Hey, thanks for the reply. I have to admit, it’d be super cool to meet him sometime. Though I never understood why Max had a Win-like feel.
But the question of doing something like Max is a hard question! So let’s discuss me + distros, man.
Thanks for that, but frankly, so far, I don’t have solid experience yet, sadly — I maintained a small Linux distro a few years back, which became the basis for the Poem Couplet alpha1 image. And, well, I’m most likely famous (in a bad way) here and beyond for publicly failing at Poem ( archived here.) Being a failure at a project is never fun.
At the moment, I’m still trying to work on and finish Couplet (what survived the fall of Poem) in the background. Outside of the Be/Haiku sphere, I also work on a systemd-free live distribution. And I’m quietly working on several personal projects mainly built on Gnu/Linux I plan to roll out as well.
So, from a time perspective, I don’t know even if a HAIKU Max distro similar to the old BeOS Max would be possible, team or not.
But if I could, what’s my thoughts on making “Haiku Max”, or any distro for that matter, for everyone’s reading pleasure?
Well, honestly, I wouldn’t mind helping Haiku from a UI perspective, but it sounds like a good fraction of my ideas that I see as necessary changes are getting shot down. But right now, Haiku is doing good, imho. Much better than Haiku was doing two years ago. And I am genuinely excited about the Beta.
So, if I ever did decide to retry my luck at building a flavor, distro, fork, etc., it would only use old alpha 4(.1) source and work from there — not any current or recent source to avoid offending the Haiku dev team. Again, they’ve done a great job so far and I respect their efforts.
I’ve internally mused off and on over taking a look at trying again since Poem folded… but I realize that’d require a stack of work, like getting a modern browser, compiler, EFI, etc. on it over time. The other thing is I learned a lot from failing at Poem, more than a chapter out of a book would say. Here’s some advice free of charge to anyone eager to work on a (software) project:
- Don’t be too anxious to plan and announce something. Is it something that needs done or not?
- Be braced for fails. They can happen. I wasn’t ready; I was a cocky kid who failed thanks to no one but myself.
- Never call a build a full 1.0 release without concretely knowing it is one. And don’t be quick to promise one and put up impossible timelines and half-baked junk. (Still learning this one, tbh!)
- Don’t change and redefine the project’s mission, reboot it, split it up, etc. That will self destruct a project faster than an accidental rm.
- Build what you can. Try what you can’t. But let your users know your limits.
Whether I ever dive into the A4 source and make anything out of it ever again or not, be it ‘Haiku Max’, ‘Poem’, ‘Senryu’, or whatever else, I haven’t ‘made up my mind’ as they say…
But I really am hoping to get the word out about the Haiku beta, will post on it whenever it arrives at last, and am excited about it! (And have quick help files to present here soon!)
So that’s my full answer to that. And thanks again for reading, all.