Haiku Got Awesome. Really Awesome.

Today, let's install the bleeding edge nightly Haiku OS on an old Thinkpad, and see some of the incredible updates it's had, and find out if it really has enough features and software to use as a daily driver.

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#Haiku #BeOS #Thinkpad

[Vanders]

As the guy who was running the Syllable project for a decade I can not tell you how happy I am to see a Be-style OS reach this stage. It's an amazing achievement, and the Haiku team have done an amazing job!

[davel]

I was working PC retail when Intel was pushing the whole "Centrino" thing, and it was a real can of worms. Centrino was not a processor family (like Celeron, which it was frequently confused with), rather it was a set of Intel technologies (chipset, CPU, and wireless adapter) which together were called Centrino. They were trying to make it a "platform" when in all actuality it meant nothing. It was pure marketing and went nowhere. Currently Intel is using the Centrino name for some of its wireless adapters, but otherwise is no longer an active thing.

[Anon]

A peculiarity of this generation of Thinkpad is that the SATA controller, while being a SATA 2 one, is bios limited to SATA 1 speeds. There are modded bios like Middleton that remove this limit and add other features. So, it might boot even faster if it is actually running in SATA 2 mode.

[that_colin_guy]

The BeOS dream dies
But its spirit lives on in Haiku
An OS for us?

[fernwood]

I used BeOS as a daily driver at work for over a year around 2000. At the time most of my needs were a terminal and email client, which of course Be did well. The rest were things like media clients to listen to mp3s while I was working. The performance and stability always blew me away. Glad to see its spiritual successor is thriving. Who knows, maybe it will emerge beyond cult classic some day.

[xard]

Whenever I've played with Haiku it's been blazing fast: even on netbooks at the time.

I have to add that the Haiku UI has kept the best elements of the 90's design: very good contrast while looking really professional with a tiny hint of gradients being used here and there to pop important elements like buttons (but not overdoing it). I hope that we could get over the current nasty "dark age" of black / white + flat design and go using full range of color palette again.

[DistrosProjects]

I have some old machines running Haiku (some Dells and a ThinkPad) and it’s great! Definitely the fastest OS with CPU-only graphical rendering. I just wish sleep/wake worked.

[robertstratton]

I'm thrilled to see this OS getting more attention. There are a lot of little design decisions that run squarely away from stupid legacy encumbrances.

Perhaps one of the most important choices they made was to use a modern system for the concept of file types. Types in the file system are MIME types. No more being held hostage to "extensions" of 3 letters after a period. Others have tried this, like the Oracle Internet FIle System, but didn't demonstrate WHY it was so useful. There's a file type for "email message", and each message gets its own file. If you want to write or run a new email client (mail user agent), you just point it at the directory and *bang* the right thing happens.

The interprocess communication is a thing of beauty. Start a bouncing ball window and it will happily bounce within the frame. Start another and it will start roaming between the windows. Oh yeah, that works across a network too. As a network stack guy at one point, I loved how they assigned threads to network sessions.

One note of caution from a cybersecurity person: This is pretty much intended for single user use. That's not to say you can't have a bunch of processes and background servers and stuff. Rather, from a security enforcement standpoint, you have something much like UNIX file permissions, but systemwide security architecture and capabilities is probably one of those places where there's room for more work.

The go-to BeOS stress test was to see how many copies of the GL Teapot renderer you can run at once. Try it and then try it on your favorite modern commodity OS. You might be surprised at what happens.

[maladamedialabs]

I've been playing with Haiku for about a year now and it's getting closer to daily driver. I've been trying it on ancient desktops and yeah... it's fast. In my opinion, the lack of video drivers for both the Nvidia and AMD cards is a bit of an issue. With only VESA support more advanced video modes are out of the question. That said I'm hoping for a breakthrough in video drivers that will make Haiku a Really Useful OS. Thanks for the video!

[themaritimegirl]

I remember playing with Haiku 15 years ago on an AMD K6-2 machine. It's so cool to see it finally get the recognition it deserves.

[metalwolf]

I have a two thinkpads i picked up very similar to this. They were both $20 at a thrift store. Neither had HD trays or power supplies. I picked up the cheapest SSDs office max had at the time and used black gorilla tape to hold the SSDs into place. they still work very well.

[MARC]

I was very tempted to go the BeOS route after AmigaOS. It seemed to be the closest thing out there. I went to OS/2 Warp instead, as my job was leading me in the X86 direction.

[KohanIkin]

More Haiku shenanigans, please! I loved BeOS when I ran it as a daily driver in the early 2000s, kept using it in the YellowTAB days and keep checking in on Haiku occasionally to see if it's viable. I'm really curious to see how well the new Wine system is working on Haiku. But I also want to see Wolf3D on this thing!

[cypherian]

Great Video! I remember having my first: "Gawd, I'm so sick of Windows!" phase in the early 2000's and turning to BeOS as my first alternative! It really opened the door for me to explore different Operating Systems and platforms. Haiku has always had A LOT of potential, and I'll have to give a try someday real soon! Off Topic: Where did you get that T-Shirt? It looks great! Very On Brand for this channel!

[Leonard_MT]

0:14 You're technically incorrect Haiku isn't UNIX like, it isn't even *NIX, it's its own OS that has some POSIX features (a group of standards that almost all UNIX systems if not all follow) that gives it a *NIX feel.

[RockTo]

It is so nice to see a few things.

#1. Software running at the speed that computers used to respond at 20 years ago.
#2. No stupid flat GUIs.
#3. Actually innovative features.

[JuliaMono]

The thinklight was wonderful, especially when sitting in dark cabling rooms trying to read paper cabling plans. No modern backlit keyboard can do that. 😊

Any keychain flashlight can, tho. 😅

[dafoex]

I tried Haiku years ago and absolutely loved that tabbing feature. I wish more window managers had it.

[socketwench]

I was astounded that I was able to install Haiku (32bit) on an old EeePC 4G. It runs just fine on it.

[pvc]

I tried to use Haiku on my 'music' PC couple of days ago, with mixed results. Overall system ran pretty well and reasonably stable. There was no hardware graphics acceleration, but UI was still quite performant. It was possible to watch 720p YT video in mpv without dropping frames. The problem was MIDI hardware support. I couldn't get it to work at all. So I had to revert back to Linux.