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Beyond the nostalgia: are there any other reasons to keep contributing to Haiku? Like critical infrastructure that is reliant on BeOS/Haiku. Or anything you can

Beyond the nostalgia: are there any other reasons to keep contributing to Haiku? Like critical infrastructure that is reliant on BeOS/Haiku. Or anything you can plausibly do best on Haiku?

unixhero 4y ago
It's just a fun OS
waddlesplash 4y ago
It's an alternative to the fragmented state of the "Linux desktop": instead of having dozens of separate projects (GNOME, PipeWire, systemd, Wayland, ...) be combined by yet another project (a distribution), which is (in my view) a major cause of the fragile nature, slow pace of development (it's hard to request features if you have to spend minutes to hours figuring out where they need to be requested from!), and other problems it faces, Haiku is a one-project-governs-all: a single development team for the core operating system and userspace ("desktop environment"), with an interconnected distribution ecosystem. We can merge a change to Haiku's kernel and drivers, and test builds will be available with it on the "nightly" channel within hours. We can issue a patch for the system C library headers, trigger rebuilds of packages from the ports tree against it as soon as CI builds finish. We can send users experimental builds of work-in-progress features for testing, with very little technical know-how required to install such a patch or revert to the previous version if it breaks something. There are so many huge advantages Haiku has due to how the project is structured that the "Linux desktop", whatever upsides it does possess, basically cannot ever have by its very nature.
- guenthert 4y ago
  > instead of having dozens of separate projects (GNOME, PipeWire, systemd, Wayland, ...) be combined by yet another project (a distribution), which is (in my view) a major cause of the fragile nature, slow pace of development (it's hard to request features if you have to spend minutes to hours figuring out where they need to be requested from!), and other problems it faces, Haiku is a one-project-governs-all: a single development team for the core operating system and userspace ("desktop environment"), with an interconnected distribution ecosystem. So there will never be 3rd party software? Not even a GNU Emacs? Surely you're using GNU GCC, aren't you?
  - nix23 4y ago
    Have your read the release-notes? Hint emacs. It's about the coresystems (network, graphic, sound, storage), the bsd systems do that (partially) so is windows and macos.
    - guenthert 4y ago
      What I tried to convey is that this is an arbitrary line to draw. What difference does it make to an user whether graphic and network bugs can be reported to the same organisation, but bugs in the IDE (I'm thinking of IntelliJ here, not Emacs) go somewhere else vs. all bugs go to their respective software package's bug tracker? There was a time when DEC or IBM could act as a single point of contact for all your software needs, but we live in a much more diverse world now and the all-inclusive software offering / SPOC is just not a realistic or (IMHO) desirable target anymore.
      - nix23 4y ago
        The arbitrary line is normally base to 3rd party, the line is blurry, but you read too much in in, just compare it with macOS would you?
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        The difference is not to which organization to report, rather having a cohesive arquitecture design of the OS stack instead of a bunch of lego bricks with incompatible pins.
forgotpwd16 4y ago
Mostly for fun. Something kinda helped by that Haiku retains some interesting concepts (e.g. built to have small footprint, written in C++, object-oriented and concept-oriented API, database-like filesystem, replicants, standard scripting mechanism, ...) and being enough different from other Unix-like systems.

Beyond the nostalgia: are there any other reasons to keep contributing to Haiku? Like critical infrastructure that is reliant on BeOS/Haiku. Or anything you can plausibly do best on Haiku?

unixhero 4y ago

It's just a fun OS

waddlesplash 4y ago

It's an alternative to the fragmented state of the "Linux desktop": instead of having dozens of separate projects (GNOME, PipeWire, systemd, Wayland, ...) be combined by yet another project (a distribution), which is (in my view) a major cause of the fragile nature, slow pace of development (it's hard to request features if you have to spend minutes to hours figuring out where they need to be requested from!), and other problems it faces, Haiku is a one-project-governs-all: a single development team for the core operating system and userspace ("desktop environment"), with an interconnected distribution ecosystem. We can merge a change to Haiku's kernel and drivers, and test builds will be available with it on the "nightly" channel within hours. We can issue a patch for the system C library headers, trigger rebuilds of packages from the ports tree against it as soon as CI builds finish. We can send users experimental builds of work-in-progress features for testing, with very little technical know-how required to install such a patch or revert to the previous version if it breaks something. There are so many huge advantages Haiku has due to how the project is structured that the "Linux desktop", whatever upsides it does possess, basically cannot ever have by its very nature.

guenthert 4y ago
> instead of having dozens of separate projects (GNOME, PipeWire, systemd, Wayland, ...) be combined by yet another project (a distribution), which is (in my view) a major cause of the fragile nature, slow pace of development (it's hard to request features if you have to spend minutes to hours figuring out where they need to be requested from!), and other problems it faces, Haiku is a one-project-governs-all: a single development team for the core operating system and userspace ("desktop environment"), with an interconnected distribution ecosystem. So there will never be 3rd party software? Not even a GNU Emacs? Surely you're using GNU GCC, aren't you?
- nix23 4y ago
  Have your read the release-notes? Hint emacs. It's about the coresystems (network, graphic, sound, storage), the bsd systems do that (partially) so is windows and macos.
  - guenthert 4y ago
    What I tried to convey is that this is an arbitrary line to draw. What difference does it make to an user whether graphic and network bugs can be reported to the same organisation, but bugs in the IDE (I'm thinking of IntelliJ here, not Emacs) go somewhere else vs. all bugs go to their respective software package's bug tracker? There was a time when DEC or IBM could act as a single point of contact for all your software needs, but we live in a much more diverse world now and the all-inclusive software offering / SPOC is just not a realistic or (IMHO) desirable target anymore.
    - nix23 4y ago
      The arbitrary line is normally base to 3rd party, the line is blurry, but you read too much in in, just compare it with macOS would you?
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      The difference is not to which organization to report, rather having a cohesive arquitecture design of the OS stack instead of a bunch of lego bricks with incompatible pins.

forgotpwd16 4y ago

Mostly for fun. Something kinda helped by that Haiku retains some interesting concepts (e.g. built to have small footprint, written in C++, object-oriented and concept-oriented API, database-like filesystem, replicants, standard scripting mechanism, ...) and being enough different from other Unix-like systems.