Anybody has experiences using Haiku OS? I wonder what can actually be done with it :) What popular software runs on Haiku?
@unfa well it's my main OS at home. I end up writing a lot of apps myself and fixing a lot of bugs in the OS and not getting much else done. It works reasonably well for my use now (xmpp chat, some web browsing, writing code for haiku itself and for old and/or obscure computers)
A lot of apps from Linux are available now, that's useful but nothing new, and that wasn't really the goal for Haiku. A lot of apps remain to be written…
@pulkomandy
Fan here 🤩
Is there a virtualization layer? OpenBSD, Plan9, have vmx and the like, to run non-native apps under Linux, and create the choice of using the base OS as a daily driver.
Or is running #HaikuOS in a VM on a different base OS the way to use it as a daily driver?
Also, BTW, is the OS design adjacent with KML - kernel-mode Linux?
@unfa
@tetrislife @unfa I use Haiku on real hardware, for now there is no support for virtualizing other OS in it. I think KapiX (one of the developers) is or was experimenting with porting nvmm from NetBSD.
I don't see what we would do with KML, we don't use the Linux kernel and we would rather remove things from the kernel whenever possible and benefit from memory protection and all other nice things provided by userspace?
@pulkomandy
Thanks for clarifying. I was trying to understand Haiku's approach to (desktop) OS design, and thought a comparision to kernel-mode Linux was valid. So, single-user doesn't mean "run everything as root"? Cool!
@unfa
@pulkomandy
Oh. How far do those isolation properties go, beyond Linux's ? I guess #Plan9 is the practical gold standard for that.
Windows games used to basically run in kernel mode, as I recall reading. So, it may not be a bad idea for selected apps. And it is different from running as root, thanks for pointing that out.
Anyway, its already a happy situation, having a freely-available desktop-oriented OS in #HaikuOS
@tetrislife only drivers run in kernel mode. Games usually don't install their own drivers.
Haiku is not different from UNIX/Linux in terms of users management. It's not a place where we have a lot to innovate for now (other more important problems to solve first).
@tetrislife @unfa "everything running as the root user" is not at all the same as "everything running in kernel space"
So, yes, Haiku is mostly single-user, but still there is a lot of protection to prevent applications accessing/corrupting each other's memory and data. Running everything in the kernel would remove that barrier