About HaikuOS

Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.

Hardware Support

HaikuOS supports both 32-bit and 64-bit processors; I installed the 64-bit version and have not really run into any issues, however, from the FAQ on Haiku’s website regarding whether there is a 64-bit version of HaikuOS or not:

Yes. Please note that the 64-bit release does not support BeOS binaries, but it is still compatible with the powerful BeOS API (while offering modern features). The 32-bit Haiku release can run most BeOS applications without modification or recompiling. - General FAQ

I did not have any issues with any applications that I tried to run, but most of the things I ran were likely not developed specifically for BeOS.

Using HaikuOS

I installed HaikuOS on my Thinkpad T400 with 4GB of RAM and a core2duo. Even on a hard disk drive HaikuOS boots very quickly. The issue I have with the boot is that I could not figure out how to require a login before being able to have root access to the system. I also could not figure out how to bind a key to lock the screen, which may not be an issue for some people, but definately worth noting for some users.

Shortcut Keys

The shortcut keys are based off of the ALT key rather than CTRL, which takes a minute to get used to if you are used to Windows or Linux. However, it does not take long to fluently work with it; and it can also be changed to the CTRL based shortcut keys in the keyboard settings if it is too annoying to deal with.

User Interface

The UI of Haiku is reminiscent of a 90’s OS with some design choices that take a minute to get used to. However, Haiku includes very good documentation on the desktop that will give a very good walkthrough of most of the common tasks that users would be interested in doing. It will also show how to customize things like the deskbar, which users may want to put somewhere they are more familiar with such as the bottom left corner rather than the top right.

It also take a slightly different approach to window management differently than a traditional stacking window manager does. Each application has a tab that can be dragged to position the window on the screen. If you would like to group applications together, you simply hold the Windows key and drag the current tab over the tab of the application you would like it grouped with. This will then allow the user to drag and resize the entire group of windows rather than just one window at a time. I like finding different ways to manage windows and actually use the system like this (even if I wouldn’t necessarily want to actually use it every day).

File Systems

HaikuOS does not support many filesystems at the time of writing. According to the DriveSetup program on my Haiku install, it will only support FAT32, Btrfs, NTFS, and the Be File system. The FAT32 and NTFS support means that you could transfer data to and from HaikuOS on a flash drive without too much trouble, as most people likely do not use ext4 for external drives. Though, more filesystem support would be nice.

Package Management

HaikuOS uses pkgman as its package manager which works at least as well as FreeBSD’s pkg for most basic tasks like searching for or installing software. There is also a graphical package manager that is called the ‘HaikuDepo’ if users would rather have a GUI for installing packages rather than a command-line tool. The Haiku Depo also has recommendations for popular software in various categories that help show some of the popular options for certain types of software (quite helpful for looking at browsers).

Applications

One of the major issues with more niche operating systems is the availability of software. This is a problem that even more popular OSs like Linux or any of the BSDs have to this day. The following sections will cover some of the highlights of a handful of categories for applications.

Web Browsing

My experience in browsing the web on HaikuOS was probably the worst part of using the OS for me. Websites were slow to load, and too often just didn’t load at all. The browser that I had the best luck with was Gnome’s ‘Web’ (formerly known as Epiphany). It tended to have the best site compatability and also tended to load the quickest out of the browsers that I tried. The next best browser on the list was Falkon, but sadly I had quite a bit of trouble even looking for a wallpaper on DuckDuckGo with Falkon. Finding and downloading an image for a wallpaper was little trouble with Gnome’s Web.

HaikuOS does have a built in browser called ‘Web Positive’, but with my testing the site compatability for that browser was not very good at all. Many sites did not load from something that looked like a TLS error. It seems like the OS thought the time was wrong on my machine, even thogh it appeared to be correct to me. I could not figure out how to fix that issue with the default browser, but the issue didn’t come up again with any other browser.

Media Consumption

The built in media player for Haiku was basic, but it was able to play the music and videos that I tried out. Audio switching between the laptop’s speakers and headphones worked without issues. I installed Clementine for a music player, however, Clementine was not able to play webm audio for some reason (though I did little to try to resolve this).

Office Suite

Libre Office is available in Haiku’s package manager, which should get most people close enough in an office suite. There is also Caligra, however, I have not used it so I don’t know how good or bad it is.

Coding

I want to make it clear that I do not code a lot, so my opinion may not be 100% accurate, but Haiku seems to have most of the tooling needed for at least basic programming. There are a variety of editors, compilers, interpreters, and utilities that make coding in Haiku very possible. It also has packages for a variety of version control systems including: Git, Subversion, and Mercurial.

Gaming

While I do not see many people using Haiku as their main gaming machine, there are quite a few games and emulators in the repositories. Some of the games that I noted are: Minetest, GZdoom, Hexen II, and SuperTuxKart. The main issue I had with gaming is the wireless mouse I connected to the laptop didn’t work, but I’m sure a wired mouse would work just fine.