Was just explaining to my offspring about how Apple was looking to buy Be Inc. back before Jobs returned and they allowed themselves to be bought by NeXT. Sort of a fun complete-circle: Be ports BeOS to PowerMacs, Apple passes on buying Be, Be Inc. fades into the distance, HaikuOS kicks off, 20+ years later they port HaikuOS to Apple hardware.
Honestly... my problem with Apple laptops isn't the hardware, it's the crappy version of XNU/Darwin/NextStep that comes with them. I would buy a Mac if it came with HaikuOS and supported all the peripherals. But what is the chance of that?
This weekend I installed Haiku on my old Thinkpad X40. It’s fast and surprisingly stable. Emacs, VLC works like a charm. Computer to slow for web browsing. The BeProductive office suite is a masterpiece of application at a 9MB download; although not open source.
Then I installed Haiku on my XPS13 under KVM/Qemu. Everything runs blazingly fast. I’m thinking of maybe using that install for organizing my photos. The metadata functionality built into the BeFS is great for that.
I must say that I am really impressed.
How usable is Haiku OS in practice?
It's a delight to use, if a little esoteric at first. After the experiment phase, the software ecosystem comes up fairly limited. But I recommend visiting.
I was trying to set up an install for my HS age some to learn programming this summer with minimal distractions. I was surprised to see IntelliJ runs and they’ve integrated GNU core utils. A hello world program ran fine.
On M1 on specific? or on any platform in general?
Sad that we'll probably never be able to run this on M1/M-series iPads.
So sad to me how combative Apple has been towards open source software over the years. The peak of the jailbreak era was imo peak mobile development too. So much innovation and rapid iteration. Anything seemed possible and anything really was possible if you put your mind to it and built the thing. Pretty much any good idea apple integrated into ios has been shamelessly copied without attribute from that crucible of creativity that is the jailbreak community.
But it all hinged on someone coming up with an exploit and releasing it free to the community ignoring any bug bounty. True altruists. And apple is good enough at whack a mole and paying people $100k that this sort of effort died out. Most low hanging fruit all picked and patched already. It is no wonder that ios innovation has also stalled out now that there isn't someone to copy good ideas from any longer.
I am sure government can regulate such things like they can force Apple to open up their walled garden.
It would be refreshing if anyone in government cared about such things.
Which governments, though? The US loves these "NOBUS" companies, enforcing Google and Apple's walled garden is part of their agenda.
The hardline opposition like China, Russia and North Korea all have contingency ecosystems they'd rather promote than force Apple to comply with an arbitrary featureset. The EU, for all the good it has done, will have to contend with the US refusing to extend FVEY intelligence to states that resist cooperation.
The four other eyes are most likely already excluding the US at this point given that sharing intelligence with the US almost certainly means sharing it with your enemies.
The four eyes are most likely already excluding the US at this point.
My hopes are high that the EU will be able to do this some day (unless it's fully enshittified first -- see chat control, age verification etc.)
This is to see what the distro is like, not to see if it’s stable on apple silicon
[deleted]
Using BeOS was a fantastic experience in 1999, and it's sad that it hasn't caught on. I'm rooting for all OSes that bring different perspectives to the OS world instead of being another textbook Unix variant.
My only qualm is how HaikuOS, and AmigaOS for that matter, fail to carry over their aesthetics to a high-resolution/HiDPI world. I see gradients, overly-empahsized embosses in the UI screenshots. They lack the serene feeling of their user interfaces from 25 years ago, and feel like DVD menus now. I used to feel the same about KDE, but it has since moved on from flashy rendering AFAIR.
What I mean isn't to adopt a completely flat design, which I also dislike, but for instance, Windows 11's UI seems easier on the eyes than Haiku now.
I also know that UI is hard, no question about it. All the good luck and best wishes to the team.
Haiku has a flat theme.
[deleted][deleted]
[dead]
Neat! Not sure why the comments on this post are immediately asking if it’s useful. Not everything has to be immediately useful to exist. Kill the capitalist in your head.
> Kill the capitalist in your head.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
Who referenced capitalism? And do anarchists, socialists, communists, et al., never question the usefulness of a thing either?
The difference is those groups promote culture for culture's sake. Capitalism does not. Culture is only promoted if there is profit to be made off promoting it. As such what culture exists is severely inorganic and dependent on market forces rather than being some proxy of the actual ideaspace of the community.
I mean it's not hard to understand where the author is coming from. It seems like these days even a hobby project has to meet some kind of 'is there a market for it' threshold of justifying its existence.
So your parent may've taken the 'is it useful' comments to mean 'if not, why even exist' but I got the sense they're more from people who are considering an install, even if just in a VM.
[deleted]
[flagged]
If it's not useful, then why create it?
What a depressing thing to read on _hacker_ news of all places
It's just a name, after all. More accurately, this site would be titled VC Incubator News.
And how boring it would be if that's all it was.
HN isn't reddit, for better and for worse. This is the "Orange Site" that gave us Sam Altman, defends monopolies and shits out thousands of net-negative SaaS startups that leech off Open Source software. Manufacture of depression is one of YC's byproducts that everyone loves to ignore while berating Flock and 9 Mothers like they spontaneously popped into existence.
Your peers on this website are not principled, fun-loving Freenode/Libera geeks. HN is the Linkdin of underground social networking.
This is unexpectedly one of the saddest comments I have ever read here.
The "everything needs to have a purpose and make money" mentality here is very exhausting.
For fun.
We could say the same for most of the comments on this site, including yours and mine.
Because they can.
Are you useful?
That's the scary part about AI and the transformation it'll have on society. The answer to that question for all of us, soon enough, will be no, not useful enough vs an AI. Then what happens?
Maybe, but it’s not gonna be because of LLMs
Yet I still can not use ruby on it ...
Sorry guys - Haiku is a great idea, but it needs to become a real operating system semi-advanced users can use daily. And it hasn't been at that since years.
Linux works.
What do you mean by that? It seems like there's Ruby in the packages:
> it needs to become a real operating system semi-advanced users can use daily
No it doesn't.
[deleted]
> Linux works.
Which distro?
Linux is an OS kernel, not a full operating system.
I still need to know which distro to choose before I install it.
No need to do that with macOS or Windows, but Linux is always a problem.
I have no idea which distro to choose actually. Too much choices and it's not clear why one should be better than the other. For some distros it feels more like it's one-man projects for bragging rights. It's also a bit hard to put trust in that.
I want to resurrect an older Mac mini with an installation of a Linux distribution, but choosing a suitable distro is the first step I struggle with. Only thing I know is that it won't be an Ubuntu setup. :-)
I do run Linux-based systems in various forms already: OpenWRT on the router, an older Debian VM —which I just messed up a few days ago by trying to uninstall a wallpaper package which took down the whole desktop environment for some reason— and Raspbian on the PI.
But on some days I feel maybe I just should go for FreeBSD. But it may have similar (to a lesser extend) issues like Haiku with proper up-to-date software, especially in the web browser department? I previously dabbled with Haiku and this was its main issue. The OS itself is pretty nice though.
I've tried a few distros in the past and have now settled (on NixOS for servers and tinkering, and Fedora for just-working). But I've never tried a BSD and would also be curious how using one would turn out.
Maybe getting into FreeBSD for a bit would be a fun little project.
Which Windows?
I personally always install LTSC because there's no ads and less bloat, but sometimes random things don't work. This isn't a problem with Android, but Windows is always a problem
On VMs*
No, they got it booting on bare metal a few posts down.
If you scroll down, the poster got it running on real hardware.
Can we use that as daily driver?
A clever developer making things work on his or her own
hardware, is not quite on the same level as daily driver.
(Granted, Linux would also have to run on M1 Macs. But I
mean this more on the issue of same-hardware or comparable
hardware level.)
One can reasonably infer that, since this is a discussion thread rather than a formal support announcement, that this is not yet a formally-supported configuration.
I’m not sure anybody can use Haiku as a daily driver, regardless of platform.
Depends on your needs. On Intel and for some minimal uses, it probably can be a daily driver. There's some days where I've used Haiku exclusively. Not many, and probably days when I went without checking my email, but it has happened.
But it isn't ready for any kind of real mainstream daily driver use, no.
Who is “we” and why do they matter in this context
Was just explaining to my offspring about how Apple was looking to buy Be Inc. back before Jobs returned and they allowed themselves to be bought by NeXT. Sort of a fun complete-circle: Be ports BeOS to PowerMacs, Apple passes on buying Be, Be Inc. fades into the distance, HaikuOS kicks off, 20+ years later they port HaikuOS to Apple hardware.
Honestly... my problem with Apple laptops isn't the hardware, it's the crappy version of XNU/Darwin/NextStep that comes with them. I would buy a Mac if it came with HaikuOS and supported all the peripherals. But what is the chance of that?
This weekend I installed Haiku on my old Thinkpad X40. It’s fast and surprisingly stable. Emacs, VLC works like a charm. Computer to slow for web browsing. The BeProductive office suite is a masterpiece of application at a 9MB download; although not open source.
Then I installed Haiku on my XPS13 under KVM/Qemu. Everything runs blazingly fast. I’m thinking of maybe using that install for organizing my photos. The metadata functionality built into the BeFS is great for that.
I must say that I am really impressed.
How usable is Haiku OS in practice?
It's a delight to use, if a little esoteric at first. After the experiment phase, the software ecosystem comes up fairly limited. But I recommend visiting.
Here are some more impressions: https://kconner.com/2025/03/09/haiku-os-study-path.html
I was trying to set up an install for my HS age some to learn programming this summer with minimal distractions. I was surprised to see IntelliJ runs and they’ve integrated GNU core utils. A hello world program ran fine.
On M1 on specific? or on any platform in general?
Sad that we'll probably never be able to run this on M1/M-series iPads.
So sad to me how combative Apple has been towards open source software over the years. The peak of the jailbreak era was imo peak mobile development too. So much innovation and rapid iteration. Anything seemed possible and anything really was possible if you put your mind to it and built the thing. Pretty much any good idea apple integrated into ios has been shamelessly copied without attribute from that crucible of creativity that is the jailbreak community.
But it all hinged on someone coming up with an exploit and releasing it free to the community ignoring any bug bounty. True altruists. And apple is good enough at whack a mole and paying people $100k that this sort of effort died out. Most low hanging fruit all picked and patched already. It is no wonder that ios innovation has also stalled out now that there isn't someone to copy good ideas from any longer.
I am sure government can regulate such things like they can force Apple to open up their walled garden.
It would be refreshing if anyone in government cared about such things.
Which governments, though? The US loves these "NOBUS" companies, enforcing Google and Apple's walled garden is part of their agenda.
The hardline opposition like China, Russia and North Korea all have contingency ecosystems they'd rather promote than force Apple to comply with an arbitrary featureset. The EU, for all the good it has done, will have to contend with the US refusing to extend FVEY intelligence to states that resist cooperation.
The four other eyes are most likely already excluding the US at this point given that sharing intelligence with the US almost certainly means sharing it with your enemies.
The four eyes are most likely already excluding the US at this point.
My hopes are high that the EU will be able to do this some day (unless it's fully enshittified first -- see chat control, age verification etc.)
[dead]
You can also try out a demo in your browser at https://distrosea.com/select/haiku/
M1 is not listed at this URL for me?
This is to see what the distro is like, not to see if it’s stable on apple silicon
Using BeOS was a fantastic experience in 1999, and it's sad that it hasn't caught on. I'm rooting for all OSes that bring different perspectives to the OS world instead of being another textbook Unix variant.
My only qualm is how HaikuOS, and AmigaOS for that matter, fail to carry over their aesthetics to a high-resolution/HiDPI world. I see gradients, overly-empahsized embosses in the UI screenshots. They lack the serene feeling of their user interfaces from 25 years ago, and feel like DVD menus now. I used to feel the same about KDE, but it has since moved on from flashy rendering AFAIR.
What I mean isn't to adopt a completely flat design, which I also dislike, but for instance, Windows 11's UI seems easier on the eyes than Haiku now.
I also know that UI is hard, no question about it. All the good luck and best wishes to the team.
Haiku has a flat theme.
[dead]
Neat! Not sure why the comments on this post are immediately asking if it’s useful. Not everything has to be immediately useful to exist. Kill the capitalist in your head.
> Kill the capitalist in your head.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Kill the capitalist in your head.
Who referenced capitalism? And do anarchists, socialists, communists, et al., never question the usefulness of a thing either?
The difference is those groups promote culture for culture's sake. Capitalism does not. Culture is only promoted if there is profit to be made off promoting it. As such what culture exists is severely inorganic and dependent on market forces rather than being some proxy of the actual ideaspace of the community.
I mean it's not hard to understand where the author is coming from. It seems like these days even a hobby project has to meet some kind of 'is there a market for it' threshold of justifying its existence.
So your parent may've taken the 'is it useful' comments to mean 'if not, why even exist' but I got the sense they're more from people who are considering an install, even if just in a VM.
[flagged]
If it's not useful, then why create it?
What a depressing thing to read on _hacker_ news of all places
You might want to read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture
It's just a name, after all. More accurately, this site would be titled VC Incubator News.
And how boring it would be if that's all it was.
HN isn't reddit, for better and for worse. This is the "Orange Site" that gave us Sam Altman, defends monopolies and shits out thousands of net-negative SaaS startups that leech off Open Source software. Manufacture of depression is one of YC's byproducts that everyone loves to ignore while berating Flock and 9 Mothers like they spontaneously popped into existence.
Your peers on this website are not principled, fun-loving Freenode/Libera geeks. HN is the Linkdin of underground social networking.
This is unexpectedly one of the saddest comments I have ever read here.
The "everything needs to have a purpose and make money" mentality here is very exhausting.
For fun.
We could say the same for most of the comments on this site, including yours and mine.
Because they can.
Are you useful?
That's the scary part about AI and the transformation it'll have on society. The answer to that question for all of us, soon enough, will be no, not useful enough vs an AI. Then what happens?
Maybe, but it’s not gonna be because of LLMs
Yet I still can not use ruby on it ...
Sorry guys - Haiku is a great idea, but it needs to become a real operating system semi-advanced users can use daily. And it hasn't been at that since years.
Linux works.
What do you mean by that? It seems like there's Ruby in the packages:
https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/ruby/haikuports/haikuports...
> it needs to become a real operating system semi-advanced users can use daily
No it doesn't.
> Linux works.
Which distro?
Linux is an OS kernel, not a full operating system.
I still need to know which distro to choose before I install it.
No need to do that with macOS or Windows, but Linux is always a problem.
I have no idea which distro to choose actually. Too much choices and it's not clear why one should be better than the other. For some distros it feels more like it's one-man projects for bragging rights. It's also a bit hard to put trust in that.
I want to resurrect an older Mac mini with an installation of a Linux distribution, but choosing a suitable distro is the first step I struggle with. Only thing I know is that it won't be an Ubuntu setup. :-)
I do run Linux-based systems in various forms already: OpenWRT on the router, an older Debian VM —which I just messed up a few days ago by trying to uninstall a wallpaper package which took down the whole desktop environment for some reason— and Raspbian on the PI.
But on some days I feel maybe I just should go for FreeBSD. But it may have similar (to a lesser extend) issues like Haiku with proper up-to-date software, especially in the web browser department? I previously dabbled with Haiku and this was its main issue. The OS itself is pretty nice though.
I've tried a few distros in the past and have now settled (on NixOS for servers and tinkering, and Fedora for just-working). But I've never tried a BSD and would also be curious how using one would turn out.
Maybe getting into FreeBSD for a bit would be a fun little project.
Which Windows?
I personally always install LTSC because there's no ads and less bloat, but sometimes random things don't work. This isn't a problem with Android, but Windows is always a problem
On VMs*
No, they got it booting on bare metal a few posts down.
If you scroll down, the poster got it running on real hardware.
Can we use that as daily driver?
A clever developer making things work on his or her own hardware, is not quite on the same level as daily driver. (Granted, Linux would also have to run on M1 Macs. But I mean this more on the issue of same-hardware or comparable hardware level.)
One can reasonably infer that, since this is a discussion thread rather than a formal support announcement, that this is not yet a formally-supported configuration.
I’m not sure anybody can use Haiku as a daily driver, regardless of platform.
Depends on your needs. On Intel and for some minimal uses, it probably can be a daily driver. There's some days where I've used Haiku exclusively. Not many, and probably days when I went without checking my email, but it has happened.
But it isn't ready for any kind of real mainstream daily driver use, no.
Who is “we” and why do they matter in this context