I have said it before, Haiku feels like it is simultaneously 20 years in the future and 20 years in the past. The interface is so incredibly snappy but there is a lot of basics missing such as WiFi support.
Seeing a modern browser supported does fill a big gap however. Who knows maybe one day through a series of silly unpredictable events it will be the OS of choice and running Ladybird browser in a similar fashion.
I absolutely adore the way that HaikuOS looks and feels. It's like a direct evolution of the classic Mac OS UI. So incredibly snappy and responsive and with minimal visual clutter. I keep an old thinkpad around with Haiku just for when I need to do word processing with no distractions.
Right but we need a dose of realism. They don't develop the drivers, and they don't make the hardware. If the manufacturer doesn't care, then that's that.
It's a network problem. Manufacturers aren't gonna care unless it's a big OS with lots of users. Your OS won't get a lot of users unless it has drivers. So the result is stagnation, and only the Big 3 OS continuing. Well... really the Big 2. Mac OS is a unique situation.
Mac OS 9 felt pretty darned fast on my 400Mhz iMac G3 back in 2000. Same for Windows 2000 on my parents’ PIII 750Mhz Dimension 4100. The only time anything felt slow is when a significant amount of data needed to be loaded from their hard drives.
Not all machines were like this though, we also had a Compaq Presario with some kind of Celeron running 98SE and that thing did feel slow more often than not, especially after several months of usage with the cruft buildup that comes with that.
I think the rule (at least while Moore's law was in force), was UIs start out boated but become fast as the hardware catches up. For instance, your example:
> Mac OS 9 felt pretty darned fast on my 400Mhz iMac G3 back in 2000.
You were using a UI that (at its core) was built for 1984 machine, with sixteen additional years of hardware performance improvements.
Every once in a while I boot up a Mac from 1989, and Mac OS is definitely not snappy on it.
I think if you want speed, you need to find something built for a system far more constrained than the one you're actually using. The choices the developers made to make the system merely usable under those constraints will make it fast once they're removed.
That makes a lot of sense, and I agree. Perhaps a good baseline to develop against today to produce a similar result on modern hardware would be something like a Core 2 Duo or Core i5-750 and Geforce 9600 GT.
Not only slower, right? I mean, for UIs, there is the same race to the bottom going on as in other parts of the industry.
It needs to be a big show, and everybody must be able to directly understand it without any learning curve or even rtfm.
Everything else (ergonomics, features, ...) are too often secondary values.
I wouldn't say that UIs were great in the 90s. They weren't. It was also harder to implement them. The programming languages were more tedious, low-level, etc.
But as so often, it's disappointing what we do with our additional power today. Snappiness wouldn't even be my first concern, though.
Same for MacOS 6 and 7 on period hardware. It’s anything but snappy. MacOS 7 on PPC was snappy compared to Windows 95 on Intel, and that’s it. Amiga was snappy, compared to Windows, but I have a working Amiga 600 and it’s not a great platform even for email.
The apps were snappy, but the hardware wasn't. Every menu/window opened immediately and without unnecessary animation... unless it needed some unexpected processing - then you were potentially waiting for the spinning rust to handle the swap file.
The UI was minimalistic, but with better hardware we also wanted nicer fonts, transitions, wobbly windows (I actually miss those) and countless other nice things that take time.
Also, it’s pointless to open a menu in less time than it takes the screen to refresh.
Most desktop have such options, kde and gnome too.for instance.
I am pretty sure this is good old resistance to change. You would disabled them on all your systems, then force yourself to use them that way for a month and I am pretty sure that "disorientation" would quickly disappear.
I strongly disagree with this statement. Every new version of Windows feels slower than the last one. Linux DEs are either very outdated and very snappy or somewhat modern and only barely snappier than Windows. I have zero experience with MacOS.
CRT screens were also 60Hz.
Look at the latency along all steps of the pipeline to get a keypress visible on the screen... https://danluu.com/input-lag/
Many were above 60Hz and it depends on resolution. An iMac G3 for instance could do 75Hz at 1024x768 or 640x480 at 117Hz. Someone recently got a CRT at 700Hz too:
No, an extra ~17 msec of delay is not even close to the cause of this. The speed difference between older and newer UIs is still apparent even at 60 Hz.
Future comes in at point were we actually circle back. "Black is always in fashion" kind of thing.
Ditch modern ad endpoints (a.k.a. operating systems) and go back to those distros we used 20 years ago. Accept that those don't support DRM, carefully choose our hardware (as its barely supported), and stick to it until it dies.
The thing i miss most from that time is Window Maker. I'd love to have again those tiny tiles with small graphs and buttons, but for more modern use cases.
That's actually amazing. Can't wait for dockable apps support. That could be a killer app for operators - half desktop, half monitoring dashboard, haha :) I can already see those dockable tiles with Prometheus metrics.
The thing I liked most in the NeXT was the sparing use of color. It was part necessity, but also usability. What does the color of the window bar being blue communicate?
I am an enthusiast for Gnome’s less is more approach.
The original NeXTcube was 4-bit grayscale, but there was a graphics card available which supported 24-bit colour. The later NeXTstations supported 12-bit colours without any additional hardware.
I have 3 x64 boxes with 3 different wifi chipsets that work with no issues. The only chipset that doesnt work for me is the bm4360 chips used in Apple hardware. A 7$ usb wifi dongle solves that problem.
How would you use WiFi on Haiku if it were there? I thought people mostly use Haiku inside VMs like VirtualBox so network connection goes through an emulated fiber.
I dream of Haiku being ported to Raspberry Pi and I even was sadly surprised it isn't - to me the primary value of Raspberry Pi seems it being an uniform standard hardware platform, this sounds like a great enabler for alternative OSes as lack of need to support all sorts of different hardware makes the thing a lot easier.
The raspberry pie is a very odd computer which is hard to develop for. There are much better targets that are both simpler to develop for, cheaper, and easily available.
And we never really got any of them working, so I would contest that. Many years ago, I asked about Pi 2 support on the Haiku forums and there was a lot of ill will towards Broadcom closed binaries. I pointed at the Plan9 port and a couple more examples and nothing happened.
I tried the same thing several times with the Pi 3 and the Pi 4, and someone more vocally pointed towards RISC-V. Some four years later, there is a somewhat working RISC-V port, but in the meantime there is still no working ARM port of any real use.
On the whole, I was not overly impressed with the Haiku OS community where it regards exploring widely popular platforms that, despite having some challenges, would provide them with a larger audience. It's their call, but as an original BeOS user (and who can actually spot the Be Book from my couch as I'm typing this) and someone who's spent the past two years delving into the Rockchip ecosystem, I'm quite saddened by the way things went. It's not as if they lacked other ARM options, they just a) didn't have the resources and b) were perhaps a tad too opinionated.
The RISC-V port was done almost entirely by one developer who took an interest in it. It wasn't as though the project got together and decided to prioritize RISC-V over ARM; it was just that someone did a port, and then it got (mostly) upstreamed. Nobody has taken an equivalent interest in ARM, in large part because, well, the developers are all running x86 machines as you might expect, so that's what Haiku gets developed on. If someone comes along (or one of the existing developers takes interest) in working on the ARM port more, we will hardly reject the patches!
Opinions aside, they just don't have the resources for ports. That's the shame: that this project isn't more popular.
Linux doesn't have this problem anywhere close to the way Haiku does.
I am, although I do not use it as a daily driver, I have bare metal installs on two different computers. In my experience, it is very snappy, and always fast, except for some browsers, and wifi support for my specific wifi cards is there, and works fine, although not perfectly.
In regard to using it as a daily system, browser-wise, especially since Firefox has been ported, it works well enough. Webmail can be used fairly easily, but most of the email clients available only support regular pop/imap authentication, and not oauth.
But then, whether you can daily drive it depends on your specific use cases and hardware.
What would be interesting is if AppleBe still ends up merging with NeXT a few years later, and Jobs doesn’t immediately scrap the hybrid BeOS platform immediately…
Given the famous keynote where he announced killing OpenDoc and other efforts, I am not so sure about that, regarding scrapping the hybrid BeOS platform.
I had decent success with it on an 11th-gen Framework 13. Power management was finicky, but it was also finicky under OpenBSD, which makes me think it was a hardware or firmware issue. I haven't tried it since upgrading to the latest firmware, so maybe the combination of that plus whatever bugfixes have happened in the last couple years might've improved things.
My guess - BeOS and Haiku are not Linux based systems (not BSB, nor any other OS.) People that use Haiku probably do so out of choice and I guess they already know Linux exists. If they wanted to use Linux, they probably would. IMO, stating "just use Linux" therefore seems super obnoxious.
Seeing a modern browser supported does fill a big gap however. Who knows maybe one day through a series of silly unpredictable events it will be the OS of choice and running Ladybird browser in a similar fashion.