Welp, I'm on a roll tonight. First I installed #Haiku (a BeOS clone) without fully wiping the old Debian installation off the disk, so that didn't work, then I did a proper install... and forgot to mark the partition as active. 🤦 I may or may not emerge with a working install by the end of the night if this keeps up :P
alright, I am victorious!
And of course the first thing I had to do after getting the OS installed was try to install Wine on it, followed by a Windows application. So... will report back if I come out alive.
Alright, Windows app was a fail, but other things are working out well enough.
Wow. So despite the fact that my Windows app didn't quite work, so many things *did* work:
* Touchpad, keyboard, SSD, video, USB, all functioning well
* Installer was lightning-fast
* Ethernet worked out of the box
* Built-in web browser (WebPositive) is actually *really* good for being a non-standard browser
* 1 GB of RAM is *just* enough to render a single GitHub tab in WebPositive
* Also was able to browse YouTube although I couldn't watch anything in the browser
* yt-dlp's platform-independent executable worked just fine (I had installed youtube-dl from the repos which didn't work, but it pulled in the right deps for yt-dlp it seems)
* MediaPlayer was able to play the video I downloaded *really smoothly*
* Speakers worked
* IRC works
I'm impressed. Very impressed. I had no clue a "hobby OS" like this could be this far along.
I did hit some hiccups:
* Boxedwine got stuck forever trying to launch any Windows app, and was then impossible to close
* Trying to shutdown or reboot the system always hangs the entire OS (thankfully it seems to be just a nuisance, I can force-shutdown at that point and it seems I suffer no severe consequences for doing so)
* Drive partitioner's UI could be better, I ended up botching my install twice in a row because of that
* MediaPlayer is *very* sensitive to clicks, I accidentally restarted my video several times because of that since tap-to-click was working on my touchpad :P
* Lots of keyboard shortcuts I'm used to from other OSes and DEs don't work (Alt+Tab, Alt+F4, Ctrl-Alt-T, and I even had some trouble with Ctrl-A and Ctrl-C though those may have been keyboard-induced user error because this old laptop has the Control key in a funky spot)
All in all though, very good OS. And I may try to determine the source of the lockup-on-shutdown issue and fix it if I can.
@arraybolt3 Ah, welcome to Haiku! Glad to hear another Fediversian trying it out. I first got into it due to @ActionRetro, who makes videos involving Haiku sometimes.
Tip, if you are dealing with an app whose windows you've closed but still just won't seem to quit, try Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Click-ing its Deskbar entry: https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/deskbar.html
@arraybolt3 I would use #Haiku more often *very* gladly, but unfortunately I haven't been able to get it running on my main laptop, a System76 with ...an Nvidia GPU. I got Haiku running on an old #Dell #D630 I have, though, which I use for school and notetaking very happily.