What can you do with Haiku?

Avid Haiku community member Carlos Mario Cataño from Colombia, known to many of us in the community by his nickname Skar Cat, has an interesting blog post about his experiences with Haiku. Written exclusively from an end user point of view (Carlos is not a developer), his post is not an in-depth review, but rather a personal recount that may answer some of the questions that people contemplating the use of Haiku for the first time may have about this still in early development OS. I found it to be an enjoyable and informative reading, so I decided to publish a loosely translated English version of the post, of course with the author's permission. A couple of mandatory screenshots are also included. Enjoy!

As has been said repeatedly, Haiku is an operating system in development that is still in alpha status. One question that I suppose many people may be asking themselves is: what can you do with Haiku in its present state? I will try to respond to this question to the extent possible.

Haiku benefits from quite a bit of legacy BeOS software. Some of these applications are obsolete, but others are still quite useful even today. My Haiku installation includes Firefox 3.0, which allows me to use Facebook, Gmail, the Google Reader, as well as surf the net. From time to time Firefox can be buggy, but Haiku has now another surfing companion in Arora, a Qt-based browser that uses the WebKit rendering engine; this browser was created mainly for demo purposes, so it's not as complete as Firefox, but it does work well with some pages.

Using Firefox 3.0 and the Gnash free Flash player (see how to install Gnash for Haiku here), I can watch YouTube videos in Haiku. I was surprised at how well Gnash works in Haiku, both with sound and smooth performance, at least when playing YouTube videos. I have experienced problems when using Gnash in other Flash-based pages, but this is still a very promising development.

To watch movies, there is Haiku's native Media Player, which is pretty good at playing both audio and video in many different formats (see it for yourself). But if you are not satisfied with this player, you can always use VLC for Haiku (it's an old version, but works quite well: get it from here). The Haiku Media Player can also be used to play audio, although I prefer to use the old WinAMP clone for BeOS called CL-Amp; this is a legacy app for BeOS, but it runs runs very stable and is thus quite useful.

There are also emulators and games, both for BeOS as well as native to Haiku or ports, all of which run pretty well. Good examples are Wesnoth (there seem to be several versions; check out haikuware.com), and Open Arena for Haiku, both of which are worth a try!

Finally, Haiku can also be used for programming, debugging and for software development in general. At present, trying Haiku out is not very difficult if you use the official alpha 1 release or even the nightly builds. At some point, it looks like we will also be able to enjoy Java (see here and here for more info on Java port) and a WIFI configurator (work bu developer Colin Gunther; see his blog here; there is also a presentation of his Wifi stack that he gave at BeGeistert 021); a WebKit-based native browser (a project lead by Haiku developer Ryan Leavengood) and open source 3D acceleration are also in the horizon (this is probably referring to the Gallium 3D port; sources here).

Even when Haiku is still alpha software, it is quite stable, easy to use and fast. Let me tell you: I have been using the system the whole day, writing this post from Haiku revision 34770, listening to Nirvana on CL-Amp while chatting with my friends on Meebo (as there is no working MSN client yet), and checking out Facebook. Basically, I have not missed anything of what I usually do when using other systems. We will see what happens on 2010, but I am pretty sure that it will be a good year for Haiku.

Good luck and best wishes for the New Year to everyone!!!