For a while now, i have been following the progress of the open source Haiku project, which aims to re-create BeOS 5. BeOs, for those of you that might not know, was a rather cool operating system developed during the late 90’s.

What amazed me about BeOS is that unlike many operating systems around at the time (and arguably, those around today) it:

• Booted up and shut down in mere seconds (no suspend or hibernate trickery needed)
• Wasn’t bloated to hell (sadly a trend nowadays)
• Did multi-tasking right (e.g. didn’t start choking when one little app decided to do something a bit intensive)
• Supported live file searches (before the advent of spotlight & co)

Although of course, it wasn’t all perfect. It did lack a few things, like:

• Multiple user support (nowadays the norm)
• Good hardware support (e.g. for stuff like 3d cards and network adapters)
• Great third party support (apart from what you can find on BeBits)

Regardless, in 2002 Be Inc ceased operations and thus BeOS was more or less dead. That was until the controversial Zeta developed by Magnussoft came along. Controversial as it was often claimed that Zeta was developed without the permission of whoever owned the rights to the source code of Be OS. Safe to say, the nail hit the coffin earlier this year.

Luckily, Haiku is actually coming along quite nicely nowadays. After trying out the latest test image in qemu, i found it to be almost usable, with the exception of:

• The networking which i couldn’t seem to get working properly (although the DNS did work, so its probably a qemu issue)
• The system started to hang a bit when running one of the demo apps (although on the plus side i could still move the windows around freely)
• The sound, which i guess doesn’t work due to lack of appropriate drivers.

Still, considering it was running in qemu with no kernel acceleration module, i thought it was quite responsive. In the future, i hope that the Haiku team will improve stability and hardware support so that developers will seriously consider targeting the Haiku / BeOS platform. Hell, maybe even i’ll try using it more.

Ultimately, i hope that software developers in general stop following the trend of more bloat, slower functionality. Can’t we all just follow examples such as Haiku’s and make something that is simpler and faster without all of the bloat?