Current linux user here but long time Haiku / BeOS follower (with Amiga roots to boot). Linux and linux programmers are great but when they can’t think outside of that box, what are they doing here? There’s plenty of linux distros they can choose from, why do they have to morph something unique into yet another … ? Also, what’s stopping the pro-linux crowd from forking so that those with the original Haiku vision won’t have all their work wasted? I’d be happy to try a forked linux-haiku hybrid but I don’t want to lose the unique OS this project has promised to bring back for so long.
Speaking of ‘morph’… I still dabble in a particular, modern reinterpretation of what the Amiga was - MorphOS. It’s closed source, has a comparatively small (but very productive) developer team, not to mention, kinda small user base. But it exists and it works and pushes ahead despite a number of times in the past that it could have been scuttled. There’s actually two other Amiga re-spins - AmigaOS (also closed source) and AROS (open source) - with a certain amount of collaboration between them. If a linux-haiku fork happens, I don’t see why the loss of those programmers should be a complete loss - there can still be a degree of collaboration here too.
You can find the official mailing thread here (>200 mails…)
so thats the background behind the discussion about “moving” to linux
but the main developer are not really considering to move to linux because it would be a way to big project.
also i think the most of the developers are the same oppinion.
If you really are thinking of forking Haiku on another kernel, it would make sense to use FreeBSD, as there is already some compatibility with it, plus the licensing is similar.
Personally, I don’t see much point - wouldn’t it be better to work on Haiku itself(?).
This is really just a pet project by one developer who discussed it on the mailing list. Yes it was discussed, but it’s not changing the direction of Haiku at this point.
I’ve written from time to time that I don’t like Gnu/Linux, and yet I use it every day. Why?
It’s the only OS aside from Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and *BSDs that actually works with the rest of the world, and out of the above, I prefer good configurable ones like Gentoo, Debian or Slackware. As such, it’s the only major system right now that has that advantage, and yet is free and open source software. But yet, as I mentioned in another post, Gnu/Linux has failed on the desktop because it can’t see the fundamental elements of what an OS should be. Artful, fundamentally usable, and powerfully simple. No one can agree on anything – whether it’s a DE, a library, or anything else. Too much freedom is a bad thing.
I love Haiku a lot, and I do earnestly hope that Haiku reaches a wide user base one day, and surpasses what even larger Gnu/Linux “distros” like Ubuntu have done. As a community, we can’t switch to Gnu/Linux and just quit! I was appalled to read this post, really.
I do think, however, that Haiku needs tablet support and a way to run modern apps in it. Hence why I am sincere about finishing a distribution by Christmas (that’s in another post down the list).
Could Haiku + Linux work together on one disc as one to boot and run on a amd64 UEFI system? I think this would be an excellent idea until Haiku gets such support itself. Should we switch kernels (or even whole systems) and quit? Never.
