[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.

Other related posts: