I can’t even feel superior to everyone when theirs so many arch installers!! I use real arch btw. I thought “I guess I should go to Gentoo” but then wait, CHROMEOS IS A GENTOO INSTALLER!
I feel like we only have two options now
- Ascend to BSD-land
- Ironically supporting Windows Unironically
edit: I have decided to replace my debian laptop with BSD
What’s the elevator pitch for it, seems cool
If you are nostalgic for BeOS, then the elevator pitch is, “It’s Be, only on modern hardware and more software support.”
If you are unfamiliar with BeOS, the pitch is: “Imagine an extremely lightweight desktop is with all of the things you would expect in a modern environment with none of the legacy. In an alternative universe, BeOS would have become OSX.”
There are so many things that Be did right from the very beginning that other OSs have adopted, but never as cleanly as Be did it.
For example, its file system. Most people don’t really notice or care about the file system, they all have directorys and hold files, maybe with permissions. BeFS does that as well, of course, but so much more. The entire file system acts as a database, so you can easily perform fast queries on it. You can also create virtual directories that are the result of those queries.
You want a “folder” that contains every markdown file created after 2020 between 20 and 1000kb in size? Bam, instantly done and live updated whenever something accesses it. The files aren’t actually copied there, just appear there to normal tools, almost like soft links.
BeFS also supports a resource fork system that it calls attributes. These can also be queried using the same database like tools as the rest of the system. File typing is done this way, every file gets a MIME type attribute and there is a daemon that sniffs them when a new file is downloaded or copied over.
Even more, this allows some crazy things like plain text files that have font, color and other formatting elements because all that is stored as an attribute.
Or their contact information app, which stores every person as a zero length file with details as attributes. You can create a virtual folder of all your contacts that meet a certain criteria and have other applications use that folder for whatever.
Or the email app which stores each email as a file, and adds the basic metadata like to, from, subject, read, etc as attributes. Then you can have different virtual folders based on those. This also means that the basic file system browser is the default way to view email, because it supports all the attribute viewing, queries and such you would need. Or you can do it all from the command line using either basic cli tools or some slightly specialized ones.
Combining attributes and virtual directories makes for a fantastic media library system, all built into the os for free. Imagine a directory that contains “Every metal song I have, from 1989 to 1993, that I haven’t played in three weeks” or whatever else you want.
Back when people used files and all applications were local first, this was probably much more exciting, but it’s still pretty cool.
Considering how the mainstream OSes dropped the ball on file metadata super hard without even approaching what you describe, exchanging files between Haiku and those OSes gotta be a pain.
Oh it absolutely is. Bringing files into Be is fine. The file type sniffer runs in the background and adds whatever metadata it can in a lightweight quick way. IIRC there are addons for specific file types like media files that add nice things like author, runtime, etc.
Sending them out is a pain though. All the metadata is usually lost and from what I recall even emailing a file from one Be machine to another could be difficult. IIRC you could zip them and the metadata would make it, but raw files and tgz would lose it.
The file system thing is really cool, are their downsides of implementing it like that? Curious why Linux would not implement something like that
I think there are a couple of reasons. First, the Linux kernel doesn’t support resource forks at all. They aren’t part of POSIX nor do they really fit the unix file philosophy. Second, most of the cool things that BeFS enables are very end user desktop oriented, and Linux leaves that desktop environments, not the kernel. BeOS was designed as a fully integrated desktop os, not a multiuser server os. Finally, I expect that they are a security headache, as they present this whole other place that malware could be stored. Imagine an innocent looking plain text file that has an evil payload sitting in an attribute.
The resource fork isn’t gonna be really meaningful to essentially all Linux software, but there have been ways to access filesystems that do have resource forks. IIRC, there was some client to mount some Apple file server protocol, exposed the resource forks as a file with a different name and the data fork as just a regular file.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/hfsplus.html
Linux does support HFS+, which has resource forks, as the hfsplus driver, so I imagine that it provides access one way or another.
searches
https://superuser.com/questions/363602/how-to-access-resource-fork-of-hfs-filesystem-on-linux
Also, pretty esoteric, but NTFS, the current Windows file system, also has a resource fork, though it’s not typically used.
searches
Ah, the WP article that OP, @evol@lemmy.today linked to describes it.
It’s been a few years since I used a Mac, but even then resource forks weren’t something you’d see outside of really old apps or some strange legacy use case, everything just used extended attributes or “sidecar” files (e.g. .DS_Store files in the case of Finder)
Unlike Windows or Linux, macOS takes care to preserve xattrs when transferring the files, e.g. their archiver tool automatically converts them to sidecar AppleDouble files and stores them in a
__MACOSfolder alongside the base file in the archive, and reapplies them on extraction.If course nothing else does that, so if you’ve extracted a zip file or whatever and found that folder afterwards, that’s what you’re looking at.
TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork But yeah good insights
do you know how many of the features you’re describing work on haiku?
All of these features work on Haiku OS.
thanks <3
The excellent answer by @bartydecanter@lemmy.sdf.org already presented the cool features of the file system. There are a bunch of other interesting features found throughout the OS.
Pervasive multithreading and multitasking makes Haiku very reactive and fast, even under load. Back when BeOS came out, the killer demo was playing several videos simultaneously without stutter. This is of course less impressive today, but you can fell this all over the OS when using it.
Window management has two really cool features called Stack and Tile. Enabling you to stick windows together, so they move as one. On top of that you can put several windows from different applications together into one tabbed window bar . It’s super cool and unique.
The biggest difference when using it compared to the big desktop operating systems today is that it gets out of your way and just lets you do things. Using it will make you realize how cumbersome the current desktop has become. Of course there are some security downsides, as there’s no pervasive sandboxing, rights management, and so on.
Running on real hardware can be difficult because of a lack of drivers. I highly recommend trying it in a VM (VirtualBox, qemy, UTM) first. The increasing number of ports (mostly FOSS stuff you know from Linux) make this operating system actually practically usable. The ports don’t take advantage of the Haiku specific features, but are great overall. Especially the KDE apps are a good fit.
Some people say it’s ready to be a daily driver even it’s still in beta, others say it’s what Linux used to be .
It’s the open source version of BeOS, the original alternative OS for PowerPC Macs.