Ars spends too much time trying to work in Haiku, the BeOS successor

What starts as a joke
Turned into a fool’s errand
“I’ll work in Haiku.”

And it started with such promise, too. Haiku, the open-source successor to the late and lamented BeOS—that late, lamented operating system of the 1990s developed at Apple refugee Jean-Louis Gassée’s Be Inc. BeOS was intended to compete with the “classic” Apple MacOS and with Microsoft Windows; by 1996, Gassée was jockeying to get Apple to acquire his company and make BeOS the basis of the next-generation Macintosh operating system. But then along came some guy named Steve Jobs, with a company called NeXT. And the rest, as they say, is history. Be Inc. was eventually acquired by another doomed company (Palm) and dissolved.

Haiku (initially “OpenBeOS,” but changed because of copyright assertions by Palm) was launched in 2001 to create an operating system that was binary-compatible with applications written for the ill-fated BeOS. It uses the same C++ API as BeOS, but it is a re-implementation of that API, so it shares virtually none of the code of the original BeOS. As it has evolved, Haiku has taken two diverging roads: a 32-bit version that retains backward compatibility, and a 64-bit version that is more forward-looking but breaks backward compatibility because of compiler issues. That’s because the 32-bit version, like BeOS before it, is based on Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) 2.

Neither of these paths have yet resulted in an operating system that could be considered ready for release. After a burst of development activity fueled by Haiku being accepted for Google’s “Summer of Code” program in 2008 and 2009, the first “alpha” (experimental, pre-“beta”) version of Haiku was released in September of 2009. But it has been a slow road since then.

The “stable” version
Was released five years ago
And it’s an alpha.

The last official build of Haiku R1, alpha 4, was posted in November of 2012. Development of a version of Firefox for Haiku (Bezilla) trailed off long ago—the last post on the project’s progress was in 2011, and it was to Bezilla’s LiveJournal blog. That means that trying to do actual day-to-day Web work (or any work, really) does not particularly inspire poetry.

The Bezilla browser is still where it was in 2011: stable, crash-free, and pretty much worthless with modern websites. It fails ugly and hard on Gmail, and Google redirects it to the still-active unsecure search page for legacy browsers. Similarly, the Alpha WebPositive browser is essentially non-functional for modern websites. I couldn’t even log into my Google account. On top of that, most of the Be applications I tried (such as the open source AbiWord word processor) failed to launch.

Things looked a bit better on one of the more recent nightly builds, particularly on the “hybrid” 32-bit side, which is more likely to actually function with existing BeOS 5 (Intel x86) software packages. Many of these are available through an installation manager called HaikuDepot, which was added after the alpha release was posted. The WebPositive browser manages to function (mostly) on modern pages, though there are occasional freezes (especially with Gmail, which has a tendency to overwork the browser).

The Haiku e-mail client, though bare bones, works with occasional hiccups with POP and IMAP accounts. I had one or two mail daemon seizures to contend with. Also, there’s an SMB networking add-in to allow connections to file servers, as well as built-in FTP and web servers.

There are other signs of progress. The Swift programming language is partially ported to Haiku now, thanks to a Summer of Code effort. The OpenJDK was ported to Haiku in 2012, and Haiku is back in the Google Summer of Code program for the eighth time this year (after a two-year hiatus). So there’s hope that some eager students will push the project forward.

I may have ended up being more productive with Haiku than I was that time I used FreeDOS. For those curious to see how far they can take things with Haiku, the .ISO files can be used for live boot CDs.