alt Hacker NewsSorry for being negative here:
What is the motivation for recreating Be? What would you hope to obtain that you cannot just by using, say, a customized Linux Mint?
If it's just historical/nostalgia/challenge, I get it. But people seem to believe there is something else too, and I'd like to know what that is.
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> What would you hope to obtain that you cannot just by using, say, a customized Linux Mint?
When things are coded right, Haiku / BeOS is blazing fast (every single thing runs in a separate thread), and resource usage is tiny. I think the OS only uses about half a gig of RAM? When the apps are coded right, there's a feeling that this is how our modern computers could have been, free from bloated software and using the full speed of the machine. And when shutdown only takes a couple of seconds, it makes you wonder what the other OS's are doing.
Of course the reality is not that. Display drivers & video codecs on Haiku often don't have the right hardware acceleration, most of the software you need is now Linux ports rather than BeOS native. But Haiku sometimes feels like a calming OS. Because it's so small and quite modular, it feels like an OS you can still potentially get your head around.
It's one of the last single-user focused operating systems. Its design from kernel to UI is intended to make the system accessible to the user sitting at the desk. It was _extraordinarily_ fast and stable on even modest hardware of the era, and its software toolkit was a delight to use.
Even now, using it feels like the system is bereft of bloat and cruft. It's a system _for the user_ that doesn't assume that the user is technically incapable.
Resource efficiency is a huge one. If you are familiar with the Via Nano: it's a SLOW x86_64 chip (sometimes used in thin clients) that feels about half as fast as older AMD 64 cpu. Haiku feels great on a Via Nano, and it's really storage-space-efficient. Linux distros are slower, and use more storage space (especially important for using an OS on a thin client PC).
It kind of looks nice visually. Other than that I do agree with you. I got tired of waiting. Linux spoiled me. I need things to work these days. Linux works.
BeOS was way, way snappier to use on the same hardware than Linux (or Windows) no matter how much you trimmed down your (GUI) Linux.
IDK what scheduler voodoo they were doing, but it was awesome.
Only things I've seen that achieved something similar were QNX/Photon, and (though with the benefit of way stronger hardware and a ton of "cheating" by suspending applications) some (mostly early) versions of iOS.
I'm not sure I have any use for Haiku today, but I definitely wish for a world in which computer GUIs didn't feel so damn slow and janky and pre-occupied with whatever it's got going on internally rather than what I need it to be doing right now.
Also, I wish some kind of tagging system for filesystems had taken off well enough that I could rely on it, even cross-platform and when copying files between filesystems. Entire programs could just be file tags. Other programs could just be a thin GUI over tagged files. It sucks that didn't end up becoming a standard and reasonably cross-platform-compatible thing.