[haiku-development] What's the status of Haiku?
- From: Sia Lang <silverlanguage@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 15:03:37 +0200
Back in 2007, in his goodbye letter, Phipps assessed that "we're almost
there". That's seven years ago, and I unfortunately think his assessment
today would be about the same.
Maybe I'm wrong, as I find it hard to figure out the actual state of Haiku.
On my machine, it "kinda" works, but there's clearly also several critical
bugs. Could someone please give the audience a rough estimate on when to
expect the first release?
I'm asking this in no small part due to having a working prototype BeOS API
layer on top of a Linux 3.x kernel (app, interface and networking kits
already in decent shape after only a couple of months of development -
Linux has already done the hard work) and I am pondering whether or not to
pursue this project.
If Haiku is close to release, I probably won't bother since it's still a
lot of work, but if another seven years is going to pass by, I'll probably
go ahead.
While there are some minor downsides to having the kits on top of Linux (or
one of the BSDs), the upsides include all the drivers in the world (well,
the gpu driver situation could be a tad better), a rock solid kernel that
works on all kinds of devices (who says BeOS can't run on a phone, mine
can), and a working BeOS clone with comparatively little effort (as a
musical engineer, my biggest worry was sound system latencies, but it turns
out many Linux schedulers can easily be tuned to handle the loads I expect
in a BeOS system.)
I think the Haiku project made a monumental mistake in not using an
existing kernel - it's simply no longer practical for a small project to
keep up with the hardware evolution, handling security requirements and so
on. Sad but true, and it was sad but true back in 2001.
Thanks. Sia.
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