Hello Community, unfortunately Haiku will not reach its donation targets, which is a big problem.
To this I have a few questions:
Why do not you donate?
Are you already using Haiku?
What can make Haiku better than a project?
What do you want to do with Haiku OS?
If Haiku reaches the donation goal, what should focus on Haiku in the new year?
I would like to thank everyone and look forward to the answers.
Haiku - free, open and functional
- Why do not you donate?
Why should I?
In other words, people spend money if they are expecting something to get what they want, or to thank for something what they got for themselves useful. Is it not so?
It is sad, but I think the lack of communication between the Haiku developers and community causes alienation. Nobody donates money to those whose objectives are not clear. Also, it often seems that the Haiku developers do not really care about the community desires.
- Are you already using Haiku?
A little bit to research Haiku possibilities, a little bit to remember BeOS.
Haiku not ready to productivity use (lack some essential features), Haiku good only for developing itself.
- What can make Haiku better than a project?
See above↑
- What do you want to do with Haiku?
I like to use Haiku for role of main OS on home PC and tablet: music, movies, internet, some writing, some reading, some editing pictures, some editing audio and video, some programing, some gaming.
- If Haiku reaches the donation goal, what should focus on Haiku in the new year?
Actually I do not now for what purpose that donation? I seen some piggy on main site of Haiku, and what? – “people always want money”, for what goal? for whom? what is here for me?
What do these questions have to do with a donation call? Sounds more like a poll.
- Why do not you donate?
I donate now and then. Unfortunately never really much since there is no more left. In addition, things are usually developed which for me are not always considered as urgent (Other views, different thinking). In addition, the focus is still strictly directed at the developer and. Not to the user.
- Are you already using Haiku?
I am using haiku since that is running, before zeta and before that beos.
- What can make Haiku better than a project?
By paying attention to the user and after numerous attempts finally released an official version (No this does not have to be the beta).
- What do you want to do with Haiku?
At the moment I use Haiku only as a playground for my developments with yab. I would like to bring Haiku more and more into everyday life (Internet, mail, image processing, CD create, watch movies, office, etc.), as in old days (BeOS and Zeta)
- If Haiku reaches the donation goal, what should focus on Haiku in the new year?
What is the donation goal?
Hi,
There is still some confusion going on, so I want to make this clear first. The donated money goes to Haiku, inc. It does not go to “the developers”. Currently the main use for the money is paying for the server on which all of Haiku is hosted. The website, this forum, the git depot with the sources, the bugtracker, etc. This is of course very important to Haiku.
The remaining part of the money is used as follows:
You can read a little more about it on the inc website: www.haiku-inc.org.
Now, there are several management problems with the inc. The same people have been in charge of it for way too long, and they are getting burnt out or bored of trying to move things with so much inertia. We would definitely need more people to join the board of directors and help keep things running. There is a problem in accepting new people there, that they would have access to the bank account and donation data, which are considered private (some people want to donate anonymously so we can’t expose this data in the public).
As for the development being “developer centric”. I can only speak for myself here. Before being a developer, I’m a full-time Haiku user and I try to get things to fit my needs. Doing so involves keeping a working development environment, and sometimes this takes a lot of work and there is little time left for the actual user-facing work. But, this has to be done, otherwise the project will become harder and harder to maintain. You can help us by keeping the bug reports coming and nudging the developers (gently) about fixing them. I know it is a common pattern that people ramble about how many problems they have, but then never turn them into bug reports. Try to do it and turn your rambling into positive energy for the devs, that would be great (and possibly more important than the money - as long as we can pay for hosting the servers).
thanks pulkomandy, your introduction make it more clear
If something is too complicated, and it will be difficult to implement. For example, for the bug report, or they could be automated? The program threw the error, the debugger has prepared a report, and screenshots if needed, user added comments if needed, and continue with sending all this report to developers.
This is not the most efficient way. There are several problems:
Most of this can be done in user side. As I said, this is more important than donating money to Haiku, it really helps bringing the project forward. Not all these tasks require lots of programming skills. A good bug report like this has several positive effects:
Users also humans. And I do not suggest such things like “let’s handle the devs as if they were bug-fixing machines”. You exaggerate.
Please don’t take this negatively, I am just adding my 2 cents as to what I think can move things along. I think the Devs do great work and am excited at the prospect of using Haiku full time.
However…I wish the Haiku devs would stop adding new features and get what is already being worked on stable. It seems like something is being implemented with bugs and not stabilized before moving onto the next thing. Not everyone on the team does this, but it does happen often. While I think JessicaH’s UEFI stuff is great, it really does not have to happen now. She could have been working on stabilizing BEFS or fixing kernel issues that already have tickets (forgive me if that is what you are doing Jessica, the lack of accurate names with the tickets makes it hard to see who is doing what and there is no ticket related to UEFI that I could find). All of these ports really do not need to happen now either (x86_64, PPC, ARM, etc). All they are doing is porting the bugs to other platforms. All of this focus could be on the main project. In my opinion, the only other platform should be ARM so you guys can release for a Raspberry Pi.
Official releases should be more often also. It is not worth installing Alpha 4.1 anymore as there has been so many positive changes since then. In my opinion, you should be at least Alpha 10 by now. It should be something like close 20 tickets and make alpha point release. I know to Devs releases are just a number, but to users it means something. When I go to the main site and click Get Haiku, the first thing I see is “Alpha 4 is 3 years old. You may want to try a nightly dev build” and a link for Alpha 4.1. Not sure why you just don’t make every 10th nightly build an alpha maintenance release (e.g Alpha 4.1.1). Showing a link for 4.1 on the right does not look like much progress to a user.
PulkoMandy stated that the Inc is getting bored…why don’t they start calling people like NVidia or AMD to work with them on porting their Linux video drivers to Haiku or get them to write a Haiku driver? P.R. would be a good thing also. If you search YouTube, you don’t find any developers or staff talking about Haiku recently. I can only find an interview from 10 years ago with Ryan Leavengood on some podcast.
If you want more donations, you need to create more buzz. Show people what a good product you have and all the hard work you put into it.
Again…I mean no harm by this…just trying to point out what I see. I could be way off base with all of this but this is what I feel.
I want to say, let us fight for a better software, not with each other.
It is not good, when some kind of search for imperfections becomes into witch hunting.
I think no one will argue that the softaware developers cause the bugs, as well as to correct those bugs and refine the software to adequate level they need help of the software users.
so we are back again by the faults of the past. the main goal of haiku was to rebuild beos. with alpha 4.1 we are sooo close to this goal, but then the package management comws around. i love the package management and i think is good work, but the fault was to stop focus the main project goal. the pm brings so many changes that we are fare away a official release as years ago.
so i agree with paradoxonj. me too does not want to make things done by the devs bad but the focus is by the development playground and not by the Users. to get more feeback, bug reports, communiy activity we need to make haiku more useable for that group we need, the users.
And yes, I also think, that Haiku has future in ARM world. ARM laptops and tablets its ideal for Haiku.
But this can happen after beta.
And I want to say about goal (remaking beos), what is that? it is remaking BeOS in the form of the past, or remaking BeOS in soul of the today? I think most of us wants second.
I want modern reincarnation of BeOS, not archaic software copy.
…And for that I am ready to pay.
Thanks for the comments, it is always interesting to know what everyone is thinking and how the project is perceived.
New features are a way to keep the motivation up. Jessicah is working on UEFI because otherwise she can’t run Haiku natively on his machine. Likewise, Kallisti5 spent a lot of time on the Radeon driver, and other people worked on USB3 support. If the devs can’t boot the OS on their own machines, the project will die.
Bug fixing takes a lot of investigation effort and is often not a very rewarding task. Hours or days of research, and at the end a barely noticed 2 line change to fix the problem. Not everyone can do this all the day.
The x86_64 port is already mostly complete and running well. It already was when we released alpha4, but we wanted to let it mature for some time before making it officially stable.
The PPC port is making progress because someone donated PPC hardware to one of the devs. mmu_man is working alone on this and it is not interfering with other things. I don’t think anyone can demand one of the devs to stop what he is doing (such as a port to PowerPC). If someone enjoy coding on PPC, why could we force them to do ARM?
We are very much aware that there has been way too much time since alpha 4. However, you are going a bit far in the other direction. When we do a release, there is a significant effort in quality assurance and testing before the release is shipped. The main point of package management was related to that, in two ways:
We can’t just pick a random nightly and tag it as a release. There is always something broken, and we want to limit regressions that users have to face. We try to have a reasonable release rate, and we have failed after alpha 4. There are multiple causes for that: lack of planning, underestimation of the work required for the package management, and lack of discipline from some devs who merged things too early into the trunk.
As for PR, there hasn’t been much activity on that side for a few years. This is yet another task that can be tackled without help from the same old developer team, and even completely outside of the Haiku project. For example, Leah Hanson did some articles and talks about the Haiku Vector Icon Format and that did raise some awareness about Haiku. Other people could do the same. If you want to organize an interview with a dev, I’ll be glad to answer questions. But I don’t think it is my duty to run after this. I usually prefer to work on the backstage.
Thanks for your answer. Again…I did not mean anything in a negative way.
My point is…PPC is a side project by someone. That focus could be used to fix some of the kernel issues rather than port to an obsolete platform. ARM is part of the future. I am not saying Haiku should run on phones, but it should at least run on a Pi. If you look at it, a Pi is a $35 development machine. Very affordable.
What you say about the devs machines needing to work, I get it and that is a valid situation. At the same time, you can get a development VM on DigitalOcean for $5 a month to compile the code on a Linux platform and generate an ISO image for testing. D.O. also gives you console access to that server so you can use QEMU to test. I’m saying, there are ways around the limitations. It is good that those limitations are being fixed, but it takes the focus off the important stuff like SSD issues and BFS corruption which make Haiku a big risk for myself and other SSD users. There is also the dual monitor issue where my second monitor doesn’t show a desktop or it is all distorted (I have a Radeon HD 5700).
I am a hobbyist developer and I understand the bug fixing thing, but in the end…it has to be done. I believe that stability is a rewarding task and that is what bug fixes bring (along with other bugs sometimes). It also brings a bit more feeling of pride in your product as you just made it better to use for the community.
How can you QA something if it is constantly changing?? What I usually do is create branches in my source and fix the bugs in that branch until I can release it as a point version. Haiku is Alpha after all, bugs are to be expected. Alpha releases do not have to be perfect. I am not saying to be random…I am saying to create structure around the releases that enable you to do an “official” release more often. Quite the opposite.
I think P.R. would look better coming from a Dev or a marketing person than it would coming from a regular Joe like myself. I would be looked at as more of a “guy who has a hobby”. I also don’t feel that I am qualified enough to talk to an NVidia or AMD about drivers.
You guys do great work but you don’t show it off much and you don’t talk about it enough with people outside the Haiku/BeOS community. I see no buzz outside of this community about Haiku anymore. There used to be.
There are no problems with SSD at all in normal use of the system. All my machines have SSDs and run Haiku without any problems. I suffer a lot more from old mechanical drives failing.
There is a known issue with the fstrim command. As long as you don’t run the command, there are no known problems at all.
I am also not aware of any known bugs in BFS. There is the occasional corruption, but tracking this would require a lot of work, and can only be done by people who can reproduce the problem in the first place.
Yes, there are solution to code for Haiku if it doesn’t run on your machine, sure. But do you think people would have interest in that? “Here is an OS that does not run on my hardware, why would I code for it? Why would I use it?”. For me, Haiku is relevant only as long as I can use it as my operating system on my machines. And yes, that means writing or updating drivers each time I buy new hardware. This is my first priority (get it to boot). The second is getting it to do what I need (hence we have a reasonably working web browser now, so I don’t need to reboot to Windows or Linux each time I need to open a web page). And only third, the stability issues come. Otherwise, the plan would be simple:
As for PR, Haiku is not a closed organization. If you start doing PR for it, you earn credit and become part of the project. That’s how all the devs joined, fist you start contributing in one way or another, and then you become accepted by the team. The existing dev team is not much interested in outreach, and you can’t force them (the result wouldn’t be very good, most lileky). But, gathering interested people and assembling a PR team would be nice.
As for more frequent releases, we are trying to set this up. Package management was a lot of work, but it will simplify the release process. With beta1 we will also change the git repo organization to always have a “stable” branch. We can then release from that branch as often as we want, while people can continue working on experimental features in the master branch. Once again, it would be great if more people were working on the stable branch, but not everyone is interested in it. Some people are really here for the “developer playground” and want to work on the new features. We will never manage to get them help with stable releases, so we should as well let them do whatever they want. Do not see it as “time wasted”, what they do is relevant and they would just leave the project if you tried to force them to work on bugfixes anyway.
Maybe I am reading it wrong. Ticket #3150, #6170, #10336, and #10208 are related to SSD and BFS no? I agree the directory corruption would be hard to find but it still needs to be fixed. The dual monitor thing has been around for quite some time also.
It is good news that you are working on more frequent releases. The package management was a lot of work, but at the time was needed. It makes updating so much easier. The GIT changes are great too. I am happy that you guys listen to the community and encourage people to come and work with you. That is the second reason I stick around. The first is that I loved BeOS and now I love Haiku. Sometimes I get a little too passionate about it. Sorry if I ruffled your feathers.
I would be happy to lend a hand looking for bugs. I have developed mainly on Windows using an IDE though. I have started to think about an IDE for Haiku but have not started coding it yet as I am still trying to learn the API. I develop inside a VirtualBox for Haiku.
#3150: the last investigations show that there could be a problem in the block cache, which is not part of BFS and used no matter what your hard disk is.
#6170: no changes for the last 5 years. Does this bug still exist?
#10336: this is the one I was referring to, it will happen ONLY if you run the fstrim command, which needs to be run manually. It is rather easy to reproduce and will probably be fixed for beta1, or if it isn’t, we will disable fstrim so it can’t happen there (this is the difference between nightlies and stable releases)
#10208: this is about partition maps, not BFS or SSD. And there is a known workaround (reboot after creating the partition, before initializing it). There is a theory about what the problem is, so it could be fixed soon too.
Thanks for the updates.