A reminder that MS has deals with OEMs. Most likely, the moment a new Windows comes out, you’re no longer allowed to sell a new PC with older versions, or you lose the deal with MS. Nowadays, sure, you can move to Linux: laptops preinstalled with Elementary for example are commonplace on shelves. Fifteen years ago, that wasn’t an option. And you can’t only sell top-of-the-line machines because that would ruin your sales. In fact that’s why the forced move to Win11 has everyone up in arms.
In unrelated news: uhhh… wait. Haiku has management and marketing teams?
Thus, the intentions of the product manufacturer behind the product are the most important measure of the product’s quality and usefulness. Hidden intentions could be considered criminal activity, even if the law and order does not consider it a crime.
I think that those hidden intentions of the company are what most repel people from MS Windows. And with each iteration of their product, the situation only gets worse.
Of course, this is probably the problem of most large and bureaucratized corporations. So the issue of ethics and general culture is essential, although people often avoid mentioning it.
Also, the proposal, if I understand right, is to “slim down” by shipping it with more software and maybe less hardware support - or at least sopping efforts to support any hardware other than whatever the designated “chromebook like” machine would be.
The idea of a single machine was debated to death in dozen other threads, so here is the summary of why it’s a bad idea:
Developers already have their own machines that they write drivers for. Some of us prefer big desktop powerhorses, some prefer light laptops for travelling, some live in countries where getting a new machine is simply not an option and would be an investment of several months of pay
Users also are not necessarily willing to buy a new machine just to run Haiku. If it already runs on their existing machines, they can instead use that money to donate to Haiku inc and fund the existing development effort
How would the distribution of such a machine work? Do we just tell people to buy it from someplace? Then Haiku gets no money from that, the machine manufacturer and reseller do. Do we buy them in bulk and re-ship them? Who in the Haiku ecosystem would do that exactly? Who would handle taxes, shipping and logistics? Do we really want o spend time and money on that instead of writing the OS? What would prevent people from buying the same machine at a cheaper price elsewhere (since there’s no chance we’re going to offer this at a competitive price) and install Haiku on it on their own?
How do we make sure that machine gets proper hardware support? This won’t happen in any better way than the current situation without direct support from the hardware manufacturer. I have been scratching my head about sound not working, dual monitors not working, and so on for years on my own machine. I would not be able to do any better just because someone has picked a different machine for me to work on, unless there’s someone with intimate knowledge of the hardware and drivers for other platforms telling me what I got wrong. Are we going to convince such persons to provide us their time for free, or are we going to pay them?
Supporting a complete machine from where we start is a lot of work. With our current small team of volunteers, it will take so much time that by the time we have it 100% running, the manufacturer will say “sorry, that model is out of production already, but here is the new one that replaces it”. And we have to start all over again.
They did do some things right. None of their systems were perfect, sure, but withing the constraints of the time, they did well enough to obtain a vast majority of the market, and that does not happen if your products are complete crap.
Windows 95 is a masterpiece of streamlining user interface design and building a consistent system. Sure, the underlying architecture is limited by tiny hardware requirements and compatibility with legacy DOS apps. But the next generation of systems (NT, 2000, and XP) focused on that and solved the problem rather well. All while keeping reasonable hardware requirements for the time.
That is certainly not the case anymore with the latest versions. There’s a mix of so may different UI looks and APIs, the hardware requirements are excessive (which makes people turn to Linux to keep their existing hardware), and then there’s the bloat of useless software preinstalled and the “everything online” spying. But that wasn’t always the case…
That’s really not the case, look at Netbooks for instance. Most Netbooks shipped with XP until 7 came out. The first eeePC (701) shipped with Linux, I don’t remember the distro, but it was a pretty awful one.
So yeah, they had the option of shipping XP instead of Vista, they just didn’t take it.
Very OT for this forum, but just as comment on the “Vista was crap vs. Vista was great” discussion:
Any verdict on an OS very much depends on the circumstances in which you use it. We tested Vista in a corporate environment (with around 5000 users) back in the day on a few machines (the production OS was still XP) and it was almost unusable in this context, especially everything to do with SMB and network performance in general which made working with files on file servers almost impossible. It did get better with each update (were they still called service packs on Vista? I can’t remember) but in the end we decided to skip Vista and went directly to Windows 7 a while after it came out. Totally different experience, right from the beginning.
I thought you would just post that the distro had been tested on the range of standard hardware. I never imagined anyone would think I was suggesting anything else.
I imagined a group of users could test the subset of applications to focus on getting them to work, thus increase the number effectively contributing to the effort.
Just ideas. Not pushing any agenda. Thank you for your explanations, and I am sure Haiku will come on splendidly, and as a group you have things in hand. Sorry if I have seemed, presumptuous. I certainly do not have the answers to some of your questions, but hoped this discussion might help focus attention of true experts here on what is coming soon.
I agree that the idea of sliming down the Haiku is not realistic. My suggestion was a “slimed” down distroof Applications from Haiku Depot (THAT JUST WORK), no change to the Haiku itself. I can not see how you could do that, as it is lacking in areas like hardware support. My posts about reducing the reliance of the GUI on Keyboard shortcuts, while enhancing functionality is not a cutdown OS version!
Multiple times I have explained they are just ideas, that will hopefully elicit what the actual plan to R1.0 is and here is a “half baked: idea for discussion. That is not the way it seems to be being interpreted here so I failed in that, but still hope Haiku continues its progress as it has and nothing has been lost by reading this discussion.
Upon R1.0 users will start expecting stuff from Haiku and my posts are very much from a user perspective, which of course is different to developers. As a playground for developers Haiku is brilliant.
My idea was that users would be happy to pay for that version (not just more demands) that would justify the effort and maybe provide an ongoing freemium release model (absolutely no agenda my end), but that seems to open another can of worms, so this is my last post on the matter.
There is nothing I have posted that is new, original or brilliant. It is simply that I have said it, for others to build on if they wish, or come up with a much better plan for managing the transition. If the team think it is not necessary to plan R1.0, then that is the decision. Some focused navigation of that transition, I believe, would reduce the workload and increase the chance of great reviews.
I looked up what Wikipedia had to say about Vista.
The ambitiousness and scope of these changes, and the abundance of new features earned positive reviews, but Windows Vista was the subject of frequent negative press and significant criticism. Criticism of Windows Vista focused on driver, peripheral, and program incompatibility; digital rights management; excessive authorization from the new User Account Control; inordinately high system requirements when contrasted with Windows XP; its protracted development; longer boot time; and more restrictive product licensing. Windows Vista deployment and satisfaction rates were consequently lower than those of Windows XP, and it is considered a market failure…
Vista had many changes. And we, as users, do not like them that much.
Also, Vista needed more capable hardware. People ( and OEMS ) went by MS´s “Minimum requirements”, and then wanted to complain it was slow. When installing in capable machines, it ran well.
After the Service Packs ( and that happened with other versions also, from Win98 through NT4 & 2K ) bugs and other things were solved / improved. At that time, not like today, MS had quality control & testing labs, so changes were better tested.
I don’t care about Windows, Vista, XP and/or another release of their OSes…
I like to talk about Haiku marketing in Windows 10 End of Line chances and possibilities!
A few Haiku apps don’t work quite well or are not for professional use right now, as they are! Sequitur, Wonderbrush, Medo and ArtPaint for example! They are very much underrated apps in the field. This apps quite work, but they can do perform better on Haiku!
For driver it would be ok to have at least one Universal Video Cam driver which would do some video without much fiddling. Time will tell if there is some dev trying to finish this almost complete work!
But talking about Window Vista and that sort will not bring much benefit for Haiku.
Whilst we do not discuss politics on this forum, so will not be drawn into debating my personal views, many would like to distance themselves from MS on what we see as their own abhorrent politics.
A lot of us would be happy to advocate replacements to windows not mainly because the software is inferior but because they were accused by staff of being complicit in the occupation and genocide of Palestine. And tried to sack the whistleblowers.
Please do not resort to personal attacks here on the forum. If you don’t agree with a users posts counter them with factual information or ignore them. Thank you.
I’m not sure how discussing the quality of Windows Vista helps Haiku.
I had used it for a short time when it was long out of support already,and I found it quite usable,actually.
Not sure why Windows 7 is praised as the best Windows version ever so often and Windows Vista as one of the worst,while they’re so similar to each other.
Windows Vista brought many new design concepts that Windows 7 later built on,and I personally think they weren’t bad at all.
What it really awful is the spyware that is Windows 10,which tries to force you into M$ cloud services at every possible place.
And even more awful is Windows 11,which does the same,plus additionally forcing questionable AI nonsense that nobody asked for on everyone.
The old Windows versions,every single one of them,were truly great compared to the spyware garbage that is only a advertising space for M$ subscription services that we have to use nowadays.
If there’s one thing that Haiku can learn from that: Don’t be like Micro$oft.
Don’t start bundling crap that nobody asks for,don’t spy on users,don’t try to sell nonsensical subscriptions,don’t add a Copilot to every f***ing system tool.
Just provide a solid,stable private-by-design base,and people who really want to use spyware like Copilot can install it on their own.
I did both, my factual information got ignored and I got mocked by that same user with a deeply ignorant non-sequitur about Wikipedia. Of course he didn’t name me but it’s clear he was mocking me.
Seeing that my answer was rather jokey by contrast. There was no actual offense in what I said, no person can be married to an incorporeal entity like an OEM as far as I know.
I’m just so tired of people acting like know-it-alls and then shutting themselves off in their own bubble disregarding any possible counterpoint. So, so tired.
I don’t even get what’s the big deal about all this. I just said that OEMs should shoulder a good part of the blame for the Vista flop because they sold crap PCs that would’ve been better with XP, a thing they actually did in roughly the same timeframe with netbooks.
That’s all I wanted to say, but no… of course you can’t just express an opinion on the internet without stoking pointless drama with people that mindlessly post and have 0 interest in actually reading and parsing what others have to say.
