OS—I just feel that if someone is going to create a desktop OS from scratch, it's a chance to do something really different. I see this as a missed opportunity.
[+] [-] jacques_chester|13 years ago|reply
BeOS was state-of-the-art when it was written, in the sense that it took the accumulated wisdom and academic research up to that point as its starting point. And in many ways it is still state-of-the-art.
[+] [-] agildehaus|13 years ago|reply
Haiku has always been about recreating R5, just a bit more modern, because it's a goal everyone can agree on and no major design work was necessary.
[+] [-] ginko|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deltasquared|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reedlaw|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gecko|13 years ago|reply
As far as development: the GNU tool chain exists, and is indeed the foundational tool chain. There's also a high level of de facto POSIX compliance (though neither BeOS nor (current version of) Haiku are multiuser), and many libraries you'd expect are available just fine. Even some large ones, like Qt. This makes porting fairly easy—and much like on OS X, it's easy to wrap a native Haiku GUI around existing tools.
The one bad part of development on Haiku is that the old-world C++ API has resulted in some compiler weirdness. Haiku aims for full binary compatibility...with C++ apps written on GCC 2.95. But developers, of course, want GCC 4. So what happens is that, much like OS X has fat PowerPC/x86 binaries, Haiku has fat GCC 2.95/GCC 4 libraries. This doesn't actually make development a pain, but it requires a bit of heads-up to navigate the linking situation
[+] [-] JulianMorrison|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krollew|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toemetoch|13 years ago|reply
I remember demo-ing BeOS to a friend by opening a ton of videos at the same time. He replied that Windows did that as well, until he tried it and the system was trashing after the 3rd video. The "pauze" button in the copy/paste progress bar ... a revelation.
[+] [-] EternalFury|13 years ago|reply
[I will get flamed for speaking that way about Gnome and KDE, but they fall a little short, IMHO. This being said, I don't blame the Gnome or KDE teams for it. I blame the gazillions of distributions that add nothing beside a theme or a background picture to the base packages they get from Ubuntu or Red Hat. At least these Haiku guys seem to be adopting a more ambitious approach.]
Why is that?
I think an awful lot of people take on projects solely to make a name for themselves...or because they truly believe they know better than Linus or some other pundit they happen to despise.
A prophecy: The first entity to put a state-of-the-art UI on top of Linux will have an opportunity to compete with Apple directly.
[+] [-] glesica|13 years ago|reply
I have used OS X as my primary OS for long periods of time (totaling about 15 months) on two separate occasions and I currently use XFCE. For me, OS X is unusable garbage.
Am I somehow fundamentally defective as a human being? Or do I just have different preferences than you? The latter seems far more likely to me.
[+] [-] spamizbad|13 years ago|reply
Already been done by Google with Android. It's state-of-the-art in the sense that it's a touch-based mobile UI, and it does compete with Apple directly...
Although, if you mean Linux in the sense of a full-fledged traditional GNU/Linux Unix userspace..the closest we've got is probably something like Ubuntu.
[+] [-] groovy2shoes|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tikhonj|13 years ago|reply
On top of that, I've found that most of the problems with KDE (I haven't actually used Gnome much) have been consistently eliminated in newer versions. When I started using KDE around 4.4, I was annoyed by several little details. Somehow, even without any input from me (I'm really lazy), almost all of these little issues were fixed in subsequent versions.
For example, the GTk build of Emacs can only be resized to the nearest character--you cannot have a window that overlaps has half a character off screen in either direction. This actually makes sense for Emacs; certain normal commands and interface elements would not work properly if you could resize that way. Normally, this is not a problem; however, if you used KDE's fullscreen shortcut, it would properly hide the borders and maximize Emacs, but it would leave a strip of desktop visible because Emacs can only be sized to the nearest character. This was a little annoying, but certainly not a horrible problem, and yet it was actually fixed shortly after I found it. Now fullscreen mode fills in any stripes like that with the correct background color, even taking things like transparency into account.
Over all, KDE is still the best desktop environment I've used anywhere. Given the relatively smaller amount of resources behind the project, I'm very impressed.
[+] [-] draven|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tensor|13 years ago|reply
This is why many argue that Microsoft agreeing to produce Office for Apple back when Apple was nearly bankrupt was far more important to them surviving than the money investment.
[+] [-] timc3|13 years ago|reply
I have been using OSX for as long as it was available, and I am starting to get tired of its look, but I am increasingly switching to just running as much as possible in iTerm 2 to be me as operating system agnostic as possible. Adobe software is holding that process back.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] joneil|13 years ago|reply
I think this is Canonical's current strategy: they're not relying on KDE/Gnome to get their act together, rather they're trying to roll their own with Unity.
They had a shocking start (very unfinished when launched) but they're moving really quickly. I personally find it nice to use now. Still not at Apple levels of state-of-the-art or polish, but if they keep the pace up they'll overtake Win7 before long and within a few years might offer serious competition to Apple.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ElCabron|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ElCabron|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfc|13 years ago|reply
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