I have spent a bit more time with Haiku and thought I might
share a few more of my experiences.

I have confirmed that the headphone jack and speakers both
work out of the box with haiku and my Thinkpad X230. As a
part of the testing I ported over a scraper I wrote a while
ago for... a popular music website, and downloaded some
tunes to try out (mostly solo piano stuff in either a jazz
or ambient vein). I then needed something to play the MP3s
with. I tried out the media player that comes with Haiku:
"MediaPlayer". This application had worked well for playing
a video downlaoded with youtube-dl as a test. When I tried
to play an MP3 the screen went white accross large bits of
it with garbled text. Nothing responded to commands, clicks,
etc (including various attempts to send signals to kill or
interrup). I had to restart the system. In the end this
suited me fine because I prefered cmus anyway. So I ran:
`pkgman install cmus` and a few moments later I had it up
and running. I added the albums I got and hit enter to
start playing one. It palyed, but there were lots of pops,
artifacts, and glitches. I tried making adjustments to
buffer size and sample rate to no avail. Eventually I found
a bit about this issue on the Haiku message boards. It
seems to be a problem with the udnerlying driver and not
in the cmus port itself. The driver has not been fixed, so
that was a bummer. I then tried the only other major audio
player I could find in the repo at a quick glance:
Clementine. Clementine has had no problems playing music.
However, I find this player to be absolutely horrid. It
will not save my settings and it has so much GUI junk that
just isnt needed. It makes me miss WinAmp a lot, lol. I am
hopeful that the driver that cmus uses will eventually get
a patch and I can go back to my prefered audio player. All
that said: audio mostly works well as far as hardware goes,
though there remain some software issues.

I cannot recall if I talked about Go in my last post about
Haiku so I'll keep this brief: Go 1.4 is ported. The idea
being that they could use that to bootstrap 1.5, which can
then bootstrap later versions. However, no one has gotten
1.5 to build... so we still only have ancient Go. Which is
a big bummer for me, but is having the effect of pushing
me more toward C (and due to Haiku possibly a little bit
of c++... but I am naturally resistant to oop as a code
style, so I will likely stick mostly to C and just use
c++ when I need to interact with the Haiku GUI apis).

The terminal, as I have written about prior, continues to
be a less than stellar experience. I get the impression
from the message boards that the terminal is not the way
most of the devs like to experience computers and instead
work very hard on their GUI stuff, which I am mostly fine
with... but I do wish the terminal functioned better. It
seems to be glitchy, have less than optimal unicode support
(it supports utf-8, but I get a lot of characters not
displaying or not displaying correctly... this could be
font related, but I am using a font I know to have the
characters I am having issues with so...).

My battery life has been ok. Not stellar, but ok. I have
not been able to figure out a way to attach screen bright-
ness to any key control of any kind and it _always_ starts
the system at full brightness. So I have to go into the
"screen" preferences and lower it. Doing so requires usage
of a GUI application that requires navigating multiple
menus. It would be nice if, lacking any key bindings, I
could make the adjustment from the terminal. The WiFi has
remained pretty good. It seems to shit the bed on maybe
one out of every five boots. However, I can usually just
go into my preferences and disable the card for a moment
and then restart it and log into my network and I am good
to go, so this is not a major problem. The keyboard back-
lighting as well as the 'ThinkLight' work well and are the
only Fn key combo (with spacebar) that works reliably on
the system at present. Having never owned a Thinkpad before
this one, I am surprised to find that I much prefer the
ThinkLight to keyboard backlighting. I am also now so used
to the trackpoint that it feels weird to go back to my
XPS and use the touchpad.

I have been enjoying this system as a second computer for
listening to music and phlogging, but have generally avoided
coding on it. The exceptions being porting over the aforeme-
ntioned scraper and a quick dice rolling app I coded up in
C while playing Shadowrun with friends earlier (I got tired
of rolling 18 actual dice and counting up successes and
failures and thought typing: `roll [# of sides] [# of dice]`
was much easier. Both of those are quick and simple projects
though.

While perusing their message baords it seems that most of
the devs prefer large IDEs and many want to get Node and/or
C# ported over to Haiku... all of those things are very
unappealing to me. I do not know that I am a good fit with
this community (I prefer Vim or my own editor, Hermes, for
writing code and really dislike JS and Microsoft stack).

In the end I think I would still prefer to get a BSD running
with dwm/dmenu and call it a day. That said, trying to get
X running w/ FreeBSD was such a pain that I am in no rush
to return to those efforts. This is a secondary system for
me that largely exists to test and try things out, so it is
fine for it to be a less productive system for a bit. I
wonder if I would have better luck with either OpenBSD or
NetBSD. As mentioned before, GhostBSD installed well for me,
but was way bigger and bulkier than I want. But it at least
shows that the systems _can_ run on my laptop.

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