I like the idea of more operating systems to pick from. I'd love to try Haiku or BSD one day soon. What motivates people to invest in these very niche systems?
I'd love to play around with them for fun but is there more to it?
A while ago (2011ish maybe?) I had a hand-me-down laptop whose processor speed was measured in MHz (it even had a floppy drive!). The previous owners had windows XP on it but that didn't really run well. I tried various Linux distros/desktop environments/window managers and found that even running a barebones AwesomeWM setup was sluggish. I decided to give Haiku a shot and was surprised by how smooth it felt. I'm pretty sure the only sluggishness I had when opening applications or booting up was because the hard drive was very slow. I don't know how they did it but somehow it worked wonderfully on this really weak laptop. (Unfortunately I couldn't get the floppy drive working, idr why but some driver issue blocked me.)
Since then I've kept an eye on it and plan on going back to it with some more powerful and better supported hardware to really get to play around with stuff like the interesting filesystem and get some things I use all the time ported over. Would love to switch over from mainly using Linux to having a Linux home server, and using Haiku as a daily driver and sshing in for Linuxy stuff.
One of the other Haiku developers had this [1] response to an inquiry about why Haiku is so fast:
> The system is not all that well optimized, uses a 15 year old compiler which does not uses any modern CPU features, and by default, the kernel is built in debug mode which makes it much slower than it could be.
> How do other operating systems still manage to feel slower? I have no idea.
(Those kernel debug options are no joke, they are a massive slowdown. The ones for the TCP stack alone take network throughput down to 1/5 of what it is without it; the ones for SMP, the virtual memory manager, lock facilities, etc. combined make the system visibly less snappy. We disable these on beta builds, but they are enabled on nightlies, and back in 2011 they were on by default.)
I'm not familiar with OS internals, but i believe having a system-wide consistent design (whole haiku is a monorepo) would enable you to simplify a lot of stuff.
Also, many modern distros and desktop environments are bloated: you either have a choice between a full-featured, resource-hungry desktop (Gnome/KDE) or an efficient minimalist window manager (i3/sway). I believe the same applies to different parts/layers of the system.
Haiku doesn't have the same feature set (yet) as full-featured modern desktops and doesn't have to deal with dozens of compatibility layers, so maybe that's also part of the reason it fares better.
Doesn't that apply to everyone's OS of choice though? Actually maybe it doesn't... But it's not very helpful unless you can be at least a little bit specific about why it makes you happy.
> Doesn't that apply to everyone's OS of choice though?
Do people have love deep in their hearts for Windows or even macOS 11?
It's hard to explain these days, but back in the late 90s it was just so far ahead of everything else except maybe NeXT and NeXT was entirely out of reach for 99% of the world.
The UI was ridiculously smooth and fast and everything worked together like a well oiled machine.
Here they play an mp3 and a video that continue to render while you move the windows around, on a 133mhz machine without it even putting up a sweat. Clearly that's nothing today but that was unheard of at the time.
Beyond that it had amazing features you still don't see on operating systems today like the file system being an actual queryable database. Common metadata like ID3 tags from MP3's were entered into this and queryable.
The standard email client stored emails as individual files and just queried the file system. I believe the address book did the same for people.
The tabs of the individual windows stack together across apps! There were just so many little wonderful fit-and-finish things like that you don't get these days.
> Do people have love deep in their hearts for Windows
Windows 2000, yes.
Amazing OS, insanely fast, and lightweight. With only a handful of background running processes and a couple dozen services it was possible to know exactly what was running on your computer at any time.
On at least one occasion I was able to detect malware on my machine by noticing unexpected background network traffic via the light on my network hub blinking when it shouldn't have been.
Windows XP will go down in history as the OS that an entire generation is nostalgic for, but Windows 2000 was its fiddly, hard to setup, but rock solid once running, older brother.
Win2K wasn't that hard to setup, and it got better when XP came out because driver support expanded. I've certainly had more difficulty setting up Linux today than I ever did Win2K in the past.
And getting gaming to work was a separate challenge.
It wasn't terrible, but it did require knowledge of what chipset your motherboard was running and you had to know that certain magic patches were needed to the OS.
> On at least one occasion I was able to detect malware on my machine by noticing unexpected background network traffic via the light on my network hub blinking when it shouldn't have been.
That's golden. Would deserve a blogpost on its own.
If you weren't actively loading a webpage or playing a game, there wouldn't be any network traffic.
This was back before the days of auto updates or telemetry!
So basically if I was doing something locally, and I saw the lights blink on my hub, and my (tiny!) process list didn't have any obvious suspects, I knew something was up.
Malware wasn't nearly as well hidden back then, so uncovering it wasn't all that hard.
I fondly remember that period indeed. But reading your comment i realized it's been a while since i could tell whether my computer having network activity was suspicious or not, and i'm guessing a lot of younger people don't even realize that could be a thing.
> Malware wasn't nearly as well hidden back then, so uncovering it wasn't all that hard.
Yeah catpicture.jpg.exe was definitely easier to identify than modern viruses are.
I may contribute to Haiku, now that they are putting full-time resources into place.
Why would I do this? It is more than nostalgia or fun, although that is part of it. I believe that diversity is vital to keeping the technological landscape healthy. Most people are happy to go with the status quo, fewer are willing to work to make positive changes and even less are willing to fund their efforts.
Will something come of Haiku because of this? Directly or indirectly, yes. Someone will be working on a vision that may differ from that of Apple/Microsoft/linux, etc. This will have a ripple effect as either Haiku succeeds, or those who work on it take their viewpoints and knowledge to other companies and efforts. Either way, this sort of diversity helps out in keeping the technological ecosystem from becoming more and more of a monoculture.
I use OpenBSD because it's a very pragmatic choice for servers. Nearly everything is "off" by default and I can add only the specific things I need, reducing the attack surface. Pledge/unveil makes sandboxing my applications very simple. The pf firewall is much easier to use with confidence than iptables. The manpages are great and the system is small relative to most Linux distros, so you can understand how everything works and fits together -- great for infra. It's well-designed and consistent throughout because the kernel, OS, and all core tools are designed by the same people. As of yet, no conntrack-style edge cases requiring days digging through kernel code. :)
This of course involves many trade-offs (losing access to common "modern" tech like containers, slower performance) but for my company the trade-offs were justified.
> The pf firewall is much easier to use with confidence than iptables
Tell me more! I cut my teeth on ipchains/iptables back in the early 90's, and feel very familiar with it. That said, I know that doesn't mean it's the best/easiest at all. I've tried to grok Pf once or twice, but never ended up getting very far. I wanted to ask you if you began with Pf, or if you came from something else? More or less, I'm trying to figure out if Pf was difficult for me just because it wasn't my first.
I came from iptables and still have the misfortune of needing to use that in my job. :)
My favorite feature of pf is the configuration file, which is a human-readable/writable file which sets the state in a consistent way, rather than iptable's preferred mechanism of using a bunch of CLI commands executed in just the right sequence. I want a guaranteed consistent state when I'm configuring firewalls across a fleet, and pf.conf makes that not only easy to achieve, but the default behavior. Just modify the conf file, copy that to all the boxes, reload pf, and your firewalls are all updated and guaranteed to be in the same state, regardless of whatever state they were in before.
You can read the pf.conf file from top to bottom to figure out what's going to happen to any packet. All the rules are included right there.
Maybe to get a more considered word in about features you need? I can't really think of anything specific os-wise, but I'm thinking, if you rely on some cool cross-app functionality (e.g., macOS drag-icon-from-toolbar-to-move-corresponding-file) you can have a good shot at contributing to/owning that feature on a small OS project vs. something like Fedora which would require a lot more buy-in
> I'd love to try Haiku or BSD one day soon. What motivates people to invest in these very niche systems?
My interest in FreeBSD began about 12 years ago, when a friend of mine told me about the BSD operating systems and he said that the one he was using was very secure (OpenBSD) and that it had good documentation and that these BSD operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and others) are each developed "as a whole", as opposed to Linux which I had recently begun seriously using but which is developed as a bunch of separate much more loosely-tied projects and then bundled together in the form of various distros.
I installed FreeBSD and liked it a lot. I just felt at home, somehow. And for a good while I was running FreeBSD also on my desktop and my laptop.
Fast-forward to present day. On my laptop I run macOS. On my servers I run FreeBSD. My MacBook Pro M1 laptop is my daily driver. I have a desktop that I run Linux on but I rarely boot it because mostly I have no reason to. Almost everything I do I can do with my MacBook Pro M1 and with my servers that run FreeBSD.
But even though I like FreeBSD so much, I feel and fear that Linux keeps advancing in much bigger strides than FreeBSD, because of the many many more people contributing to Linux compared to how many people are developing FreeBSD.
I really want to get into eBPF on Linux soon and explore that. It seems like it could help me gain both insights into the execution of the software that I develop, even more than is possible with DTrace maybe. And I want to explore what can be done on Linux using kTLS and eBPF together. And I am curious to find out more about things like what they talk about at https://pchaigno.github.io/ebpf/2020/11/04/hxdp-efficient-so...
And all of those things have me thinking a lot about whether the positives of using FreeBSD (jails, OpenZFS in base, a system that is developed as a whole, etc) actually justify staying with FreeBSD. Or if I should ditch FreeBSD and focus my energy on Linux instead of on FreeBSD.
I'd love to play around with them for fun but is there more to it?