How Haiku Is Building a Better BeOS

angry tapir writes "BeOS may be dead, but over a decade after its lamentable demise the open source Haiku project keeps its legacy alive. Haiku is an attempt to build a drop-in, binary compatible replacement for BeOS, as well as extending the defunct OS's functionality and support for modern hardware. At least, that's the short-term goal — eventually, Haiku is intended significantly enhance BeOS while maintaining the same philosophy of simplicity and transparency, and without being weighed down with the legacy code of many other contemporary operating systems. I recently caught up with Stephan Aßmus, who has been a key contributor to the project for seven years to talk about BeOS, the current state of Haiku and the project's future plans."

Re:Haiku

[Anonymous Coward]

They may well say that.
But I do not take commands
How to pronounce it.

Re:Raspberry Pi?

[LifeIs0x2A]

Good idea, but BeOS is lacking the massive software repository that Debian Linux (the current platform for the Pi) is offering, minus the huge development community. The same problem that prevents it from spreading on other platforms as well. Anyway it would be a great alternative. Especially for educational purposes as it is a very clean and efficiently structured OS.

How is this 'news'?

[dingen]

Haiku has been around for 10 years or something. They've always aimed for a binary-compatible successor of BeOS. And they're still at it.

So what?

Not to be harsh but...

[apcullen]

So what? I mean, it's pretty. I can admire its simplicity. But.... can I run open office on it? It's built on Qt... but can I run kde apps on it? Play some ksoduku? The article doesn't really mention application support, except to say that 3d acceleration isn't there yet. I remember back when Be was first released everyone was wowed by its multi-threading support-- but surely modern operating systems have duplicated this by now? It seems to me that if you took a linux distro, stripped out all the 3d support and other power-consuming enhancements, and ran xfce or some other extremely light weight window manager, that you'd have a system that's just as fast but one that you could actually run the programs you wanted on.