# 17 Mar 2024 - Hello From Haiku!
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Surprise... hello from Haiku OS!
I used to use BeOS a couple of decades ago, so I check in periodically on how Haiku is doing. It's the open source reincarnation of BeOS.
The last couple of times I checked in, it just wasn't there yet. I remember struggling with kernel panics, warped screen aspect ratios, and having to run ethernet cables to get online. Oh, and the live USB image only has a few megabytes of free space, so whenever I ran the software updater, it would always completely fill up the tiny 600MB partition and lockup the system. At which point I'd usually give up on Haiku for another few months.
Fast forward to March 2023, and they fixed a bug in the Intel 8265 WiFi drivers. That's a big advance for me, because now I can use Haiku on my Thinkpad X1 without dragging ethernet cables through the house! There's also been a lot of Action Retro YouTube videos lately about Haiku, and one of them had a tip I'd missed about setting up an EFI partition correctly, so that Haiku can boot on UEFI systems instead of requiring a legacy BIOS.
Long story short, I now have Haiku running from a 128GB USB stick, with working WiFi on my Thinkpad X1 Yoga 3rd Gen! This is the first time in many, many years I've been able to use BeOS / Haiku in any kind of semi-productive manner.
To write this, I'm using Ghostwriter, a focused Markdown text editor (actually a port of a KDE application). To upload it to the SDF Gopher server, I'm using FileZilla. And to view it on Gopher, I'm using the Kristall small web browser.
You might notice those are all ports of Linux applications. It seems that time hasn't been kind to BeOS development, and not so much development is happening with the native Be APIs. But the work done on allowing KDE & Qt ports to function on Haiku means there's at least some productive things that can be done on Haiku now.
Haiku still isn't quite there yet. I still can't use it with an external monitor, and there's no chance of using it with my Bluetooth keyboard as Haiku (like OpenBSD) doesn't have a working Bluetooth stack. So in terms of a productive alternative OS for actually getting things done, you're still better off with Linux for now. But it's getting there, and if your work is mostly just done in a web browser, then maybe you could use Haiku as a daily driver OS now.
I still have fond memories of BeOS, so I would like to use it more often again if I can. I remember really liking the C++ IDE at the time, and felt like I was having success making some working code back then. It would be interesting to see if that's still true now.
If nothing else, it looks like Haiku does make a pretty good focus-typewriter device when used with Ghostwriter.
- Kohan
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- SyneRyder / Kohan Ikin
http://www.kohanikin.com/
http://www.namesuppressed.com/
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