You know… a looooong time ago (22 years ago (over two DECADES!), wasn’t it?)… we thought we’d have a copy of BeOS R5 eventually. And, to this day, we still DON’T. Why is that? Because, over time, new stuff kept getting added… and things got broken… and more stuff got added and things got changed… and other stuff broke. Year after year… decade upon decade… and no one seems willing to admit that the cart was put before the horse for SOOOO long, no one knows how to get the mess straightened out.
When you have enough people thinking in the SAME direction (like Linux/Ubuntu, etc.), you can get things done pretty cohesively. But Haiku has NEVER been like that. We’ve had a mass of people, all doing their own thing, and trying to cobble together the end result. Guess what? IT DOESN’T WORK. Oh, sure… you have an Operating System, that is scattered across several different platforms… with pieces that BASICALLY function as they should… but is it BeOS R5? Nope. It’s technically far beyond that point, but what we have is not even a finished product, not even a clone of an ancient OS… it’s something beyond and yet still unstable. Something far better and yet far less usable.
The frustration factor (over the course of decades) is what has finally driven me to barely even being interested in it at all. Why? Because I know that for every two steps forward, there will one step back. As it was in the beginning and so it continues.
Haiku R1 was supposed to be the equal of BeOS R5. But we kept getting distracted by the next shiny new thing… and kept adding and changing stuff forever. Instead of having a clone of BeOS R5… a point of reference that we could say, “THAT is where we started improving upon it and making it far greater!”, we have something that should probably be equivilant to Haiku R3 (I’d assume, over the course of 22 years). Instead of setting specific, attainable goals for each revision, we keep moving the goal post ad infinitum.
Honestly, at this point… what is Haiku R1 supposed to even LOOK/FUNCTION like? Will we ever REACH R1? We keep talking about it, yet it’s like a mirage… always before us, but never reached. Why can’t we reach that goal?
Because we never stop wanting the next, bigger/better thing. Trust me… as long as you keep striving to keep on top of the latest technological “thing”, you’ll NEVER reach R1.
We should have simply said… “Duplicate, in Haiku, what BeOS R5 has.” STOP! That would have been the FIRST goal. Done! Achieved. Permanant stake marker in the field. THEN, from that point forward, we set specific future goals… remove obsolete hardware specs and add the next set of newer hardware. Each improvement (revision) removes any obsolete hardware and adds the next set of improved hardware AT THAT POINT IN TIME (2005, for example). For example: ISA → PCI ->AGP → PCIe. And IDE → SATA → PCIe (m.2 NVMe) And so on. But stop chasing technology. Set a line in the sand for each revision and DON’T budge! Doesn’t matter if it’s not the latest/greatest… you can get to that (maybe) in the NEXT revision.
Instead of having people constantly complaining about broken beta nightlies, we could be directing people to full prior revisions that work. Completely. Beta nightlies should be a part of developing the NEXT full revision! And THEN you can tell people to stop complaining about broken nightlies and to go use the last full, working revision, until the next one is finished! But Haiku doesn’t HAVE that!
So, instead of complaining about people complaining… why not do something sensible and stop giving people a reason to complain. Give us a full revision that works completely, for what it is. If it has to be older processors and motherboards and USB 2.0 and older hardware… so be it. But give us something we can say “This revision of Haiku is completely usable.” Hardware that works. Drivers that work. Software that works. It may be on hardware that is 5-10 years old… but at least it’s usable and reliable! And we can take pride in that.
I know I sure would.
