What about bounty? 3D acceleration bounty?

[Barrett]

@PulkoMandy

As said in the homepage?

Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.

These sound like sane and worthwhile goals in the modern days. GNOME is trying to be both desktop and mobile apparently, so in terms of free software operating systems for personal computing / desktop computers, there is not that much choice. This is what makes me think Haiku has a role to play in computing.

I still think Haiku should implicitly target a more focused set of users. For example, are those users people who use a browser and office suite extensively? Then bet all on that.

I see a lot of debate about “focus shifts”. We already made one back in 2010, and I think this is when this goal stated on our homepage was set. Note that it is not anymore “Haiku is an open-source recreation of BeOS R5”. We already understood, back in 2010, that this was not going to cut it anymore as a project vision. So now, Haiku is only inspired by the BeOS.

When reading that I thought I had my mind farting, because AFAIR, Haiku always was a Desktop operating system:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061004081231/http://haiku-os.org:80/

The fact that we keep binary compatibility with it is not part of the project vision anymore, and is kept because 1) it is already there and not too costly to maintain and 2) it is useful to run some old apps and to test regressions from BeOS.

Let’s see when someone begin to add C++11 features, if it is “not too costly to maintain”. Locked with C++99 it is a bit easy to say. Not to mention a whole lot of other stuff the Haiku API needs to become somewhat modern.

These sound like sane and worthwhile goals in the modern days. GNOME is trying to be both desktop and mobile apparently, so in terms of free software operating systems for personal computing / desktop computers, there is not that much choice. This is what makes me think Haiku has a role to play in computing.

Not with the current flaws in the API. You like it or not, we need to review a lot of things on the light of the 20 years that passed.

So, the lack of 3D acceleration should be attracting devs interested in implementing that, right?

I think the project held back quite a few of developers because of sticking to some goals. Those goals were probably right until a few years ago, but now it is time to look at recovering some sane need to advance the system. I think you can have drivers where there’s actually an use case. Linux had a lot of audio drivers thanks to what jack allowed to do. The same apply for a lot of other things. If Haiku at least had a little more implicit goals like “web browsing”, “multimedia”, I’m pretty sure it’d be more interesting to developers.