Étoilé on Haiku?

1

Hello all! There are two projects which I find inspiring, neither of which I have a vested interest in, other than wanting to see both succeed so that i can use them. Haiku for the hard work and the potential to be better than the other OS choices and étoilé (Starry) - I believe after the Xerox Star user application environment, not an OS, for being the future, in my mind.

There are a lot of nice touches and attention to detail, but the main idea, I think, is services, an element of Jeff Raskin’s Human Interface project, small applications which can composite into the same document with other unrelated data, means if you learn to use it, you can use it anywhere (perfect for an open source ecosystem). Even folders, forming projects have a compositing nature and seem to be saved ‘desktops’ which you can switch between. They have the best workflow worked out that I’ve seen. Too many features to mention, but, though Haiku and étoilé overlap, covering the desktop above an OS, I wondered what everyone thought of their ideas and if both projects could be developed in parallel, perhaps taking the runtimes and applications and maybe other modules to reduce some development overlap and expand the potential application envirenment? Built on GNUstep, the open cousin of Apple’s OS X development environment, Cocoa, utilising Objective-C 2.0 runtimes. It might make it easy for Mac developers to port their apps to étoilé and if two strong projects where made compatible, perhaps this could really grab some attention and more developers will be inspired to work on these.

http://etoileos.com/etoile/

They say, “…highly modular and light components with project and document orientation in mind, in order to allow users to create their own workflow by reshaping or recombining provided Services (aka Applications), Components etc. Flexibility and modularity on both User Interface and code level should allow us to scale from PDA to computer environment.”

The étoilé project has been going for 5 years with a lot of work done now and an expected user release this year. I could see the features of both projects jumping way ahead of the major OS’s, giving users a granularity and workflow which is closer to the way people think.

But what do you guys all think? What would be the problems and the advantages? Does anyone like the idea?

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I have not used étoilé so cannot say what it would offer. Looks interesting project but I believe I would not care for it on Haiku.

Haiku has its own user environment and developers would not adopt étoilé.

I am sure it may appeal to some people but do not think to most. I am very happy the way Haiku is now. It already has code for multi-threading, fast and responsive UI - Haiku code is created with speed in mind. The eventual programming goal is to make a very fast, well looking, modern OS.

We already have 3rd party Qt & KDE available which is more than enough for Haiku.

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I also haven’t tried Étoilé, but I find it interesting as well. The way Haiku currently works though, there would probably be a lot of work to integrate anything major from Étoilé. Haiku’s GUI API would be deprecated in favour of Étoilé’s, or vice versa, for one. There is also a license issue with GNUstep, which Étoilé is based around, with GNUstep being LGPL/GPL licensed.

With that said though, both projects are open source, and Étoilé itself is MIT/BSD licensed just like Haiku. Somebody could certainly take Haiku’s kernel, reverse-engineer GNUstep and make an MIT licensed version, and then make a new desktop OS using Étoilé. It would be much better than Linux (A server OS with desktop environment).

This is probably up to any external developers to do however, since I can’t see our current developers abandoning Haiku over it.

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Hi again all.

I wouldn’t suggest abandoning anything, but if Étoilé could be tailored as an application for project work for it’s work flow, styled to fit and so on. It could be a bridge to a lot of applications eventually. I’m suggesting that if that was done, if could attract a lot more interest firing some imaginations.

What I haven’t seen in Haiku is much in the way of planning what will be the direction and feature set to aim for once parity with the Be code is achieved. There are of course many suggestions and pulling and pushing… Of course there is a lot of catching up to do with functionality that is now common, but, in any game, you must not aim for where the ball is, but where you believe it is going to be. Far greater efficiencies can be created if a very much forward looking plan is developed.

Would any one else like to see a services model created on Haiku? Small applications that can be used in any document? Could make future development much easier and efficient. Less monolithic in nature. The benefit is that the system can remain light, yet with a lot of functionality.