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- Hacker News
- Congratulations to the haiku team!by bebop
- Tried Haiku on an old laptop. Loved it. Then realized Linux feels just as fast now and has containers. Haiku is cool, but it's losing the lightweight edge.
- Congrats to the team, I adore Haiku from afar and hope they continue to do good work. Had to do a bit of debugging with some code I help maintain for the new release, but it was a fun excuse to mess around with it a bit again.by moody__
- I wish Haiku all the best. It's always great to see some diversity in the FOSS OS landscape. Hope it finds its niche eventually like the BSDs did after the lawsuit drama.by penchant
- Hopefully, it won't be a small niche. It would be great if Haiku ends up getting used for meaningful work.by gmueckl
- I would love to give Haiku a try. Indeed, I've looked at it's code before (it's quite good, or was, last time I looked at it). What prevents me is accessibility. To be fair to Haiku, implementing an actually good accessibility stack is genuinely a nightmare that AI isn't going to help much with, were you to ask it to help you with it. Primarily because many accessibility stacks (UIA, MSAA, IAccessible2, AT-SPI, ...) are massive collections of incredibly nasty hacks. I have yet to find an accessibility stack that is actually well-designed, thought out and future-proof. And screen readers are pretty much collections of good code alongside a bunch of app-specific workaround as well which just complicates things.
All of that said, I might fire it up if only to play with it from the console if I can get something like SSH working.
by ethin - In a world where Haiku is widely adopted, I figure its accessibility model would be much like that of Windows XP, in that it works by not restricting you from doing things, rather than specifically allowing certain things. XP and Haiku let the user do pretty much whatever, and for this reason, many disabled people still rely on systems like XP.
- I love the UI style of HaikuOS, so cool to see new ports like Firefox and a Go runtime in this release. Congrats to the team!by accrual
- > User interface and user experience improvements
https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta6/release-notes/#:~...
Menu that does different things based on modifier keys seems novel to me, is BeOS or Haiku the first interface where menus take modifier keys into account?
by omoikane - No, macOS has changed menus using the Option key since it was known as System.by ianlevesque
- I am working on the IUP fork (UI toolkit) , with many new drivers/backends and features, and, of course, I added Haiku because it looks and performs so well, it works differently from what I used to see, making it even more interesting. The result: the absolute king in memory usage was the Win32 driver, like 4M for Hello World; in Haiku, that is 3M! For comparison, the GTK4 driver uses 40M; GTK3 and Qt6 ~15. WinUI is something like ~25.by gen2brain
- Code blooms, Haiku flies
A new release greets the world
Congrats to the team
by andsoitis - I see what you did there.by tpoacher
- Summer nears its end
And Haiku blooms like heather
New flowers emerge.
by onraglanroad - Haiku could theoretically fill a niche for music production workflows. Ultra tight MIDI timing and sequencing, low-latency audio and a beautiful desktop. I hope this dream comes true eventually.by Aldipower
- I think it'll need a compelling DAW to make that a reality.by KerrAvon
- Tunetracker[0] radio automation software (not sure what else it did/does) started on BeOS, then moved to Haiku. After 25 years(!)[1] it's on Mac now.
[0] https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/
[1] https://rbr.com/tunetracker-ditches-beos-haiku-for-mac-backb...
by sillywalk - I doubt this, but hear me out for the reason:
I worked on a Elektron MachineDrum firmware fix that corrected the MIDI jittering due to incorrect ISR configuration. MD itself is pretty tight already with its RTOS but the fix brought it down to microseconds. I was pretty proud of it because it solves a few phasing problems.
I then turned this over to a friend running a lot of Elektron boxes, and his reaction was, "you mean the sound we've got is wrong? how strange!"
So while I feel the same urge to have ultra tight MIDI timing, I doubt this would be a general interest of the non-technical musicians out there.
by v-yadli - I'm so happy. Haiku to me, is visually the most beautiful operating system out there. The icons, apps, designs. If there be anything that can ever steal the spotlight from Mac; it would be Haiku. And the OS is perhaps the one and only one that remains a tool in the old sense. All other operating systems are now service and signups and telemetry and notifications; this is the last resort remaining for the rest of us. I only wonder sometimes when it is going to become usable. With LLMs I'm wondering can't they be put to find the stability issues and make the solving faster?by pmkary
- >All other operating systems are now service and signups and telemetry and notifications
What are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense.
by tokai - I mean, Linux is still pretty squarely in service of the end user.by montroser
- Looks like Windows 98. Which is of course a compliment.by alasano
- > If there be anything that can ever steal the spotlight from Mac; it would be Haiku.
I looked at the Haiku slideshow and I'm not seeing this. It looks like an eye sore, desktop environments familiar of the 90s. Even early OSX is a massive improvement (as it was to the NeXT desktop).
- What really sets Haiku (and the preceding BeOS) apart is that it's built for the express purpose of being a desktop operating system. As good as desktop Linux has gotten it still suffers from servers being the chief use case for Linux-based OSes, seen in quirks such as how poorly it handles running out of memory (not as big of a deal in the server world, particularly in the container era; just tweak your setup and reboot your containers). It's not bogged down with corporate IT needs either.
The last time we got an OS that was as purely desktop-end-user-oriented with no competing influences was Classic Mac OS, which had serious technical issues.
- Just a heads-up for those trying it out, I've found a couple of regressions in Beta 6 that rendered my Haiku system unbootable, until I remembered about hammering the space key during the boot sequence to get to the safe mode menu.
In my case, my ThinkPad X1 (Yoga 3rd Gen) used to boot despite what appeared to be kernel panics, but typing "continue" at the kernel prompt would skip past them and everything would then work fine. In Beta 6, it now hangs at boot instead with no kernel panic warning. Disabling ACPI in the safe mode options gets me past that, and there's a way to disable ACPI permanently at boot via some configuration files - though obviously that isn't desirable.
It also seems there's been some work on USB Audio (yay!), but it now causes a kernel panic on boot if a Focusrite Scarlett is connected. Turning the Scarlett off avoids the kernel panic. The Scarlett has never officially worked in Haiku, but it at least never used to crash the system. In my case, I've reverted back to the USB Audio Scarlett Haiku driver that Claude Sonnet vibe coded for me, and for me that's working. (I can't contribute that code because of Haiku rules against AI code, but hopefully the humans will eventually find time to hand code it and get it working.)
by SyneRyder - Haiku should rethink that AI rule. Put very high code quality gates in place, sure, but Haiku in particular is a very low-velocity project and AI could help them so much. There is no reason you can't produce high-quality code with AI conformant to your style guidelines and structural preferences, it just takes a lot more effort than the slop.by KerrAvon
- > Focusrite Scarlett
If it's the one I'm thinking of, this device includes a read-only ~100KiB USB mass storage device filled with .lnk files to remind you to register the device to get your bundled digital goods (a bunch of DAW plugins).
You might want to try connecting the interface with Windows and install the focusrite driver. This will set the device to a "pro audio" mode, unlock the higher sample rates, and permanently make it stop behaving as a mass storage device. Not sure if this fixes Haiku OS USB audio compatibility, but it's a good bet and helps avoid the annoying mass storage device volume.
If you don't have a Windows machine to do this on, you can do it in a libvirt or qemu virtual machine on Linux using USB host device passthrough. Once you do it, it doesn't have to be done again, I'm guessing they implemented this with an eFuse.
by creatonez - Feel free to reach out, I will be happy to try help with these issues :)by jessikat
- Maybe share my old article with Haiku developers: https://clickhouse.com/blog/agentic-coding
Could be a small chance, but it has already made many engineers reconsider their AI stance.
by zX41ZdbW - I think there should maybe be shadow repositories available for Open Source projects where things like your driver could be contributed.
I get why Haiku does not want to deal with it do this is not a criticism. But I have also used AI to port software and create drivers. Others may not have the ability, even with AI. Perhaps I have docs you don’t. And some of it took a reasonable amount of money and time. I am not going to dedicate that to everything I might use if it was available. And in addition to wasting duplicated money and time, we are destroying the earth recreating things others have already done.
I use Chimera Linux and I have thought about starting a repo just for the stuff that I have ported.
I am not sure what the exact answer is but I hope this is something we figure out.
by LeFantome