I can't see what Haiku offers that modern OS X doesn't. Drag and Drop between applications? Got it. Combining soundcards to use in aggregate? Got it[1]. Object Oriented APIs? Had it since NeXTSTEP (and they're called 'Kits' as well).
The only thing that seemed mildly interesting to me was the routing of audio between apps, but this is mostly achieved these days using ReWire or Soundflower (admittedly not an ideal solution).
It seems like a fun hobby (I'm into OS nostalgia myself) but suggesting that it's going to have any effect on 'the world' is pretty silly.
I use Mac OS X every single day and I would freely admit it is a giant bloated memory sucking pig. My finder was using 100 megs of memory yesterday. Why? Who knows but for me I'd like to have a lean OS with good features rather than one that I need to reinstall every year because it suddenly becomes a sluggish, memory sucking pig like my Mac OS X machines have over the last 5 years.
Haiku isn't a memory pig- I'd like to see that ideal come back in OS design.
And yes, I am transfixed with 'memory sucking pig' as a phrase right now.
While I wouldn't disagree that an OSX install can get slower over several years, I can't help but think what you want is a bit of a case of 'the grass is always greener'. There are plenty of lean linux distributions out there, but the reality is that they cut things out.
Modern operating systems do a lot to improve your experience as a user and provide various services. A lot of tech people seem to want their system to have as much CPU and RAM free as possible, but then what are you going to do with it? Are your apps actually running out of memory and swapping?
Yes I am having a problem w/ 4 gigs of memory, running minimal numbers of applications with swapping and slowness. Every year I reinstall Mac OS X and it gets better for a bit, then it starts to come back and I do some maintenance and it gets somewhat better and repeat til around the 12-15 month mark when I have to reinstall again.
I totally agree. The main reason I play with Haiku is that the UI is really responsive. OSX seems to be optimized for screenshots, looking pretty in a manner that often gets in the way. I get beach-balled a lot on the Macbook I have at work, and most things are sluggish. When it's not loaded down, you still have to wait for animations to change desktops and minimize windows. This is even true of my iPhone (again, issued by work) which, even if it's not overburdened, it does make you wait for animations.
Not to single out Apple; most UIs are like that nowadays, including my personal phone (N900, flashy/slow animations and everything, but tolerable). Responsiveness and speed in GUIs seem to be relegated to semi-obscure X11 window managers. It would be nice if "usable" got a higher priority than "flashy", without neglecting flashy, but it seems to be one or the other for now.
Some people clearly want that, though, so it's hard to blame anyone for selling it to them.
The spotlight interface is still inferior to the searching mechanisms in tracker. The technology underneath is the same technology but generations ahead, but the delivery is poor adn the result is far less useful. Unless Apple rebuilds their GUI this will be permanent because search is bolted onto finder, whereas it's close to the design ideas of tracker.
Tracker is much more rapid to navigate around than any other GUI I've used. I find haiku workspaces far more fluid to use.
Some disadvantages opver OSX is that OSX is really unix, whereas Haiku just presents as it. Most people won't care about this, but if you were porting unix utils yourself you'd probably be aware of it.
BeOS/Haiku use C++ as the primary development language. This will be offputting to some. I'd expect the APIs are easy enough to wrap and that the haiku community will produce first-class python wrappers or similar. They've had them in the past.
> suggesting that it's going to have any effect on 'the
> world' is pretty silly.
There are some cool apps around that were originally developed for haiku, and then moved to other platforms. We might see some more of this.
I can't see what Haiku offers that modern OS X doesn't.
That's not really the point. Haiku's intent is to keep BeOS alive. At the time (over 10 years ago), BeOS was the epitome of a modern OS. The pickings were slimmer back then.
Of course, it took almost that long to make Haiku happen, and the OS world has changed significantly since then.
For a "modern OS" BeOS lacked a lot. Shoddy hardware support at best, a terrible network stack, did it have a printing subsystem? I know they wanted to rebuild the networking stack I don't remember print being good. Internationalization was non-existant.
It was an RTOS with a UI on it, sexy and clean, I'm not a hater but a long long long way from NextStep or OSX.
Replace shoddy with limited and I could agree with that. BeOS died very young.
Pretty much all those points could be made at the inception of any OS. OS X had a nice jump on that because it was NextStep and had been developed for well over a decade.
To be fair, much of the needed work was accomplished in the Dan0 development release that was leaked near BeOS's demise. This included the BONE network stack and some 3D support. Everything about Dan0 was, of course, very much development code, but it was definitely a marked improvement over R5. Haiku was able to use some of the Dan0 high level kits in place until rewrites could be made.
Clearly the Apple/Be Inc. issues were sorted out to Apple's benefit, but it's still neat to see what could have been. OS X had its own issues in its widely released beta, after all. ;)
The only thing that seemed mildly interesting to me was the routing of audio between apps, but this is mostly achieved these days using ReWire or Soundflower (admittedly not an ideal solution).
It seems like a fun hobby (I'm into OS nostalgia myself) but suggesting that it's going to have any effect on 'the world' is pretty silly.
[1]: http://www.apple.com/pro/techniques/aggregateaudio/