Daily Driving Haiku

I've been testing Haiku OS pretty regularly as they'd release a new beta, but I hadn't ever really given it a fair shake. I saw it simply as a way to make old computers run somewhat modern software and load a wikipedia page or something. But with the release of Beta 4 I decided to give it a real chance and installed on an i7 laptop with 16GB of memory. Pretty much the same as my main Linux laptop.

So I'm semi-daily-driving Haiku since then and I have to say I'm pretty impressed with lots of it. I definitely have thoughts about performance and applications and security, but to get the Big Thing out of the way first...Everyone who talks about Haiku/BeOS talks about the party trick of attaching windows together, but they don't really go into exactly how much of a game changer that still would be for me in a modern desktop environment. Here I try to demonstrate:

I immediately latched onto this workflow as if I'd been doing it for years. I would LOVE to have this functionality in KDE Plasma as well. I tend to have a shitton of tabs open at all times in my browser, and I can't just go close them, because I might want to go read them someday. But I'll mostly end up with a bunch of YouTube tabs, a bunch of tabs from Fark, and a GeoGuessr tab going.

But let's say there are certain tabs I'd like to "pin" or "prioritize"? In Haiku I'd just have a browser instance for each of those and pin them together. So now I have tabs of tabs. I can have a "main" tab with news sites and social media and a bunch of stories in tabs. Then another top-level instance of just YouTube with like your Subscriptions tab at the front. I have a GeoGuessr one, etc. But then at the end you have a Terminal instance with all of its tabs. And then an Email client/Calendar, etc., maybe attach an always-visible IM client to the far right, maybe not.

I think this is what EMACS users feel like.

Enlightened. I fucking bet Enlightenment could be hacked to do this and I might try to do that. But I really don't want to daily drive Enlightenment.

Here's where if I was popular I'd have 1500 people saying in KDE it's some keycombo and then drag one window over the other and calling me a noob.

But in any case this method would collapse maybe 6 or 7 windows I have open on my Linux desktop into one window with 6 tabs. Then each of those tabs would have however many tabs of its own. And in Haiku this 1st and 2nd level navigation is immediately easy to grasp and adapt to.

I would use the hell out of that

What I can do now though is have one browser instance that's all YouTube pages, one that's all "general browsing", one that just has a Send to Kodi tab and then group all those together with a Terminal window and an email client.

And of course all the browser instances and the terminal have tabs open. So you can switch windows with alt+left/right, and switch terminal tabs with shift+left/right.