R1/beta3 just had its first rc cut the other day. Exciting to see this operating system continue on towards a first release. The risc-v port is gaining decent support as well.

Discussed at the time (of the article):

The Dawn of Haiku OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3904972 - April 2012 (110 comments)

Would haiku be the best option for the next generation of kodi players, instead of things like Linux or Android?

Wasn’t beOS great for playing media or has the playing field been leveled over the decades?

IMO hardware driver support is the key to performance at every level, embedded to bigiron. OS architectures are important, though most supporting smaller devices are good enough for most media needs up to ~2K and 60fps.

Isn't Linux supposed to be getting PREEMPT_RT ("realtime patch") support any day now? That should bring us to full feature parity with BeOS/Haiku at least on the kernel side.

Ah the nostalgia. I loved BeOS!

I remember fondly opening a whole slew of video’s by mistake. I expected BeOS to crash, but instead, it played them all at once.

I recently bought an Apple MacBook air with a M1 chip and only now has my system a similar performance as my Pentium 4 with BeOS used to have almost 20 years ago!

The performance (though limited due to overall software availability) of BeOS and QNX circa 2000 were incredibly impressive compared to either Windows 2000 or GNU/Linux.

Cleaner designs that just seemed better at actually making use of the available hardware, even though it was a single core Pentium 3 (or my parents older first gen Pentium).

I often ponder how things would've been different if something more like them had taken off and become mainstream.

> I often ponder how things would've been different if something more like them had taken off and become mainstream.

IIRC, as it relates to BeOS, Apple was going to acquire BeOS or NeXT and opted for NeXT.

If Apple had gone with BeOS, the computing world would probably be a very different place today, given all the great things Apple did after Steve Jobs came back.

An alternate reality where Apple acquires BeOS over NeXT does make for an interesting "what if" story though.

BeOS was not as stable and complete an OS as NexTSTEP. It would have taken longer for Apple to launch their version of the OS and Apple was in a hole in the late 90's. As you noted there would be no Jobs which came with the OS.

We would have had someone with hard nipples :-D (JLG)

The BeOS C++ api was nice to work with, and every little thing was a thread. I think if it became more mainstream we might have had a higher core-count.

I wrote a simple windows implemention of the BApplication and BWindow etc. classes, which allowed me to compile to two platforms :-) I was very interested in OSes at the time, and ran BeOS at my job at DeltaKabel / Lucent

I remember a joke from the times of Windows Vista, I believe, that after updating to it, you'll need to have at least a 2-core processor to be able to watch a video simultaneously. Simultaneously with what? Simultaneously with Windows! :)

iOS is the only remotely-mainstream GUI OS I know of that feels similar to BeOS, in terms of responsiveness to user interaction, though I'd say that's less true now than it was several versions ago, even on very new devices. 3-6, and the hardware those versions ran on at release, seemed like the sweet spot for magically-instant responsiveness to input.

Agreed that M1s with macOS have temporarily given something kinda resembling that back to the desktop, though I'm sure developers are toiling even now to make sure it feels slow a year or two from now (mostly not developers at Apple, to be clear).

Yeah it's kind of insane.. but I'm very happy with my snappy M1 lappy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eMGbDJmgv0 you are welcome.