A decidedly non-Linux distro walkthrough: Haiku R1/beta2
Jims review on Ars was a bit unfair, considering the enormous difference in man power involved with the Haiku community and the commercial support most other OS’s have - there is a factor of at least x1000. Yet Haiku is brave enough to tackle an integrated system of its own. For instance, Web+ is a beta browser purposely built to target only Haiku, whose primary goal is to use native features. It would have been easier to port Firefox, there even was a port 15 years ago when it was still called Mozilla. But it was sluggish then, and a more native solution was suggested.<p>Although Web+ is young, thorny and buggy (now), with every iteration it gets better, more stable, and faster. And the core OS functionality benefits with improvements other apps can utilise. For instance, lots of blending modes were added to AppServer to support web standards, so every native app gets these features as well. The net classes improved, media streaming improved. The article mentions a crash with YouTube by a refactored memory paging off-by-one error, which has been fixed 3 weeks ago, and this bug fix benefits all apps. All software has bugs, they get fixed eventually.<p>There are benefits to Haiku which most casual observers don&#x27;t register in their brief sessions. It requires a bit more “miles” before the benefits are discovered. It’s a young system with potential. It’s a beta of R1. There will be more revisions in the future, more iterations, more quality.<p>Unlike the <i></i>nix distros which are an amalgamation of various independant components with duplicate integration channels, Haiku is building a tailored unified system. The end benefit will be noticeable in component integration and efficiency, which the heterogeneous <i></i>nix systems will struggle to match. Haiku is targetting the front end user, not the invisible back end.