Possible advantages: #1 breaking out of a single niche of obscure desktop Operating Systems that are only in theory concurrent to Win/Lin/Mac OS trinity - in order to be considered interesting to people who are into virtualizations and specific tasks that desktop OSes can not manage as well as Haiku.
This could bring more hackers and enthusiasts to the Haiku core development as well as open doors to new uses of Haiku in fields like education (where it’s simplicity could be used for pedagogical purposes) or scientific (where writing custom/niche software could be done quick).
#2 providing good performance for old hardware that is no longer supported by Microsoft/Apple/(Other closed source OS vendor) through last supported OS setup. Owners of less popular/mainstream hardware that relays on specific drivers of deprecated OS would love that.
As the owner of SGI 320 with win2k http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation I can not think of slicker looking OS then Haiku to drive this old hardware
If that developer has a Haiku like system using a Linux kernel, I would be interested in taking a look, as s/he is likely using a much smaller kernel than a regular Linux distro.
Is there any further info about this project, please.
The same thing can be achieved with Haiku running VMWare or VirtualBox. Infacts, I’m using it on the latter without any real trouble, almost with pleasure and I’m seriously thinking to contribute back to Haiku.
Maybe some penny could be spent on improving data interchange between Haiku and the host os, maybe not.
[quote=zblace] #2 providing good performance for old hardware that is no longer supported by Microsoft/Apple/(Other closed source OS vendor) through last supported OS setup. [/quote]
That niche is already covered by NetBSD, IMHO. I don’t see the point in starting to duplicate the efforts of another community with more experience in this specific field than ours (they started in 1993: 21 years of activity are really an impressive record for an open source project).
About #2: I’ve been around for a while, and every Operating System and Desktop Environment that specifically set out to specialise in running on old equipment has died an ignominious death. GeoWorks Ensemble? Gone. Damn Small Linux? Hasn’t been updated since 2008. I’ll grant you Puppy Linux - it has received an update last month after nothing for four years.
There are Linux window managers that use fewer resources than KDE or Gnome, but you really have to look fairly hard to get a distro that comes out of the box with xfce or Enlightenment or Windowmaker. They exist, but they are way out of the spotlight.
Designing and developing Haiku so that it is backward compatible is wonderful. Keep it up! Announcing this fact to the world is terrible, terrible marketing. If you develop a new car entertainment system, for example, you don’t say “and it will even work in a 1970 Trabant!” You show it mounted in a 2015 Ferrari. The marketing strategy for Haiku should be “You there with the 6-core i7! Do you know that your OS is slowing your computer down?”
manjaro linux (enlightenment) was recently at the top of distrowatch and featured in several linux magazines. xubuntu (xfce) has been linked on the ubuntu site for years. lightweight distros aren’t all that obscure.
I don’t see the point in starting to duplicate the efforts of another community with more experience in this specific field than ours (they started in 1993: 21 years of activity are really an impressive record for an open source project).