CmdrFenix.org

Well, I have run Haiku on my laptop for about 2 days now and I’m ready to type up my thoughts and observations on it. Is it ready for use? No way. Does it show promise? Hell yeah!

Pros

• Boots my Dell Inspiron in 9 seconds. After 9 seconds it’s fully functional on the desktop.
• UI is a perfect clone of BeOS and very smooth and easy to use.
• Multitasking performance is insane! I ran multiple GL Teapot demos, the pulse demo, 3D Haiku demo, browser, and a few other file system windows and at no point did I feel even a slight drop in UI performance. (note: When I added multiple 3D apps I did see some after effects if the windows touched.
• Updated compilers and libraries meant I could get some of the newer apps compiled and working… well somewhat. (note: perl CPAN didn’t work at all and I couldn’t get it working in order to DL XML::Parser, which is needed for one of the dependencies of Pidgin)
• Networking setup was a breeze. It auto detected the NIC in my laptop and everything just worked.
• Downloaded a few apps from BeBits and they worked so BeOS compatibility is “good”. (note: many apps had MAJOR problems loading.)
• Installer was something I have been waiting for and I wasn’t disappointed. (note: There are obvious points where it could be improved / optimized, but for the most part it was simple and worked.
• VERY simple BeOS layout on the file system was a great touch.

Cons

• No package manager. This is a biggie as I had no easy way to uninstall apps I was trying to get working without going through the file system and deleting files.
• I mean I know it lacks a package manager, but being spoiled as I am a lack of an organized package delivery system like yum or apt is big now a days. This would *greatly* improve the functionality of the OS.
• Not a multi-user OS. That’s right, still unfortunately not a multi-user OS, but something that is “on the road map”.
• No way to password protect the single user account. Probably the biggest killer of this right now, but being in Alpha, I wasn’t probably going to leave this on my laptop.
• App support is limited. I was able to get “vision” working as an IRC client, but I couldn’t find a working IM client for this. Big Achilles heel here if you want to penetrate the desktop market.
• Buggy boot loader. After install, it wouldn’t actually boot on the HD. Had to boot the Live CD again and then run “bootman” in order to fix it.
• Needs a clearer roadmap for development. The roadmap they have looks more like a bug tracking system than a roadmap.

Considering the project started in 2001 and now in 2009 they are where they are shows the project definitely has great momentum and some talented developers. They started from the ground up and didn’t take the quick path of using the Linux kernel and just smashing in some GNU toolkits. As of 2008 it is now self hosting, which means it can check out and compile new versions of itself. They did update it to use the newest GCC compilers, which means the newer apps should all compile eventually, but it still has a long way to go.