against what Xerox said, niche OS challenge! would you use this?

[DiTBho]

"where there are literally thousands of programs written for it, it would be unwise not to take advantage of it" - Xerox said.

It explains why BeOS died, and why Haiku exists as "done by volunteers" project.

For those who, if Windows, Linux, MacOS are too common business OSes nowadays, they are only happy when the the OS is as wild as rare

So if you can put on your seat belt so you don't fall out of your chair, would you consider using one of these?

• Haiku (BeOS-like, developed by a small group of volunteers, ISO available for x86, RISC-V is the first functional non-Intel/x86 port!)
• Syllable (Desktop) ( forked from the stagnant AtheOS, ISO available for x86)
• ...

Here, even when the kernel *somehow* works, the network is up with a more than decent SSH & SSHD, the filesystem is superb and unique (BFS rocks!), and the GUI elegant and productive, the problem is... the lack of applications and the difficulties in porting what exists from Linux/BSD.

Adding more sauce to the niche-OS challenge: Haiku Beta 3/4 on RISC-V + AMD-GPU

OMG, it's all a crash and kernel panic at the moment, SMP (more than one processor) support is still a WIP-pray-it-wont-panic via a couple of patches.

And you know, "releasing software that requires these unsupported builds is discouraged" - they said!

Been an awful good human being, do you dare ask Santa Babe to hurry down the chimney on xmas night
with one, say two, little things you really need?

• a SiFive Unmatched board with PCIe(very hard to find)
• a Radeon HD PCIe graphics card

Oh, men, sure I will!

[DiTBho]

Intel and sifive are working together for a new SBC.
4xP550 cores, 1xPCI-e slot.

Allwinner Nezha has a new SBC called MangoPi Pro, freebsd is porting riscv for their D1 soc.

Nice. Isn't it? 

[xmris]

Haiku is nice, I run it as 2nd OS on an ASUS EEE PC (901) , you can even run 'wine' there - bit weird operation not like 'wine' on linux, you may keep an eye on https://github.com/haikuports/haikuports .

[DiTBho]

Yup, Haiku beta3 is available for x86 and it's nice!


RISC-V: anyone? am I alone here? let me know 

[DiTBho]

Syllable (Desktop): anyone?

[DiTBho]

Future: Haiku on ThinkPad X13S (ARM, Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 8cx Gen 3 SC8280XP @ 3,00 GHz ) 

[50ShadesOfDirt]

Can't help w/ the above, as I'm having fun with OS/2 Warp (Arca Noae version, *current* reseller of OS/2!) in a VM.

Gets me my object-oriented desktop fix, and surprisingly, I'm able to do pretty much all my productivity work in it. This should make it as one of my "core" productivity vm's ...

Folks are working on kernel (loader) replacements (QSINIT, OS4 projects) for the original, so maybe we'll see 64 bits! ! In the meantime, lots of ports to it from the linux world, including GCC, package managers (rpm/yum, anpm), etc. I'm able to run firefox and such, so not cut off from the rest of the world (although it may have been better to be cut off?)

I think my perfect PC would be a type-1 hypervisor (esxi, gobs of ram & ssd's), and a boatload of vm's holding core productivity machines (win, linux today, soon to include OS/2, and who knows what tomorrow), and all the other os's in vm's that there just isn't enough time in the day to play with. Last time I looked, about the only thing holding me up was nvidia graphics support, shared out to all the vm's ...

Hyper-V gets close, and I might switch a physical machine to it one day, but I feel like MS "pollutes" these solutions (Hyper-V, WSL, etc.) with so much extraneous crap that I tend to stick with standard virtualization (vmware workstation, virtualbox).

Attached is the ArcaOS desktop in OS/2 ...

[SiliconWizard]

Syllable (Desktop): anyone?

I had a look at Syllable a long time ago. Maybe 15 years ago or so. It wasn't particularly stable at the time. Haven't looked back since. I don't know how robust it is or how clean the design is.

As to Haiku, I know it, but I haven't dug deep enough to know if the design is sound or if it's not just a waste of time.

I like alternatives, I just don't know if either of them is worth it. Let us know.

[DiTBho]

I just don't know if either of them is worth it. Let us know.

Haiku:

Beta1/x86 is not worth it
Beta2/x86 is worth it for basic tasks. A lot of stuff just work if you don't question why.
Beta3/x86 is worth it, lot of fix and improvements, to the point you can daily use it for office tasks.

X11-apps are being ported to the native GUI, X11-native is ... still an hack inside an hack inside a window of pain.

The native filesystem is worth it *ONLY* if you really need relational features.
I do, so I love it 

Beta3/RISCV is not worth it:
- only works on certain Radeon cards
- text-console-mode doesn't work -> you need a Radeon card.
- SMP is unstable
- slow
- only two (expensive) mobos (partially) supported at the moment

Beta3/PowerPC is not worth it: unstable. Stalled. No interest.
Beta3/Arm is not worth it: unstable, but it's just a matter of time. I see interest.

[DiTBho]

(I secretly dream about a RISCV laptop, with a RADEON chip on it, and running Haiku
2023? 2024? sweet dreams are made of this  )

[Infraviolet]

So, no-one seems to have discussed yet: what can these unusual OS's do for you that Linux can't?

When it comes to ideas for a new OS, honestly the most useful thing I can imagine would be Linux, but modified to have a perfect compatibility layer (not a "works 50% of the time" one like Wine, which I'm very lucky to have work for the windows programs I need to use from Linux) for running .exe windows software. An OS is a tool to serve as a stable base on which to run the programs you actually do things with, I'm a bit mystified why OS development projects so often go in the directions of novelty but rarely towards improving compatibility.

[DiTBho]

So, no-one seems to have discussed yet: what can these unusual OS's do for you that Linux can't?

for me, they right question is *how* they can, and *how* they are written 

[DiTBho]

Haiku ucKernel vs Monolithic Linux, pros cons, but I love uckernels

Haiku, and X11 vs Haiku-GUI is an other pros. Its graphical engine is coherent and it's so thin that it can fly the same hardware where GNU/Linux X11 looks a dead elephant.

(cons ... there is no software ... X11-apps need to be ported, adapted, modified)

A second pros: the BeFS relational filesystem (openBFS). It takes a lots of good ideas from XFS but mixed with unique features like relational capabilities.

There is no other filesystem like BeFS!

[SiliconWizard]

Is Haiku initially based on BeOS source code (if it was ever released, I don't even know?) or is it a clone with a completely different code base?

[DiTBho]

Source partially released.

The kernel comes from newos. New fresh stuff.
The filesystem is new fresh stuff, based on Be' doc.
Part of the GUI comes from BeOS pro netbone source.

[Marco]

Nah, I have no nostalgia for any of the underlying history. It's not even a proper microkernel.

An actual microkernel desktop OS with full MMU protection of all subsystems and drivers, with PCID/ASID support to keep it performant, would be interesting ... but still not interesting enough for me to use. Well, maybe if Valve uses it for Steam Deck 2.

[DiTBho]

Meanwhile, Haiku R1-x86/beta4 has been released!!!

[DiTBho]

Oh, Oh, Oh! Finally a decent Xlib and Wayland compatibility layers!!!

[DiTBho]

It's not even a proper microkernel.

yup, and technically it is not even a Unix-based system, but rather a "single user" Unix-like OS (single user Unix? LOL) with a POSIX compatibility layer added on top to provide a standardized shell and GNU userland utilities, such as coreutils.

Yes, unbelievable, but Coreutils really runs on Haiku

A true "ortodox uCKernel" should be reduced to the minimum with only IPC, memory management and a few other things lies in kernel space, while all other things run in user space, drivers, filesystem, ... On top of it the servers supply all the services needed to run user apps.

The Haiku kernel is a hybrid kernel designed from the bottom up to be "pervasively multithreaded", which, for performance reasons, moves some stuff like the network stack in kernel space to take good sides of both worlds, achieving high stability and modularity but avoiding performance bottlenecks.

[DiTBho]

(otherwise, try Minix-v3  )

[Marco]

The Haiku kernel is a hybrid kernel designed from the bottom up to be "pervasively multithreaded", which, for performance reasons, moves some stuff like the network stack in kernel space to take good sides of both worlds, achieving high stability and modularity but avoiding performance bottlenecks.

Even with ARM's 8 bit ASID, I doubt you're going to be trashing the TLB much if you use them intelligently. With PCID's 12 bits I don't see it happening.

The context switch cost argument is 20 years out of date.

[DiTBho]

NewOS_t Haiku;

Haiku is based on NewOS, largely implemented in C/C++, with a small amount of assembly.
You don't like it? Well, it's C/C++ with a small amount of assembly, so .. you should be able to modify and improve it.

The design of the NewOS kernel, therefore of the skeleton of Haiku kernel, is based on a micro kernel written by a former Be Inc. employee Travis Geiselbrecht, with a minimal amount of user space libraries and applications so it isn’t interesting from an end-user point of view – there is no gui, simple commands on a command line, however NewOS provides a flexible framework to build other systems out of, cross-platform portability, kind of *very clean implementation* (the Linux kernel sucks here, a lot) that can be used as a learning tool for others and gives an educational opportunity for developers. Pretty like what Michael Noisternig did when he took over the NewOS source code, and implemented new ideas creating a fork named NewOS-Notion.

That *IS* the point here 

[50ShadesOfDirt]

As to why "OS/2, in the new incarnation of ArcaOS", it has a truly object-oriented desktop, where every item on the desktop isn't just a pointer/shortcut, it is an intelligent "object", and almost infinitely configurable.

This was programmed/built in the 90's, and it is still one of the key reasons to use the OS/2 desktop today.

Package managers exist (anpm, yum/rpm), and many linux apps have been or are being ported, so not much you can't do.

Closest thing to it might have been BeOS?

[DiTBho]

every item on the desktop isn't just a pointer/shortcut, it is an intelligent "object", and almost infinitely configurable.
[..]
Closest thing to it might have been BeOS?

not even close, on Haiku the desktop is very minimal
but you can somehow use the filesystem to add meta-data to App binary file, and use the trick to configure the App.