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| Developer interview: how Haiku is building a better BeOS |
| By special contributor rohan_p on 2012-08-08 15:21:35 |
| BeOS may be dead, but over a decade after its lamentable demise the open source Haiku project keeps its legacy alive. Haiku is an attempt to build a drop-in, binary compatible replacement for BeOS, as well as extending the defunct OS's functionality and support for modern hardware. At least, that's the short-term goal - eventually, Haiku is intended significantly enhance BeOS while maintaining the same philosophy of simplicity and transparency, and without being weighed down with the legacy code of many other contemporary operating systems. Computerworld Australia recently caught up with Stephan Assmus, who has been a key contributor to the project for seven years for a lengthy chat about BeOS, the current state of Haiku and the project's future plans. |
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| RE[2]: Haiku and Linux |
| By CapEnt on 2012-08-08 18:56:25 |
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The issue here is not only the look (imho, Haiku indeed looks dated), but their overall architecture: Haiku is more integrated, more standardized and is a overall cleaner design for a desktop OS (not server) than Linux. Despite dozens of efforts by Linux community to integrate the DE with the core OS, it still fells like a gigantic wrapper on top of a mess, who gives a overall fragility to it. For a power user who likes total control and has patience to keep track of every single application (and their versions) installed, this is not a issue, they don't need a wrapper. Just a window manager who can put a terminal anywhere in the screen is enough. But, for a naive but curious and tech-savvy user, who likes to mess with his computer hardware but don't care that much about the OS, he is forced so many times to use a terminal, so he can edit entirely non intuitive configurations, that it gives the feeling that a single mistake can bring the whole world down. (while on Windows, it would mean, more often than less, a box about "where is the driver?".) Edited 2012-08-08 18:58 UTC |
 - Score: 4 |
| RE: Haiku and Linux |
| By Gone fishing on 2012-08-08 19:48:23 |
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> It's quite appalling to think about it, but Haiku, as incomplete and visually aged as it is today, still manages to be a better desktop OS than Windows. It's a shame that it never got serious attention of any large company.[/miss_q] It was a great desktop, stunningly better than Windows 9x. It is a shame that it never became a viable desktop OS mainly due to lack of applications. I still think its a great OS that in some ways compares favourably to any desktop Linux - Windows or whatever. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[3]: Its AÃ��ïÂÂ&i |
| By orsg on 2012-08-08 20:31:16 |
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it's pronounciation differs dramatically from what you would expect from ss, namely it's the complete opposite (long instead of short). If you want to get rid of it, please don't try to make things more wrong. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: Haiku and Linux |
| By moondevil on 2012-08-08 20:51:56 |
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> The issue here is not only the look (imho, Haiku indeed looks dated), but their overall architecture: Haiku is more integrated, more standardized and is a overall cleaner design for a desktop OS (not server) than Linux. Quite true. Back in BeOS days, it was for me the right successor to Amiga, sadly never took off. If Apple had taken BeOS instead of NeXStep, while managing to arrive at the same state the company has now, no one would be getting Mac OS X (former BeOS) because of its UNIX roots, funnily enough. On the other hand we would have a great multimedia OS. |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE[3]: Its AÃ��ïÂÂ&i |
| By ebasconp on 2012-08-08 20:56:02 |
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> nonetheless it's a useless character and should have been abolished many decades ago... Disagree here; those special characters shape a language. I'm a native Spanish speaker and 'á', 'ñ', '¿' or 'ü' are part of its history and personality. Currently a lot of people write without using tildes, and, though their texts are perfectly understandable, their texts show their poor level of language handling too. |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE[2]: Haiku and Linux |
| By izomiac on 2012-08-08 21:31:22 |
| What the UI looks like is probably the least important factor IMHO. It's like the walls in your home, after a short while you forget what color they are. Of course, for marketing purposes it's vital, but Haiku isn't designed to attract customers, it's designed to be usable. |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE: Haiku and Linux |
| By No it isnt on 2012-08-08 21:32:00 |
| Just exactly what does Haiku or BeOS do better than Linux? My question is as genuine as it is rhetorical. |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE: Its A�mus not Assmus! |
| By rohan_p on 2012-08-09 00:17:51 |
| I submitted it with an ß, though I have to admit I didn't notice in the preview if it was displaying correctly... |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[4]: Its AÃ��ïÂÂ&i |
| By Doc Pain on 2012-08-09 00:39:54 |
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> Disagree here; those special characters shape a language. Especially compount words in the german language profit from ligatures like the Eszett. (Yes, it's not a letter, it's a ligature consisting of two lowercase s, precisely long-s plus round-s, forming a unit that's not hyphenated, dissolving to SS when capitalized, and has nothing to do with "vowel length"). Example: Meßstrecke vs. Messstrecke (measuring track) Just count the consonants! It also improves reading: Bambuseßstäbchen vs. Bambussessstäbchen (today's common "short vowel" nonsense spelling error included) (bamboo chopstick) The Eszett is a typographical aspect of the language that helps to differentiate words. In Switzerland, those two are only distinguishable from context, not from written representation: Buße (penalty fee) vs. Busse (buses) Maße (measures) vs. Masse (mass) If Eszett cannot be typed, it's common to replace it by ss (which is a valid and common replacement). If it's neccessary to "preserve" the Eszett (e. g. to write a name of a person), instead of ss also sz may be used (because it appears "validly" only in easily recognizable exceptions, so you can be sure sz means Eszett). This concept is nearly exclusively used in teletype and data transmission via basic ASCII. |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE[2]: Haiku and Linux |
| By galvanash on 2012-08-09 02:44:13 |
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> Just exactly what does Haiku or BeOS do better than Linux? My question is as genuine as it is rhetorical. That's easy. Two things... Uncompromising responsiveness. It is a heavily threaded, tightly scheduled, single user OS with a UI that is designed to respond with absolute minimal latency, even when heavily taxed. Simplicity. When you start digging into the guts of the file system and peel back the initial layers of the OS you find... Nothing. There are few if any layered abstractions. The same goes for the API, the number of moving parts is quite small. Is either of these things the most important attributes of an OS? Not really, but that is kind of the point. The priorities of BeOS/Haiku are and have always been different from most other Operating Systems. |
| - Score: 3 |
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