This weekend I installed Haiku on my old Thinkpad X40. It’s fast and surprisingly stable. Emacs, VLC works like a charm. Computer to slow for web browsing. The BeProductive office suite is a masterpiece of application at a 9MB download; although not open source.
Then I installed Haiku on my XPS13 under KVM/Qemu. Everything runs blazingly fast. I’m thinking of maybe using that install for organizing my photos. The metadata functionality built into the BeFS is great for that.
I must say that I am really impressed.
Haiku is a good example of prioritising the user experience over benchmarks. Under the hood, broadly speaking, it is running at about 60% the speed of Linux on the same system. But in action it feels so much quicker than anything else.
That is not to say that they aren't focusing on performance gains, just that they have ensured the user experience is the top priority.
Oh, now you say that, I could install it on a very old VAIO I have around...
Was just explaining to my offspring about how Apple was looking to buy Be Inc. back before Jobs returned and they allowed themselves to be bought by NeXT. Sort of a fun complete-circle: Be ports BeOS to PowerMacs, Apple passes on buying Be, Be Inc. fades into the distance, HaikuOS kicks off, 20+ years later they port HaikuOS to Apple hardware.
Honestly... my problem with Apple laptops isn't the hardware, it's the crappy version of XNU/Darwin/NextStep that comes with them. I would buy a Mac if it came with HaikuOS and supported all the peripherals. But what is the chance of that?
FWIW... I still have a powermac with "real" BeOS on it. Haven't booted it in several years. I did look at HaikuOS running on an X86-64 VM and for the tasks I gave it (compile a few package, run emacs, serve a web page or two) it worked like a champ. I think the developer docs could use some help, but maybe I should volunteer to help them out.
I wasn't familiar with haiku os, so:
Haiku is a community-driven continuation of BeOS, a discontinued operating system for personal computers. It is binary-compatible with BeOS, but also supports contemporary systems, protocols, hardware, and web standards. - wikipedia
Sad that we'll probably never be able to run this on M1/M-series iPads.
So sad to me how combative Apple has been towards open source software over the years. The peak of the jailbreak era was imo peak mobile development too. So much innovation and rapid iteration. Anything seemed possible and anything really was possible if you put your mind to it and built the thing. Pretty much any good idea apple integrated into ios has been shamelessly copied without attribute from that crucible of creativity that is the jailbreak community.
But it all hinged on someone coming up with an exploit and releasing it free to the community ignoring any bug bounty. True altruists. And apple is good enough at whack a mole and paying people $100k that this sort of effort died out. Most low hanging fruit all picked and patched already. It is no wonder that ios innovation has also stalled out now that there isn't someone to copy good ideas from any longer.
It sucks because for a while, at least in the second jobs era, they seemed to at least hesitantly support foss. They collaborated with KDE, released darwin as free software, and contributed to GCC and then very heavily to LLVM. MacOS, for a while, used an open source init system (systemstarter for a while, then launchd)
I am sure government can regulate such things like they can force Apple to open up their walled garden.
It would be refreshing if anyone in government cared about such things.
I'm sure "the government" (almighty, praised be it's name) is very interested in regulating an industry in order to supplicate your extremely niche hobby.
But faith can move mountains. Maybe you have to sacrifice some goats to the government to have your prayers heard?
Which governments, though? The US loves these "NOBUS" companies, enforcing Google and Apple's walled garden is part of their agenda.
The hardline opposition like China, Russia and North Korea all have contingency ecosystems they'd rather promote than force Apple to comply with an arbitrary featureset. The EU, for all the good it has done, will have to contend with the US refusing to extend FVEY intelligence to states that resist cooperation.
The four other eyes are most likely already excluding the US at this point given that sharing intelligence with the US almost certainly means sharing it with your enemies.
I doubt that. Most of those governments still rely on US-made software and US-designed hardware, so the NSA's Sword of Damocles is always dangling over their head whether or not their cooperate. The Canadian Sikh murders seem to indicate a level of US-Canada intelligence cooperation that still operates well.
My original statement should have read Nine Eyes or Fourteen Eyes, but the point stands. The US can play hardball behind closed doors and make these nations regret regulation even if it's a good policy.
The four eyes are most likely already excluding the US at this point.
My hopes are high that the EU will be able to do this some day (unless it's fully enshittified first -- see chat control, age verification etc.)
How usable is Haiku OS in practice?
It's a delight to use, if a little esoteric at first. After the experiment phase, the software ecosystem comes up fairly limited. But I recommend visiting.
Here are some more impressions: https://kconner.com/2025/03/09/haiku-os-study-path.html
+1
The window manager might look a little old-fashioned, but it seems solid as a dev workstation.
What kind of hardware do you run it on? Has driver support been an issue?
I briefly emulated it with UTM (QEMU) on macOS; the host was an M1 series chip. This story is the first indication that I might run Haiku on that machine's bare metal someday.
I run it on an old Optiplex that is a 3rd gen i3. No issue with drivers but that comes from its old (well seasoned) age.
I was trying to set up an install for my HS age some to learn programming this summer with minimal distractions. I was surprised to see IntelliJ runs and they’ve integrated GNU core utils. A hello world program ran fine.
Lack of applications is my main problem
On M1 on specific? or on any platform in general?
The platform itself. Like, can it run Firefox? Can I actually do normal stuff in the browser like watch a YouTube video or join a Zoom call? Can I run VSCode? Can I run Docker?
Was recently looking at the FuriPhone (linux phone that runs Debian) and now I'm thinking it would be a fun project to port HaikuOS to it.
Doesn't it have closed drivers making porting hard? Perhaps you could consider porting it to Pinephone?
Not sure. I thought the FuriPhone's advantage was that they were making it in conjunction with the ODM so you didn't have to use halium to call into Android. But a quick google search tells me I'm mistaken. Maybe I was thinking of the FairPhone?
I would consider the PinePhone, but my experience with it left me cold. And they EoL'd the Pro and the original PinePhone is fairly anemic by modern standards. I'm not sure it could run HaikuOS at acceptable speed. My memory was the PinePhone also had some land-mines with respect to drivers, but it's been several years since I touched mine, so I could be mistaken.
I'll probably have to spin my own hardware again. I really dislike writing drivers from scratch.
You can also try out a demo in your browser at https://distrosea.com/select/haiku/
M1 is not listed at this URL for me?
This is to see what the distro is like, not to see if it’s stable on apple silicon
Is it only M1 macs, or are other M-series supported too (or maybe they were previously)?
Hard to tell if this is a major breakthrough or just an incremental improvement.
Using BeOS was a fantastic experience in 1999, and it's sad that it hasn't caught on. I'm rooting for all OSes that bring different perspectives to the OS world instead of being another textbook Unix variant.
My only qualm is how HaikuOS, and AmigaOS for that matter, fail to carry over their aesthetics to a high-resolution/HiDPI world. I see gradients, overly-empahsized embosses in the UI screenshots. They lack the serene feeling of their user interfaces from 25 years ago, and feel like DVD menus now. I used to feel the same about KDE, but it has since moved on from flashy rendering AFAIR.
What I mean isn't to adopt a completely flat design, which I also dislike, but for instance, Windows 11's UI seems easier on the eyes than Haiku now.
I also know that UI is hard, no question about it. All the good luck and best wishes to the team.
Haiku has a flat theme.
Neat! Not sure why the comments on this post are immediately asking if it’s useful. Not everything has to be immediately useful to exist. Kill the capitalist in your head.
these are likely the same people who would be first to line up to see if they could use it to help them with rent seeking. capitalism really stifles the imagination
> Kill the capitalist in your head.
Who referenced capitalism? And do anarchists, socialists, communists, et al., never question the usefulness of a thing either?
The difference is those groups promote culture for culture's sake. Capitalism does not. Culture is only promoted if there is profit to be made off promoting it. As such what culture exists is severely inorganic and dependent on market forces rather than being some proxy of the actual ideaspace of the community.
You've structured this statement in a way that makes it unfalsifiable: if culture is organic and thriving, it's because capitalism hasn't touched it; yet if capitalism has touched it, then it must be inorganic and inauthentic. You're doing a "No True Scotsman" on culture as a whole, defining real culture as something that excludes any evidence capitalism could've produced it.
There are plenty of counterexamples for culture within capitalist society (forgetting for a moment that it's bizarre to conclude that capitalist culture doesn't count as culture if market forces touch it): hobbyist communities, open-source software, Wikipedia, fan fiction, folk traditions, religious practice, academic subcultures, internet memes, the entire DIY/punk schtick, local theater, oral traditions. All of those are orthogonal to market forces.
well, to be pedantic, stalinist tendencies of socialism (and leninist inspired movements as a whole), tend to prioritise culture as a way to communicate the ideals of the party.
Capitalism, in its most pure form, puts profit before anything else in any form of work
It isn't as heavy handed as people might have assumed. I can't find the exact quote now but there is one from a filmmaker saying they had more creative freedom under the USSR than the US. In the USSR there were some things you couldn't talk about directly but subtext was often fine. In the US there was that going on as well, but you also had the need for the film to make money and merchandize other downstream products and businesses that lead to a loss of absolute creative control in favor of supporting these efforts.
I believe it was George Lucas talking about some soviet friends
Thanks. I was even going to mention how George made some decisions in star wars arguably to further toy sales.
I mean it's not hard to understand where the author is coming from. It seems like these days even a hobby project has to meet some kind of 'is there a market for it' threshold of justifying its existence.
So your parent may've taken the 'is it useful' comments to mean 'if not, why even exist' but I got the sense they're more from people who are considering an install, even if just in a VM.
Bro you're not killing him...
I'm not sure I understand the reference
> Kill the capitalist in your head.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
you sound like fun at parties
If it's not useful, then why create it?
What a depressing thing to read on _hacker_ news of all places
You might want to read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture
It's just a name, after all. More accurately, this site would be titled VC Incubator News.
And how boring it would be if that's all it was.
How much venture capital is incubating Haiku?
Are you telling me hacker news isn't just for advertising vibe coded slop services as a get rich quick scheme? Impossible, why did claude put it in my marketing.md then? (/s in case it isn't obvious)
HN isn't reddit, for better and for worse. This is the "Orange Site" that gave us Sam Altman, defends monopolies and shits out thousands of net-negative SaaS startups that leech off Open Source software. Manufacture of depression is one of YC's byproducts that everyone loves to ignore while berating Flock and 9 Mothers like they spontaneously popped into existence.
Your peers on this website are not principled, fun-loving Freenode/Libera geeks. HN is the Linkdin of underground social networking.
This is unexpectedly one of the saddest comments I have ever read here.
The "everything needs to have a purpose and make money" mentality here is very exhausting.
I'd love to hear your critique of an art gallery
For fun.
We could say the same for most of the comments on this site, including yours and mine.
Because they can.
There are so many projects that come up here that have the tag line of "This is such a stupid idea that I just had to do it!".
We can do things just for the fun of it. Woz made the Apple computer basically as a toy, nothing more. And that's cool.
Are you useful?
That's the scary part about AI and the transformation it'll have on society. The answer to that question for all of us, soon enough, will be no, not useful enough vs an AI. Then what happens?
Maybe, but it’s not gonna be because of LLMs
Yet I still can not use ruby on it ...
Sorry guys - Haiku is a great idea, but it needs to become a real operating system semi-advanced users can use daily. And it hasn't been at that since years.
Linux works.
What do you mean by that? It seems like there's Ruby in the packages:
https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/ruby/haikuports/haikuports...
> it needs to become a real operating system semi-advanced users can use daily
No it doesn't.
It's completely okay for people who are not you to have requirements and preferences that are not yours. If you don't like HaikuOS, don't use it.
> Linux works.
Which distro?
Linux is an OS kernel, not a full operating system.
I still need to know which distro to choose before I install it.
No need to do that with macOS or Windows, but Linux is always a problem.
I have no idea which distro to choose actually. Too much choices and it's not clear why one should be better than the other. For some distros it feels more like it's one-man projects for bragging rights. It's also a bit hard to put trust in that.
I want to resurrect an older Mac mini with an installation of a Linux distribution, but choosing a suitable distro is the first step I struggle with. Only thing I know is that it won't be an Ubuntu setup. :-)
I do run Linux-based systems in various forms already: OpenWRT on the router, an older Debian VM —which I just messed up a few days ago by trying to uninstall a wallpaper package which took down the whole desktop environment for some reason— and Raspbian on the PI.
But on some days I feel maybe I just should go for FreeBSD. But it may have similar (to a lesser extend) issues like Haiku with proper up-to-date software, especially in the web browser department? I previously dabbled with Haiku and this was its main issue. The OS itself is pretty nice though.
I've tried a few distros in the past and have now settled (on NixOS for servers and tinkering, and Fedora for just-working). But I've never tried a BSD and would also be curious how using one would turn out.
Maybe getting into FreeBSD for a bit would be a fun little project.
FreeBSD is infinitely better than any flavour of Linux if you can do what you need to on it. Great performance, superb documentation, the software just works for the most part (an update in the libc isn't going to break any of the base packages, for example). It takes a while to get it set up, and it can be picky about hardware, but I totally recommend
You should just go FreeBSD, but expect to have to learn along the way. My FreeBSD install is about 20 years old and still going well. It started as an Athlon 80GB NAS and has grown into 16-core and 12TB with Linux VMs for LLMs on a dedicated NVME. It would be nice if more worked natively on FreeBSD, but the things that work work great.
Which Windows?
I personally always install LTSC because there's no ads and less bloat, but sometimes random things don't work. This isn't a problem with Android, but Windows is always a problem
On VMs*
No, they got it booting on bare metal a few posts down.
Though I think it also boots in a VM if that's your preference. Also very cool that it's on real hardware.
If you scroll down, the poster got it running on real hardware.
Can we use that as daily driver?
A clever developer making things work on his or her own hardware, is not quite on the same level as daily driver. (Granted, Linux would also have to run on M1 Macs. But I mean this more on the issue of same-hardware or comparable hardware level.)
One can reasonably infer that, since this is a discussion thread rather than a formal support announcement, that this is not yet a formally-supported configuration.
I’m not sure anybody can use Haiku as a daily driver, regardless of platform.
Depends on your needs. On Intel and for some minimal uses, it probably can be a daily driver. There's some days where I've used Haiku exclusively. Not many, and probably days when I went without checking my email, but it has happened.
But it isn't ready for any kind of real mainstream daily driver use, no.
Who is “we” and why do they matter in this context