Haiku

[Sandy Bridge]

Haiku Beta 4 dropped in December, sporting a nice list of new improvements, including better HiDPI support, thumbnails in Tracker (the file explorer), support for GTK, and a port of WINE, the latter two of which enable a lot more applications to run.

 

To give it a try, you'll need a Pentium II or Athlon or later, 384 MB of RAM, and 3 GB of storage space.  A little more demanding than Windows 98, but quite reasonable by today's standards!

 

Is anyone here running Haiku?  I took Beta 3 for a spin in a VM last year, and found it to be a pleasant experience, and the UI to be extremely responsive, even in a virtual machine.  That beta wasn't at a place where it could wholly replace Windows for me, even from a non-gaming standpoint, primarily due to not yet having a wide enough variety of software, but I appreciated the different-but-sensible UI paradigms and saw a lot of potential.  It was refreshing to see a different take than what the Big Three (Windows/Linux/Mac) provide.  I plan to try Beta 4 as well.

 

(Side note on organization, I wanted to put this in the "Operating Systems" sub-forum but can't create threads there, and Haiku does not fit into any of that forum's sub-forums, so this seems like the most appropriate spot)

[Ishayin]

I haven't tried it myself, but I remember seeing reviews of it before and being very impressed with some of its window manager features like being able to lock together windows of different types. I think you could also make mix and match tabs from different application in the same window if I'm not mistaken?

[Sandy Bridge]

On 4/23/2023 at 10:46 AM, Ishayin said:

I haven't tried it myself, but I remember seeing reviews of it before and being very impressed with some of its window manager features like being able to lock together windows of different types. I think you could also make mix and match tabs from different application in the same window if I'm not mistaken?

Indeed, you can.  I've stacked together some WebPositive windows and some Tracker windows in this screenshot:

 

You can also "tile" them, which is the locking one window to the side of another, and again they can be of different types.

 

I can accomplish the former with a third-party program (Groupy) on Windows, but am not aware of anywhere else that I can do the latter.  And Haiku's integration and smoothness is better for stacking since it is native.

 

I should try out the (relatively) new Beta 4.  Along with USB WiFi drivers and improved HiDPI support, compatibility layers for X11, Wayland, and WINE appear to be the major features - trying to make it easier to run more software on Haiku.  I suppose Haiku wants to be a little bit more mainstream.