This is just the most amazingly Sisyphean project I’ve ever encountered. They’re never, ever going to hit their goal; and yet, they keep cranking away.
I felt that way about Haiku, and it’s actually turning into a fairly pleasant little desktop that can run some significant applications. It’s almost to the point that if I didn’t need to run VMs and videoconference in Google Hangouts, it could be my full-time desktop.
The three things that kept me from going Haiku as a real desktop the last time I looked were a lack of drivers, general instability, and a lack of a good modern web browser. Have any of those been addressed? I don’t honestly need VMs or video conferencing, but being on a super old version of Firefox or WebKit were definite blockers.
It seems pretty stable. Driver-wise, it handles everything on my reasonably recent laptop; it can load FreeBSD wifi drivers. WebPositive has I think been updated to WebKit 2.
Really, I wish Haiku had simply targeted source code compatibility and not binary compatibility with BeOS. Binary compatibility shackled them to a custom version of GCC and binutils, which took a lot of engineering resources. They also added a lot of features, some of which are better than any other extant desktop OS (e.g. PackageFS), but which again took resources away from basic stability.
At the end of the day, they’ve accomplished amazing stuff and Haiku is really a usable and pleasant environment. I just think they would’ve hit usability ten years ago if they’d made a few decisions differently.
(This is not to disparage their work, which is really awesome. I was never in their shoes, so I’m armchair quarterbacking.)
To the extent you’re armchair quarterbacking, I’ve said the same thing. Sounds like it might be worth me taking another gander, though, so I’ll check things out this evening. Thanks for the inspiration!
There has been a lot of work recently on this. I dunno man, what if in three years we have a version of ReactOS that runs Vulkn drivers and can play AAA title games?
This is just the most amazingly Sisyphean project I’ve ever encountered. They’re never, ever going to hit their goal; and yet, they keep cranking away.
I felt that way about Haiku, and it’s actually turning into a fairly pleasant little desktop that can run some significant applications. It’s almost to the point that if I didn’t need to run VMs and videoconference in Google Hangouts, it could be my full-time desktop.
The three things that kept me from going Haiku as a real desktop the last time I looked were a lack of drivers, general instability, and a lack of a good modern web browser. Have any of those been addressed? I don’t honestly need VMs or video conferencing, but being on a super old version of Firefox or WebKit were definite blockers.
It seems pretty stable. Driver-wise, it handles everything on my reasonably recent laptop; it can load FreeBSD wifi drivers. WebPositive has I think been updated to WebKit 2.
Really, I wish Haiku had simply targeted source code compatibility and not binary compatibility with BeOS. Binary compatibility shackled them to a custom version of GCC and binutils, which took a lot of engineering resources. They also added a lot of features, some of which are better than any other extant desktop OS (e.g. PackageFS), but which again took resources away from basic stability.
At the end of the day, they’ve accomplished amazing stuff and Haiku is really a usable and pleasant environment. I just think they would’ve hit usability ten years ago if they’d made a few decisions differently.
(This is not to disparage their work, which is really awesome. I was never in their shoes, so I’m armchair quarterbacking.)
To the extent you’re armchair quarterbacking, I’ve said the same thing. Sounds like it might be worth me taking another gander, though, so I’ll check things out this evening. Thanks for the inspiration!
There has been a lot of work recently on this. I dunno man, what if in three years we have a version of ReactOS that runs Vulkn drivers and can play AAA title games?
I’ll happily eat my words! But i think it’s unlikely, as they are aiming at a target 15 years old!