It’s been a while since I dusted off Haiku and gave it a shot at customization. After poking and prodding a bit, I am rather pleased with this one -
Using an image from the Unsplash package. Replicants on the desktop are the Activity Monitor meters, Weather (from the package repository) and WordClock (from the package repository). Within the Deskbar, there is WebWatch.
UI font is Montserrat, installed globally outside of packages.
I know it’s not as busy as some screenshots, but I figured with the Replicants on the desktop, it’s not as bare, as they are technically programs without borders.
Does its compositor has transparency support?
Not sure how the windowing system handles support for transparency outside of Replicants (the little widgets on the desktop). However, it does have translation layers for X and Wayland, so, perhaps there’s something there.
Wow, I haven’t seen icons on a Linux desktop in some time. Throwback.
Not Linux. It’s Haiku, a POSIX-Compatible clone of BeOS, a Media first operating system from the 90s, designed to be friendly and powerful.
Gotcha. Does it run modern software like Firefox or nah?
It does have a decent complement of applications in the package depot - a few Firefox clones, LibreOffice, VLC, QMPlay2, a handful of trackers, some emulators and a few source ports to name a few.
Wine has been ported over as well, but you might need to compile it by hand. Not much of an issue though. That might be your in on getting commercial games running, if you game.
Packages are handled in a unique way, mounting into the filesystem, sort of like an AppImage, but mount-on-install instead of mount-on-run.
Interesting. I won’t use it because my Arch install is all I ever need for work, gaming, and other digital entertainment. But interesting trivia. 🙂
It’s not Linux tho, haiku
Ah alright. Still though, uncommon to see icons outside of Windows and macOS these days IMO 😁
Whoa, that looks lovely!
I can’t wait for the day when Haiku is secure enough for my threat model. It seems so calm and old-school, and yet both powerful and modern.
I love Haiku. If I wasn’t a Steam user, it’d be my daily driver.
What is your threat model?
Well, it requires that my machines have disk encryption and a password, for one thing.
Pretty basic I guess 😅 Haiku doesn’t have any of those?
Nope! There used to be a login screen available for BeOS, but Haiku doesn’t have this. As for disk encryption, I imagine it’ll be a long time before someone ports cryptsetup or anything like that.
I see. Oh welp. 😊
Haiku would be great as a alternative OS for simple usage if there was an actual browser (and office) available.
The lack of keybinds to manipulate window postions also hurts acceptance.
Waterfox and Librewolf are in the HaikuDepot. As for Office Suites, I think I did see LibreOffice there as well.
If I’m not mistaken, AbiWord would be pretty good on Haiku, but from a light search, KOffice might also be good, as long as you have the proper GUI mapping layers installed.
Have they fixed the networking stack? Last I tried it outright crashed the whole system when I enabled IPv6 which makes it useless for me even just in a VM for testing
I have not yet tried. I’ll give it a go later.
Update: I was unable to enable IPv6 in the settings. I’m sure there’s a way, but for now, I’m not seeing it. I’ll have to poke around with Virtualbox at a later date to see if I can make some changes or something.
