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Comment by cable2600 | Hacker News Reader

Free version of BeOS rewritten from scratch using the API levels for compatibility. One step closer to public release.

Its better than BeOS, has nvme support, xhci, efi boot, slab allocator, better Posix support, has Qt, webkit, FreeBSD based networking, layout engine, wifi, packages etc.

Yeah... it's been almost thirty years after all.

Not just API compatibility. To maintain ABI compatibility as well, at this point they are working with a fork of a really old gcc version that still implements this particular C++ ABI[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)#Compa...

That's only on the 32 bit version, and even there they also use GCC 8.

Is that a "recent" development? I remembered that from a few years back when I played around with Haiku in a VM, tried to port some programs and poked around in the kernel source out of curiosity.

It would explain, why I couldn't find that "how to build the toolchain" page anymore through some quick browsing and posted the Wikipedia reference instead. I guess somebody(TM) should update the Wikipedia page then.

I'm not actually sure how recent this is. Clicking through the Wayback Machine for their FAQ (http://web.archive.org/web/20150813135145/https://www.haiku-...), it looks like they've shipped the 32-bit versions with both GCC 2 and a newer version since at least 2015, starting with GCC 4 and getting newer as the years passed.

Is it promising as a basic daily system? Some modern web browser, email client, some common console tools or things like Python to run them? Or maybe there is a ports-like system developed unofficially?

I used to test every iso of Haiku I found, but it felt very much a development project then actual system for simple daily use. I wonder what's the status now.

I'd say iffy on the first. The native browser is based on a modern port of WebKit, but it's buggy and not feature-complete. Things like Youtube work in-browser, but not well (buggy player, sometimes choppy playback, etc.). Wasm doesn't work. It's otherwise pretty functional. There's no Firefox/Chromium. There are alternatives to the native browser, but they're not significantly better.

It has the second, and third (Python 3 is ported). It's POSIX-compliant, so there's tons of Linux/Unix CLI stuff available.

There is a package manager with a lot of software, both native and ported. Many of the staples are available (LibreOffice, VLC, etc.), but there's also a lot missing, some with alternatives (there's no GIMP, but there is Krita, for example).

Overall, I think it's usable as a basic system, but you could definitely run into some issues with software availability and web browsing if you want to do more powerful stuff.

> there's no GIMP, but there is Krita, for example

I wish they'd rather port Inkscape.

I'd check for native software first instead of Gimp, as Haiku had a lot of background on media production. My 2 cent tip.

Haiku's icons are vector based right? Is there a native Haiku vector art software?

There's a native icon editor.

Haiku has pretty good native audio, video and image editors.

>there's no GIMP, but there is Krita

Sounds like a win/win to me!

ArsTechnica did an in-depth review last year [1] which was also discussed on HN [2].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/a-decidedly-non-linu...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676975

The browser is said to use WebKit 612.1.21. This sounds relevant, although I'm not really sure how new 612.1.21 actually is. LibreOffice also is available already. As are Python 3.7 and VLC. Many people run Haiku on real hardware rather than in a VM (although I would speculate the HCL is rather humble).

This sounds pretty usable to me already.

Lazarus also is available which means the emerging Sublime-replacement CudaText editor can be ported as well as the Double Commander.

Is there any proprietary software from the era for the platform that is worth running today?

Honestly I still miss Gobe Productive. Fantastic productivity suite. Not very full-featured, but everything just came together in a smooth way I haven't seen replicated since.

Apparently some products still use it. TuneTracker is a system for running radio stations that uses Haiku http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/about_haiku.html

From the era? Probably not. I like GoBe Productive and actually used PoorMan for some internal stuff, but neither would be sufficient for most uses today.

However, TuneTracker and its associated suite of tools for radio station automation ran on BeOS and then on Haiku. It's been a few years since the website was updated, so I do not know if it's still active, but it was worth running in a very specific setting.

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