I'm running bits and pieces of XFCE (via Xubuntu) with XMonad and dmenu :-)
That said, what document viewer do I use when I want to read a PDF? Evince was the standard GTK/Gnome option, but it has hamburgerized everything to a state of being unusable. I recently discovered Atril, but I literally have to search DuckDuckGo for "evince xfce mate" every time I need to remember what it's called.
Both Firefox and Chromium have buried everything in hamburger obfuscation land as well. I could name more.
In short, even with my significantly customized Linux desktop, UX-ism still bites me. Yes I can find alternatives for a lot of things. No, I don't imagine Haiku being productive for me in the near term. But... Haiku does offer something of a complete thesis of how desktop UI should work. That desktop UI is firmly situated in the 1990s, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that is a good thing.
For PDF, try qpdfview or xpdf (you cannot get any more old-style than that!)
For images, you can always try feh or imagemagic's "display". Or if you want a bit more UI, "geeque" (which is based on gimageview, and still has not changed the design much)
For web browsers, I am afraid you don't have many options if you want to use modern web apps. The web evolves too fast for that. There are still independent browsers (like netsurf), but I gave up on them and just use chrome.
I doubt that Haiku can ever be practical, unless you live completely offline. Even PDF format keeps evolving -- version 2.0 was released in 2017 -- so you cannot keep maintaining versions just for a single OS.
And once you start porting entire programs from different platforms (like LibreOffice), the platform's unique UI traits will slowly disappear. Who will notice the unique kernel if it has POSIX compat layer and GTK?
> I doubt that Haiku can ever be practical, unless you live completely offline. Even PDF format keeps evolving -- version 2.0 was released in 2017 -- so you cannot keep maintaining versions just for a single OS.
There have been platform-independent PDF handling libraries for over a decade now. The Haiku-native PDF viewer, BePDF, uses one internally to handle PDF files. So that's not a problem, really.
> And once you start porting entire programs from different platforms (like LibreOffice), the platform's unique UI traits will slowly disappear. Who will notice the unique kernel if it has POSIX compat layer and GTK?
BeOS was roughly POSIX compliant, and Haiku is even more so.
Yes, we would greatly prefer native apps to ports (we're not all that different from the macOS fanatics in that way), but we don't have the critical mass for that at the moment. But the kernel isn't and was never the truly "unique" bit; it was built to disappear behind the UI, really.
May I suggest Chromium :)
I'm only half joking, I find the browser built-in PDF viewer better than most, and convenient because I already have it. The PDF viewer in Firefox seems to work nicely, too.
I always used xpdf and never had an issue, although i use the Motif versions (xpdf4 seems to have switched to Qt).
As for a browser with a normal UI, Firefox comes hamburgerized out of the box but you can easily bring it back to relative sanity by making the menubar always visible and choosing the "compact" mode from the density option.
I recommend replacing dmenu with rofi and checking out zathura for pdfs. With the mupdf backend it supports both pdfs and epubs it has almost no ui configurable vim like keybindings for navigation and search opens instantly and doesn't use much ram.
That said, what document viewer do I use when I want to read a PDF? Evince was the standard GTK/Gnome option, but it has hamburgerized everything to a state of being unusable. I recently discovered Atril, but I literally have to search DuckDuckGo for "evince xfce mate" every time I need to remember what it's called.
Both Firefox and Chromium have buried everything in hamburger obfuscation land as well. I could name more.
In short, even with my significantly customized Linux desktop, UX-ism still bites me. Yes I can find alternatives for a lot of things. No, I don't imagine Haiku being productive for me in the near term. But... Haiku does offer something of a complete thesis of how desktop UI should work. That desktop UI is firmly situated in the 1990s, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that is a good thing.