Haiku developer and community member Waddlesplash shares his insights on the project’s current state, challenges ahead, and hopes for the future. Waddlesplash discusses Haiku’s transition from a niche project to a potential daily driver OS, emphasizing the importance of maintaining momentum and addressing data corruption bugs.
Andrea at Desktop On Fire!
Haiku is definitely in a good place at the moment, and there’s some real momentum from outside the project. Yes, it’s even possible to daily-drive Haiku – with caveats, of course – and I hope they can keep this going.
I love this project. Every time there’s some news about Haiku, I spend way too much time reading more about it, and playing around with it. I’m really glad development’s moving forward. Great stuff!
I was alarmed to read that a lot of the core Haiku devs are aging out and contributing less. From a total outsiders point of view, this project seems to be hitting a high-point in terms of capability and progress. I hope it is able to get enough exposure to attract new talent as it is certainly a very cool project. I look at Haiku from time to time myself. It may never be a “daily driver” but it could be a lot of fun to spend a Sunday in while mucking about. BeOS had a pretty decent C++ API and it would be fun to play around making simple apps in Haiku.
There are people that think that it is getting close ( or even ready ) for daily driver status:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NMDYT-hCOk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UByttyMHDr8
Action Retro is a hardware focused channel so skip ahead if that does not interest you. The first video mostly details the current web browser situation but shows some cool apps at the end. The second video is from 7 months ago. It shows more but also shows more problems. In a way though, that demonstrates the momentum that Haiku has in terms of how far it has come in just those 7 months.
Waddlesplash is a super smart dude and has fixed an incredible number of defects. But as he says, many/most of the core developers are no longer active. There does not appear to be much much new development in the OS. Sadly there were never a lot of Haiku application developers. You just couldn’t develop on it due to many bugs in the earlier versions. There’s a lot of software ported but none of that makes use of the native BeOS C++ API, which is just phenomenal. Not having native applications means you don’t make use of all those extra awesome GUI threads that made BeOS apps super responsive. Without those native apps, Haiku runs like Linux.
It’s what I noticed as well. The native Haiku environment is superb. Where it absolutely falls flat are the bolted on Linux applications. They run sloooow. Which is a shame, because this could be a serious contender with native apps.
It would be better if Haiku had their own niche and didn’t have to compete with a slew of hardware platforms. If they could have their own platform with known hardware, that would free the developers from trying to keep up with a gazillion different boards and peripherals. Raspberry Pi could be a good target. The platform is reasonably powerful, relatively stable and you don’t need a gazillion drivers to be able to run. It would make bare metal installations much more feasible.
A well optimized Haiku for Raspberry Pi could attract more developers and maybe even native development.
I think part of the problem is that there isn’t any hardware acceleration on Haiku, but luckily that’s being worked on. So that might help with some apps.
Seeing that Haiku is also available for RISC-V, I’d love to buy the hardware and run pure Haiku on it.
Pretty sure I mentioned it before. It is, and always will be a nostalgia project. Last I looked there was no real support for things like 3d gpu acceleration. Like SkyOS, doomed to fail because the amount of work to write drivers for modern hardware, and make use of that hardware is enormous. As for the GUI, well it has 0 appeal to anyone born after 1990… ReactOS still the most viable contender for an alternative open source desktop.