Back in the mid 1990s, the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system cemented the Redmond software company’s dominance over most of the desktop operating system space. Apple were still in their period in the doldrums waiting for Steve Jobs to return with his NeXT, while other would-be challengers such as IBM’s OS/2 or Commodore’s Amiga were sinking into obscurity.
Into this unpromising marketplace came Be inc, with their BeBox computer and its very nice BeOS operating system. To try it out as we did at a trade show some time in the late ’90s was to step into a very polished multitasking multimedia OS, but sadly one which failed to gather sufficient traction to survive. The story ended in the early 2000s as Be were swallowed by Palm, and a dedicated band of BeOS enthusiasts set about implementing a free successor OS. This has become Haiku, and while it’s not BeOS it retains API compatibility with and certainly feels a lot like its inspiration. It’s been on my list for a Daily Drivers article for a while now, so it’s time to download the ISO and give it a go. I’m using the AMD64 version.
A Joy To Use, After A Few Snags
This isn’t the first time I’ve given Haiku a go in an attempt to write about it for this series, and I have found it consistently isn’t happy with my array of crusty old test laptops. So this time I pulled out something newer, my spare Lenovo Thinkpad X280. I was pleased to see that the Haiku installation USB volume booted and ran fine on this machine, and I was soon at the end of the install and ready to start my Haiku journey.
Here I hit my first snag, because sadly the OS hadn’t quite managed to set up its UEFI booting correctly. I thus found myself unexpectedly in a GRUB prompt, as the open source bootloader was left in place from a previous Linux install. Fixing this wasn’t too onerous as I was able to copy the relevant Haiku file to my UEFI partition, but it was a little unexpected. On with the show then, and in to Haiku.
In use, this operating system is a joy. Its desktop look and feel is polished, in a late-90s sense. There was nothing jarring or unintuitive, and though I had never used Haiku before I was never left searching for what I needed. It feels stable too, I was expecting the occasional crash or freeze, but none came. When I had to use the terminal to move the UEFI file it felt familiar to me as a Linux user, and all my settings were easy to get right.
Never Mind My Network Card
I hit a problem when it came to network setup though, I found its wireless networking to be intermittent. I could connect to my network, but while DHCP would give it an IP address it failed to pick up the gateway and thus wasn’t a useful external connection. I could fix this by going to a fixed IP address and entering the gateway and DNS myself, and that gave me a connection, but not a reliable one. I would have it for a minute or two, and then it would be gone. Enough time for a quick software update and to load Hackaday on its WebPositive web browser, but not enough time to do any work. We’re tantalisingly close to a useful OS here, and I don’t want this review to end on that note.
The point of this series has been to try each OS in as real a situation as possible, to do my everyday Hackaday work of writing articles and manipulating graphics. I have used real hardware to achieve this, a motley array of older PCs and laptops. As I’ve described in previous paragraphs I’ve reached the limits of what I can do on real hardware due to the network issue, but I still want to give this one a fair evaluation. I have thus here for the first time used a test subject in a VM rather than on real hardware. What follows then is courtesy of Gnome Boxes on my everyday Linux powerhouse, so please excuse the obvious VM screenshots.
This One Is A True Daily Driver
With a Haiku install having a working network connection, it becomes an easy task to install software updates, and install new software. The library has fairly up-to-date versions of many popular packages, so I was easily able to install GIMP and LibreOffice. WebPositive is WebKit-based and up-to-date enough that the normally-picky Hackaday back-end doesn’t complain at me, so it more than fulfils my Daily Drivers requirement for an everyday OS I can do my work on. In fact, the ’90s look-and-feel and the Wi-Fi issues notwithstanding, this OS feels stable and solid in a way that many of the other minority OSes I’ve tried do not. I could use this day-to-day, and the Haiku Thinkpad could accompany me on the road.
There is a snag though, and it’s not the fault of the Haiku folks but probably a function of the size of their community; this is a really great OS, but sadly there are software packages it simply doesn’t have available for it. They’ve concentrated on multimedia, the web, games, and productivity in their choice of software to port, and some of the more esoteric or engineering-specific stuff I use is unsurprisingly not there. I can not fault them for this given the obvious work that’s gone into this OS, but it’s something to consider if your needs are complex.
Haiku then, it’s a very nice desktop operating system that’s polished, stable, and a joy to use. Excuse it a few setup issues and take care to ensure your Wi-Fi card is on its nice list, and you can use it day-to-day. It will always have something of the late ’90s about it, but think of that as not a curse but the operating system some of us wished we could have back in the real late ’90s. I’ll be finding a machine to hang onto a Haiku install, this one bears further experimentation.
BeOS? The only operating system I ever bought. At the time, I got the installation box and tried the system, but never really did anything with it due to a lack of applications. But it left an impression that, ever since, has made me despise even more the one that ended up “winning.”
Interesting read after all. I experimented with BeOS 25 years ago, our department computer geek was quite impressed that I did, I am not a computer scientiest. I didn’t find much use beyond the “nice OS” wow and went back to Windows (NT/XP/7/8/10/11) after trying Linux (Suse), MacOS (X) and said BeOS. I only started getting more serious again about using Linux this year, and it’s still an uphill battle in some areas.
I got the box too, and was extremely disappointed in their demise as well.
I really like Haiku as well.
Unfortunately modern software is too much of a moving target. Important libraries and drivers tend to follow the latest trends in library dependencies and compiler features. It makes porting anything a never ending process that requires attention anytime something is updated.
That makes sense.
Though frameworks such as SDL 1.2 (or 2) and Allegro might been a way.
Because, they’re available on both major and nice OSes likewise.
You can use them on Windows, Linux and MinuetOS/Kolibri OS as well as OS/2.
That’s why, say, DOSBox is succesfully being available almost anywhere, I think.
I briefly tried BeOS fed up with M$ products (how unstable and locked down these felt to me) some 25 Years ago when I was back in high school. Then not 2 days in, a friend at the computer club told me “why waste your time on a dead ecosystem when you can try this” and handed me a gentoo GNU/Linux ISO and install page URL …
Never looked back but then again always kind of felt that I missed something. Happy to see that Haiku is alive and kicking. Maybe I should try to set it up on a toy machine or see if it’s multimedia and office ready enough to have it as a first machine for my kids :D (to give them a sense of OS/interfaces diversity)
That’s understandable. For example, when I checked Mobygames, it said there were merely 37 games for BeOS.
https://www.mobygames.com/platform/beos/
Which is below OS/2’s and OS/2 Warp’s number, even.
Which has 63 listed (incomplete, btw. I know a dozen PD/Freeware games not mentioned).
Which among them had even some sophisticated ones using DIVE/DART, like this one here:
https://www.mobygames.com/game/3994/
But still, some big games such as Civilization: Call to Power had existed on BeOS platform.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/336/civilization-call-to-power/specs/
So if more games had used SDL at the time, maybe, then OS/2 or BeOS ports could have been a reality.
FWIW Beta 5 is already quite “old” – totally worth trying a nightly build, they’re rarely unstable. Sure there’s some things missing compared to other operating systems, but there’s also a lot of what’s missing from others: ease of use, consistency, and a welcome lack of AI.
I remember trying BeOS 5PE (free edition) and tried development on it for a hot second, it was fun and I wondered… Alas it it just a novel6now
I remember BeOS 5 Personal Edition (PE) from the Windows 98 days.
It was so quick and lightweight on that old Pentium PC, despite booting from a HDD image..
Also remember the Zeta OS from early 2000s.
It was sold here in Germany via RTL Shop, a teleshopping TV channel, if memory serves.
At the time, it had been advertised as an alternative to Windows (XP) and Linux.
The funny thing I remember is, that release candidates were sold (RC).
There also were Zeta books bundled with an older copy of Zeta on CD, if memory serves.
Newer versions were available to book owners on a discount, if memory serves.
Aside from being basically beta versions, the copies of Zeta did work quite okay.
The company behind it also wrote custom software for Zeta.
Sometimes, I wonder how the world could have been if Zeta had lasted longer.
The German user base, if big enough, maybe would have contributed (written) some BeOS applications.
Or maybe it have caused developers’ (software houses’) attention,
which in turn perhaps would have ported or written software for German/international market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQW-q2vp6W4
I think same.
For example, any software for amateur radio hobby seems to be unavailable.
This thread mentions it: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/amateur-radio/15375
Situation is sort of comparable to AROS here, maybe.
Except that some ancient 68k Amiga application for ham radio did exist once (ca. 1988) and could be run on an seamlessly integrated UAE.
But maybe I also have to blame myself here for not contributing what I think is missing, I sometimes think.
Such projects need our support if we want it to become more attractive, I think.
Wow.
I tried out BeOS5, the freely available and got it to work acceptably well on a box I still have now. I also got it’s install on Linux one, on Slackware in fact. The big problem was updating the video card drivers on both, they used ATI boards, one still does. Planet Mirror before it became a forgotten site did have a heck of a lot BeOS stuff and there I went. Oh and there is a surviving BeBox, and it lives in NJ at Infoage at the Computer Museum there with its friends.