But, truth be told, I do miss having a place where I can freely play like in a kid’s sandbox. And that’s what I’m hoping ‘newleaf’ will be. It’ll just be a personal side project to hopefully gain some Haiku skills as an educational exercise. It’ll just be alpha 4; (with later Poem builds, I switched to hrev50810, but don’t plan to do this again.) The reason is because even though I like PM now, I don’t want Haiku to feel anything is ‘competing’ with it by taking a recent codebase. (For those wondering, I had the name ‘newleaf’ for Poem originally, and since it’s unused, am simply reusing the name).
I still hope to work with Haiku, maybe even join the team sometime, and that messing with a small distro won’t change anything or cause any hard feelings with the team or the community. Please notice I didn’t title this ‘Hey! New distro!’ or anything of that sort, because I don’t want to attract attention to it than this – especially with the Beta so close. I’ve been wanting to say this for a while now, and maybe picked the wrong time, but my hope is if I post this with enough time before beta 1 arrives, this will sink down the list and fade away with plenty of time.
That said, I’m still honestly as stoked about Beta as everyone else, and will write and post whatever I can about Haiku to let people know about Haiku wherever I can. Haiku is truly remarkable, and I don’t want to take away from it. But I did feel it honest of me to let everyone know about me and this idea.
Again, I’m honestly very excited about Haiku, and again hope this can just be a small personal toy for fun/learning. And be a place to put in my ideas like adding color, backgrounds, etc. Hopefully this thread won’t make anyone mad. And I can still join in being part of the beta excitement (and the wonderful community here). Anyway, thanks…
Quite the opposite, I feel that ignoring the last 6 years of work in Haiku is a little disrespectful to us
You will not be competing, if you were, there would be no point in making a distro (your target market would be people who already use Haiku anyways). You will be using the same codebase to do something else, and maybe reach new markets and people that would otherwise have no interest in Haiku. I may or may not like what you do personnaly (we’ll see when it’s released), but that’s the point in a distro: you are free to experiment with things the established Haku developers wouldn’t agree on on first thought, and eventually maybe prove me wrong about a few things.
I have to say I agree with PulkoMandy on this one; it would make more sense to use the current codebase if the goal is to make a new distro and just try new things with the user experience.
A distro should be as up-to-date or not far behind the main OS release as possible. This is why all the different flavors of Ubuntu (my daily-use OS, Haiku is currently my side toy with an end goal of using it as my ‘productivity’ OS) ship new editions within days, sometimes a week or so, of the new Ubuntu version. The distros exist to give users a new perspective or interface, while the bones of the system stay as current as someone using the original spin.
If one were to start from so old a codebase as Alpha-4 and go from there, you wouldn’t have a distro so much as you’d have a fork- and as said you’d be missing out on the things that have changed since.
Speaking entirely as a user with no dev-stake in the game, I think Haiku certainly has room for experimentation and different userland experiences to attract other types of users to the project whether they stick with a distro or change to the vanilla flavor later or not. It was a distro (Lubuntu) that got me into Linux in the first place long before switching to Ubuntu, and I can easily see the same happening for people with Haiku if it has a solid distro or five that can guide users to it with something that feels more familiar to them.
The problem is not a distribution himself. The problem is we have only a very smal userbase. So it can that you have at the end only one or two users (one of them are your self). And if you go a different way as the haiku Main project you need developmers for you haiku. So there are two things can happens with it. You does not have any User and you project dies or you spit the community in much smaler userbase as we have today. Is this the right way we should go at the moment? I think not.
You should Focus on writing tester ports or articles about that can be done better. You can helping writing documentation or step by step descriptions for haiku. You can learn development and helping fixing Bugs, or creating new programs and things you are missing. There a so much better ways to help haiku.
I don’t agree. If you have valid reasons for a fork and things you’d like to change, you can reach people who would not use Haiku, but find that the fork is more relevant to their use cases.
And if you make not a fork but a distro, then you are not splitting the community, because compatibility is preserved.
Also, sometimes the established rules prevent doing some innovations. What if someone was to completely rethink deskbar and tracker? What if they had seemingly crazy ideas? I guess the Haiku project would hold to the existing interface as much as possible. But what if the users (the ones coming from macOS or Windows) did like the new thing?
[quote=“PulkoMandy, post:8, topic:7445”]I
don’t agree. If you have valid reasons for a fork and things you’d like to change, you can reach people who would not use Haiku, but find that the fork is more relevant to their use cases.
[/quote]
You are right, but then the distro builder should be a developer. Would be hard to finde devs for a new project like this around here.
Anyway, thanks…
