Comment by SingAlong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SingAlong | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I just had a chat on the #haiku channel on IRC.

I was planning to switch from Ubuntu to some lightweight OS (any other linux flavor).

This is just in its initial stages. Not many programs have been ported to work on this and it's based on the BeOS.

I asked about anything for web dev (since that's what I do), and it seems that the most they support (for webdev at the moment) is the web browser BeZilla (Firefox 2.5) or NetSurf (from BeOS). Java isn't supported yet.

Again, Haiku, as stated isn't a linux flavor, it's based on BeOS.

P.S: I have nothing against Haiku, when most programs are supported, I plan to try this out. A brand new OS with a kernel from ground up, seems like a fresh breath of air. Congrats to the Haiku team.

Of course, once most programs are supported, it won't be a lightweight OS any more. :) What looks like cruft from the outside is really the accumulation of patches necessary to make things work properly.

I like having to put those patches on myself. I like the bare bones with a minimal additional features :)

It sounds like Haiku is still in the "pine for the days" stage of development:

    Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote
    their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying
    to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you
    finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-
    nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just
    for you :-)

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/browse_thread/t...

It's been in development far too long at this point for that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com