Just a heads-up for those trying it out, I've found a couple of regressions in Beta 6 that rendered my Haiku system unbootable, until I remembered about hammering the space key during the boot sequence to get to the safe mode menu.
In my case, my ThinkPad X1 (Yoga 3rd Gen) used to boot despite what appeared to be kernel panics, but typing "continue" at the kernel prompt would skip past them and everything would then work fine. In Beta 6, it now hangs at boot instead with no kernel panic warning. Disabling ACPI in the safe mode options gets me past that, and there's a way to disable ACPI permanently at boot via some configuration files - though obviously that isn't desirable.
It also seems there's been some work on USB Audio (yay!), but it now causes a kernel panic on boot if a Focusrite Scarlett is connected. Turning the Scarlett off avoids the kernel panic. The Scarlett has never officially worked in Haiku, but it at least never used to crash the system. In my case, I've reverted back to the USB Audio Scarlett Haiku driver that Claude Sonnet vibe coded for me, and for me that's working. (I can't contribute that code because of Haiku rules against AI code, but hopefully the humans will eventually find time to hand code it and get it working.)
I think there should maybe be shadow repositories available for Open Source projects where things like your driver could be contributed.
I get why Haiku does not want to deal with it do this is not a criticism. But I have also used AI to port software and create drivers. Others may not have the ability, even with AI. Perhaps I have docs you don’t. And some of it took a reasonable amount of money and time. I am not going to dedicate that to everything I might use if it was available. And in addition to wasting duplicated money and time, we are destroying the earth recreating things others have already done.
I use Chimera Linux and I have thought about starting a repo just for the stuff that I have ported.
I am not sure what the exact answer is but I hope this is something we figure out.
This is one of the things I like with NixOS: it's easy enough to add new packages and patch existing ones that stuff like this can either live in the core nixpkgs repo or be managed through some community-supported overlay. (Great example of this is [nixos-hardware](https://github.com/nixos/nixos-hardware) which shares settings and fixes for specific laptop models and the like, or [emacs-overlay](https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay) which has a bunch of extra Emacs-specific stuff that would not belong in the core repo.)
Haiku should rethink that AI rule. Put very high code quality gates in place, sure, but Haiku in particular is a very low-velocity project and AI could help them so much. There is no reason you can't produce high-quality code with AI conformant to your style guidelines and structural preferences, it just takes a lot more effort than the slop.
My understanding is that the AI policy is more to do with issues of copyright and code provenance. They want to make sure that all of their code is cleared with no risk of accidentally using 'stolen' code or GPL code repeated by an AI. I can at least understand the policy.
I think there's other opinions around AI use there as well, but I'll back off from that. I didn't mean for my post to become top voted, when we should be celebrating Haiku reaching Beta 6. I'm just disappointed that for me, R1/b6 has been a very big regression, right at a time when I've been using AI to make all the software I write cross-compatible with Haiku via Go & SDL, and even use AI to write drivers so more of my hardware works on Haiku... and instead, now I can barely even boot the system.
I have no qualitative opinion as to whether the Haiku team should reconsider the AI rule or not, but you select about just one possible advantage. There may be disadvantages using AI. One that keeps on happening is that real humans use AI slop spam to pester other humans with it.
> There is no reason you can't produce high-quality code with AI conformant to your style guidelines and structural preferences, it just takes a lot more effort than the slop.
It's not just code though. There are humans who deliberately and actively use AI slop to spam people. I saw this first on gobolinux, then on prawn, then on the ffmpeg mailing list. There are really good reasons why many humans dislike the proliferation of AI slop spam.
> Haiku in particular is a very low-velocity project and AI could help them so much
I am not entirely certain about that. If AI were to work so well, Haiku-AI could have already been insta-spawned and auto-fixed everything. Clearly this does not work, so I am unconvinced that AI is the final solution to everything - at the least right now.
What is also unfortunate about Haiku is that things such as ruby do not work by default. Ruby even works on windows, though on Linux it is much more convenient to use.
No one is trying to get rich from working on Haiku. They are doing it for fun, as a passion project. Sure AI would help with velocity but velocity is not the only goal. Journey before destination.
Also: Open source is about relationships.
Reviewing code sucks. However at least reviewing code from humans allows you connect and learn from each other. You get to mentor someone. Build a relationship and trust. They learn and grow and maybe someday can also review other people's code.
Nowadays with lots of low effort merge requests and spam it is already easy to burn out. Now add AI. Yeah, no. Why should anyone review AI slop for free. Why? It is the prefect solution to burn your contributors out.
Will do, I think I recognize your username from the forums :) Life is getting in the way and makes it difficult to write a bug report with the necessary level of detail & logs. But when I can find time, I intend to.
I think the ACPI issue is long standing, but I can't find my bug report anywhere in Trac. I'm fairly sure I've made at least one report, I created my Trac account roughly 6 years ago. But I also remember running into issues with Trac, so maybe it never went through.
I'm so happy. Haiku to me, is visually the most beautiful operating system out there. The icons, apps, designs. If there be anything that can ever steal the spotlight from Mac; it would be Haiku. And the OS is perhaps the one and only one that remains a tool in the old sense. All other operating systems are now service and signups and telemetry and notifications; this is the last resort remaining for the rest of us. I only wonder sometimes when it is going to become usable. With LLMs I'm wondering can't they be put to find the stability issues and make the solving faster?
What really sets Haiku (and the preceding BeOS) apart is that it's built for the express purpose of being a desktop operating system. As good as desktop Linux has gotten it still suffers from servers being the chief use case for Linux-based OSes, seen in quirks such as how poorly it handles running out of memory (not as big of a deal in the server world, particularly in the container era; just tweak your setup and reboot your containers). It's not bogged down with corporate IT needs either.
The last time we got an OS that was as purely desktop-end-user-oriented with no competing influences was Classic Mac OS, which had serious technical issues.
The problem is, Linux is improving too quickly for Haiku.
I have been looking forward to running Haiku as a daily driver for years. And it is almost there. It may even be good enough now for many people. Modern browsers really help.
But I was amazed recently when I put Haiku on an old laptop that was already running Linux. I remember Haiku being so lean and fast and multi-tasking so smoothly. But honestly Linux felt faster on this machine. The memory usage was about the same (a real shock to me). And I missed being able to use containers. So, I ended up putting Linux back on.
This bummed me out because I have been a Haiku fan forever and it has never been better. But when I tried to use it, I could not convince myself there was any benefit (other than diversity). And the reason had nothing to do with applications or drivers.
I guess this depends on how you see things. Windows was meant to be a desktop OS and crashed all the time. Probably still does, but the wise have abandoned that burning ship.
Linux, however, rarely crashes on a desktop, and when it does, it is usually due to a graphic card driver that doesn't want to work there.
Windows crashing all the time? I haven’t experienced crashes since WinXP… Or when trying beta drivers and overclocking. As a day to day windows and OSX user, I’ve had more stability issues with OSX than Windows.
Nvidia drivers crashed Windows 7 for me multiple times and so did virtualization software (VMware in particular). I had Windows 10 crash a few times when I last touched it doing really nothing special. I'm not using any ancient software or obscure peripherals. But yeah, if it works on your machine then I guess...
Even before the more recent enshittification, Windows has long suffered from prioritization of corporate/enterprise needs over those of end users, rendering various parts of the system more complicated than they need to be. This is visible going back to 3.x/9x; the versions of Mac OS (and BeOS) of the same vintage are more friendly and approachable on several fronts.
> such as how poorly it handles running out of memory
What is interesting, FreeBSD last time I used it, had far ,pre simple predictable kernel OOM killer. Anyway, I always either switch off swap on Linux machines or install EarlyOOM.
> If there be anything that can ever steal the spotlight from Mac; it would be Haiku.
I looked at the Haiku slideshow and I'm not seeing this. It looks like an eye sore, desktop environments familiar of the 90s. Even early OSX is a massive improvement (as it was to the NeXT desktop).
Don't get me wrong; Mac is light years ahead. What I mean is the level of harmony and design integrity the Haiku has. I doubt that any corporation can ever have even the team that used to make the icons of Tiger/Leopard era. The scrollbars of the Leopard or the whole Aqua. But given their team size and small scale of Haiku; this is one amazing job. The apps, the website, the icons; the documentations... all are in harmony and you don't find it anywhere else.
I agree, it's arguably clean, and definitely an improvement over Windows 98 era GUI, probably also XP era. But the world has moved on. Even KDE looks better today.
I honestly don't get this, what have we gotten since that's a considerable UI improvement? Bigger paddings? Flat UI?
IIRC you can even configure custom colors, have dark mode, etc. It might look dated with the gray color scheme but that's really the only thing I can guess would look dated to someone.
Haiku could theoretically fill a niche for music production workflows. Ultra tight MIDI timing and sequencing, low-latency audio and a beautiful desktop. I hope this dream comes true eventually.
I worked on a Elektron MachineDrum firmware fix that corrected the MIDI jittering due to incorrect ISR configuration.
MD itself is pretty tight already with its RTOS but the fix brought it down to microseconds.
I was pretty proud of it because it solves a few phasing problems.
I then turned this over to a friend running a lot of Elektron boxes, and his reaction was, "you mean the sound we've got is wrong? how strange!"
So while I feel the same urge to have ultra tight MIDI timing, I doubt this would be a general interest of the non-technical musicians out there.
I tried Haiku recently on a not-super-old PC and was impressed by the speed and the reasonable availability of software. I then wished I could run this on my old Powerbook G4 because nothing else seems to run there anymore with ease, and this seems like the perfect desktop OS for such old machines. And it turns out there is now a fork for PPC: https://github.com/ActionRetro/Tabby-PPC !
(Why a fork? Because it's primarily vibecoded and Haiku won't take the patches upstream. But hey, I'm gonna give it a try anyway.)
Congrats to the team, I adore Haiku from afar and hope they continue to do good work. Had to do a bit of debugging with some code I help maintain for the new release, but it was a fun excuse to mess around with it a bit again.
I wish Haiku all the best. It's always great to see some diversity in the FOSS OS landscape. Hope it finds its niche eventually like the BSDs did after the lawsuit drama.
In my case, my ThinkPad X1 (Yoga 3rd Gen) used to boot despite what appeared to be kernel panics, but typing "continue" at the kernel prompt would skip past them and everything would then work fine. In Beta 6, it now hangs at boot instead with no kernel panic warning. Disabling ACPI in the safe mode options gets me past that, and there's a way to disable ACPI permanently at boot via some configuration files - though obviously that isn't desirable.
It also seems there's been some work on USB Audio (yay!), but it now causes a kernel panic on boot if a Focusrite Scarlett is connected. Turning the Scarlett off avoids the kernel panic. The Scarlett has never officially worked in Haiku, but it at least never used to crash the system. In my case, I've reverted back to the USB Audio Scarlett Haiku driver that Claude Sonnet vibe coded for me, and for me that's working. (I can't contribute that code because of Haiku rules against AI code, but hopefully the humans will eventually find time to hand code it and get it working.)