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Haiku is the only relevant answer. www.haiku-os.org It would be great if more people helped the project out, it is far more promising than Linux for a desktop

Haiku is the only relevant answer. www.haiku-os.org It would be great if more people helped the project out, it is far more promising than Linux for a desktop OS.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Ironically, at least half of the things that make Haiku awesome are buried deep inside its kernel rather than being anything directly to do with the desktop. Also, the contrast between Haiku and Linux in my mind just points to the more fundamental difference between a design that says "you will do things this way, because this is better" (Haiku) and one that says "we'll give you a dozen ways to approach every problem because we're not into dictating optimum solutions, which may change over time anyway" (Linux). It's not that Linux can't replicate almost everything that Haiku gets right, it's more that it provides everything necessary to do 12 related things, on the same desktop.
- waddlesplash 6y ago
  (Haiku developer here.) Ultimately a lot of the things Haiku "dictates" are at levels that 99.9% of people, including developers, do not care about: the window manager and display server, launch interface, package manager, etc. Certainly those decisions have consequences, but ultimately (for example) do you really need the freedom to decide whether you want ALSA or OSS? People just want audio to work, and programmers want a sane API to work with it. The internals matter little to most people.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    You don't have the freedom to choose OSS in terms of implementation, and haven't for more than a decade. You do have the freedom to choose OSS the API. Some programmers even think that it's a better API (they're wrong, but what can you do?). I wasn't thinking at all about user-visible things that Haiku "dictates", but internal design patterns. Most of them are great, and most of them exist on Linux too (but alongside a bunch of alternatives, hence the "problems", such as they are).

Haiku is the only relevant answer. www.haiku-os.org It would be great if more people helped the project out, it is far more promising than Linux for a desktop OS.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

Ironically, at least half of the things that make Haiku awesome are buried deep inside its kernel rather than being anything directly to do with the desktop. Also, the contrast between Haiku and Linux in my mind just points to the more fundamental difference between a design that says "you will do things this way, because this is better" (Haiku) and one that says "we'll give you a dozen ways to approach every problem because we're not into dictating optimum solutions, which may change over time anyway" (Linux). It's not that Linux can't replicate almost everything that Haiku gets right, it's more that it provides everything necessary to do 12 related things, on the same desktop.

waddlesplash 6y ago
(Haiku developer here.) Ultimately a lot of the things Haiku "dictates" are at levels that 99.9% of people, including developers, do not care about: the window manager and display server, launch interface, package manager, etc. Certainly those decisions have consequences, but ultimately (for example) do you really need the freedom to decide whether you want ALSA or OSS? People just want audio to work, and programmers want a sane API to work with it. The internals matter little to most people.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  You don't have the freedom to choose OSS in terms of implementation, and haven't for more than a decade. You do have the freedom to choose OSS the API. Some programmers even think that it's a better API (they're wrong, but what can you do?). I wasn't thinking at all about user-visible things that Haiku "dictates", but internal design patterns. Most of them are great, and most of them exist on Linux too (but alongside a bunch of alternatives, hence the "problems", such as they are).