[haiku-3rdparty-dev] haiku-3rdparty-dev] Haiku 2.0 -- Unbuntu Touch -- impressions

  • From: ciprian.nedisan@xxxxxxxxxxxx
  • To: haiku-3rdparty-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 16:21:59 +0200

Hi. Somehow in last time, I started to have the following 
impressions and questions:

I'm not involved in the ARM movement, so far I even don't have a 
smartphone. But it starts to become to more clear, that arm, is 
going to be the dominant platform (at least in the domain of normal-
users). 

1) The latest arm socs have quad-cores with up to 2.3 GHz. This is 
nearly the power of a regular i7.

2) My ultrabook with i7, anyway I would not stress to its limits, 
since it becomes hot, and the fan is at least to me quite annoying. 
Instead I prefer less performance, less power-consumption for 
having more battery, and having just passive cooling and being more 
slim/compact/leightweight

3) Android nearly came to the point where it would suffice for me 
(TexLive is nearly completely ported, and QT 5.2 is fully working 
on Android, so porting LyX to Android should be not that hardy, and 
Mathematica according  to rumors is soon going to be released for 
ipad and android, and chrome is already ported). With a nexus 10, 
bluetooth keyboard and mouse, One can nearly have a production 
system and a tablet at the same time.

4) Ubuntu Touch is going to be released very soon (2-3 weeks), at 
the beginning not much software will be available there, but in 1-2 
years many productive applications that are used now on ubuntu, I 
expect to be working on ubuntu touch too.

5) intel, amd etc... are expecting for next year to sell less, 
while arm has a big success.

6) Handwriting becomes very useable on ipad with the new stylus of 
adonit http://adonit.net/  , which will come also to android. That 
means, in future you can save paper, for doing calculations, 
homework, etc, or playing doing some sketches.

7) Seeing the latest moves of Nvidia and Valve, it's an additional 
indication that windows will start to lose market-share and x86 
platforms will suffer too.


I'm sure many if not all, are aware of the benefits of arm, and 
anyone would like to see haiku running on arm.

Haiku made great progress, and it's a great joy to see the package 
management on haiku soon to be working. But on the other side I 
feel insecure and doubtful with respect to the future of haiku. 
Haiku will not disappear, but I can very well imagine, that more 
people will make the switch to arm, while haiku will not be able to 
make the switch.

Beside from the missing developers who could port haiku to arm, 
there is still the issue with the UI, which is old fashion and not 
useful for tablets. I guess one would need something like an 
adaptive UI, which is aware of the dimensions of the screen.

In my opinion ubuntu made a great move with pushing ubuntu touch 
(and not being relaxed and waiting), because like this, it has a 
chance to be one of the market leaders (next to android and iOS).

My impression is, that haiku is loosing the train again, and not 
doing the switch to the new platform early enough. I guess haiku is 
not able (because even for ubuntu it's not easy) to make the switch 
to arm anytime soon (midterm) to support arm, and the other problem 
is, that some, if not many, will be against, especially against the 
upgrade of the UI, to an adaptable UI which can be used on small 
screen and also on large screens.

In future I imagine myself, writing and drawing and doing 
calculations and skatches on a tablet, not on paper, perhaps even 
using  google glass, for reading books, or article, emails... 
hangouts.. translations to other languages ...etc...

I'm really afraid, that in a few years, haiku will be even more far 
away from catching up with linux or apple...
I'm really afraid, that in some years (let's say 5 years), haiku 
might be an legacy system, which you boot up on old hardware (or 
vm)  from time to time, because of nostalgic memories. 

Perhaps one idea is to do some statistics, and surveys, or do some 
research about what people might need/like to have in the next 
years, and to working towards that (or try to invent something new 
/ spectacular, something that catches  the attention of people).


I don't want to sound like a pessimist, but sadly I'm not that 
confident in the future of haiku 2.0, like I was 5 years ago.
I would be interesting to see also the opinion of other people 
related to that subject. Also have statistics about the haiku users 
could be of great benefit, to see how many users we win, how many 
we loose,  if the average time of "haiku usage" is increasing or 
decreasing in last time.




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