Re: Off-topic: BeOS and Haiku (was Re: Your Bespoke Lilypond Environment)

[Valentin Villenave]

On 5/8/20, Aaron Hill <address@hidden> wrote:
> I have to commend the Haiku team for having the
> dedication to preserve what they could from the BeOS world.

Well, yes and no. They managed to maintain binary compatibility for an
impressively long time, but the need for newer GCC versions and 64-bit
arch means that ship has more or less sailed in recent years.

That being said, they *did* recompile whatever they could get the
source code for, and reimplement quite a few things from scratch
(starting with, er, the whole frigging OS and GUI).

> I might just have to spin up a VM now.

If you can afford it, it does run quite well on bare metal as well (I
spend nearly half of my computer time on native Haiku). For me the
game-changer was the introduction of their package management
infrastructure: it’s very simple (some may say basic) but efficient
and rather well thought-out, both for system upgrades and
installing/removing stuff with dependencies etc.

Yes, the lack of LilyPond (or TeX) is a pity (though as a command-line
app, running it remotely is quite affordable). But Frescobaldi works
well, and I can do nearly everything I need on Haiku. There is still
the occasional system crash (KDL), but it happens at least four or
five times less often than it used to. The rest of the time it’s an
absolute delight to work with.

Cheers,
-- V.