Never say never 
However we don’t even have 3D acceleration yet, so yes, this is quite far away in the future, at least.
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I think that Haiku can be OS for some gaming console. If some Sony Playstation would run Haiku instead of BSD, this would be beneficial for the user and the producer. I think (hope) Haiku would be more eficient .
Also, in this way some gaming console (with Haiku) would be possible to use as PC.
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Emulation and virtualization can bring a ton of games as well as other software. This will make using Haiku full-time more realistic for more users. Later on, those users will desire more native software, creating an incentive for companies to code for Haiku.
That would, of course, be great, but will not happen.
Systems are not selling software; software is selling systems!
AA games could be released for Haiku (smaller companies are less reluctant to release on niche systems; some are even releasing their Games on the Amiga). Only a minority, if at all, of AAA games are even released on macOS, so there is little to no chance to get top games onto Haiku.
To bring games onto Haiku, you need to have exclusive games people are craving for! You need to create demand. A mere increase in performance on Haiku will not create that demand (cost for porting and support and the lack of market share are not worth the investment).
What are the pros and cons?
BSD is more mature and its license fits Sony in what they want to achieve very well.
Consoles are a walled-garden. Soft- and hardware can be tailored to what you need. There is no need to support any possible hardware combination, as there is only one specific hardware to support.
Besides all this, no one stops anyone to come up with a Haiku-powered console.
It’s the same issue again: why would you want to run your industry and battle-proven software in emulation/virtualization mode? It already runs on the OS you are currently using. There are no guarantees, that the software would behave the exact same way as running it on the target it was implemented for, but such a solution needs to offer that (you don’t get support/SLAs running your software in emulation/virtualization).
As long as there is no demand, there is no incentive to implement/port software to a different platform. Demand can only be generated with exclusive software, which does a better job than the alternative.
Also, keep this in mind: the best solution is not always the most successful one.
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My list:
- Modern web browser with full HTML5 support, adblocker and extensibility through web extensions (or whatever are called today the addons), possibility to create HTML5 webapps like I think Chrome could do.
- A complete and professional grade office productivity sofware: document writer, spreadsheet editor, presentation editor, and if possible other features currently present in some office packages like maths documents, publication making support (like scribus or latex) and notetaking software. Interoperativity should be also a priority (both support of older formats and also modern standards such as opendocument and officeXML)
- A modern and complete media player, with at least complete support of open audio/video standards formats and unencrypted DVDs (there are still users of DVDs). A media app should have support to play a media file, select subtitles, alternative audio or video tracks, dvd menus, metadata reader and editor, and integration with FS to create a library. Streaming and capturing could be a plus.
- Professional grade image editor, RAW image manager (like darktable), drawing app, and vector image drawing app/editor (if possible, better than the sluggish Inkscape)
- Professional audio and video editor software.
- A financial program to manage your taxes or incomes.
- A good communication software with calling support.
System or hardware support related:
- Full OpenGL and Vulkan support.
- Support of unsupported devices with a generic driver where applicable.
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I’d say this is dreaming with open eyes. After a dozen years or so as an alternative operating system, neither Linux nor even macOS really managed to take off as gaming platforms. There is no way Haiku could get there. It’s not “just add 3D acceleration and suddenly we can run all AAA games”. Gamers are people who want low latency, great network performance, etc. The whole system must be optimized to provide the best experience. And Haiku is nowhere near that. Our kernel is built in debug mode, which makes it a lot slower, and even if you disable this, it is still not particularly tuned for performance (as we are still in the early days of the project, we care first about getting things working, and only later about them being fast and efficient).
So, 3D acceleration is a big project (even if we can reuse some code from FreeBSD). And it is just a little step in making Haiku a gaming platform. Not to mention we would also need working audio output and input drivers (these gamers will want to use teamspeak or mumble or whatever similar tool), we will need a proper port of SDL2 (the current one has many bugs not related to 3D Acceleration), etc.
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Will release images from beta branch still be built in debug configuration? If so, is there an easy way to build some without it? I have a feeling that it can improve the video playback quality quite a bit and that bit is enough to make it play videos as smoothly as it can be (at least on my machine). Now that guys from HaikuPorts brought us a nice VNC/RDP client, it will be especially easy to use Haiku as a main system while still doing stuff that previously kept some people on Windows remotely. Sorry for off-topic 
We kept debug mode enabled in alphas because it helps debugging. There are many “paranoid” checks (erasing all freed memory to make sure we detect use-after-frees, etc). These make sure when there is a bug, one will enter KDL as soon as possible, rather than attempting to continue running with corrupt memory (which could have even worse consequences).
Without this, the debug reports we would get would be mostly unusable (they would provide much indirect hint to the problems). As we are still without a QA team for now, we have to rely on unsuspecting users to perform the testing and bug reporting here. But, it seems a QA team is taking shape and will be setting up a better process for beta2. This means we can consider turning off debug mode then, maybe?
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Whats the speed difference? Did anyone do a benchmark and compared release version with stripped symbols and full compiler optimizations to the debug version?
It is not about stripped symbols (probably not much noticeable changes on speed) nor compiler optimizations (these are enabled already). It’s about adding extra code to the kernel to check for many problems and try to detect them as early as possible.
See here for a list of these things: http://xref.plausible.coop/source/xref/haiku/build/config_headers/kernel_debug_config.h
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I was wondering if the topic should be renamed in “Which libraries…”. Having a good foundations of native apps would be stunning in the long run, but porting common-use libraries (sdl? gtk?) would carry tons of highly-grade apps ready to use.
I’ve no idea if this is difficult/impossible or it’s not a good idea for some reasons i don’t know…just thinking aloud…
SDL is already there. GTK is out of scope. If you want Linux apps, just use Linux, it will run them better.
The purpose of this topic is to identify the applications which are not available. Using Qt and GTK apps can only be a stopgap solution. Despite all the efforts of the people porting Qt to Haiku (and they did a great job), it is nowhere near the integration native apps can achieve.
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Oh yeah, at this point in time it is exactly that. 
But they’re not foolish dreams. Look at what happened during the last week after Valve announced Steam Play with Proton (based on Wine):
- Steam community announcement
- A growing game compatibility list with contributions from the Steam community
- GamingOnLinux initial news announcement
- GamingOnLinux thoughts after the dust had settled
- GamingOnLinux news about a new Proton (beta) version
So you see, just 6 days ago the gamers could get their hands on the Steam BETA client and there are already almost 5000 reports in the Google Spreadsheet, with 1674 reports marked as Completely Stable and 1200 marked as Stable, although Valve only officially supported a short list of titles at the time of their initial announcement.
It took a long time to reach this point, but the result shows how fast you can catch the people’s attention when you offer them something that works. Obviously, there are many others who didn’t contribute to that spreadsheet, myself included. I just wrote an article in my Linux (Mint) community, listing more than two dozen games that I tested and what the results were, so the people can try the new beta themselves.
Gaming is very exciting for many people, which is why even if I daydream about it on Haiku, it’s still not out of place to envision it in a much better position once there’s some work being done in this direction. Pick one graphics provider and just a few cards, have some initial work that enables a handful of games to run reasonably well, even if not with sound or gamepad support, and you’ll still get the gamers’ and the developers’ attention.
Yes, it’s a pain to develop and maintain drivers and libraries for sound, video, networking, and so on. But the thing is, regardless of when this work starts, the pain would be virtually the same. So considering investing some time in 3D rather sooner might be beneficial to the project, because the underlying pieces of the puzzle would also enable other apps to run, or run even better. And I might be daydreaming again when I say that if Haiku officially commits to supporting some popular gaming titles for the initial 3D support, you might just find a few developers interested in contributing.
When is it better than the starting point of 3D support for a developer to contribute, for them to forever enter the history books as the forefathers of Haiku gaming? So a little bit of strategy in making the plans and the announcements will surely catch some serious attention and potentially some hands on deck. I’d say you should try this rather sooner than later.
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It depends what that means. They are not enabled everywhere (bfs being one notable example), and Haiku is built for the lowest common denominator (Pentium on 32-bit, SSE2 on 64-bit). Building with march=native could result in a much snappier system, but last I checked (ca. 3 months ago) it didn’t even boot.
It’s not happening for official builds due to compatibility anyway.
Not really. I run Haiku on a high-end and commodity 3D workstations. You get used to certain issues when people are building things.
Various apps are best left to emulation software. Other techs like WebGL and SVG are a ways off.
I run various 3D software and games/demos on Haiku. Besides the high-speed hardware acceleration I’m used to, Haiku is fine for most things. Just yesterday, I was thinking of Sega Dreamcast games I can run on Haiku for a demonstration. I already had porting the Valve Steam client to Haiku on my list.
I think Humdinger and others developed some great animation software and paint programs (i.e. Exposer,GrafX2, WonderBrush, ArtPaint) so we tend to overlook those when we discuss Deluxe Paint, GIMP, and other related software. SMplayer and Kdenlive are available or possible on Haiku.
Don;t stop dreaming…the sheep are restless…
I think you mistake me for someone else… 
I may have contributed some inconsequential things to a few apps, but the real code slingers are others.
That was in a certain context, as a reply to PulkoMandy talking about writing drivers for those devices, and supporting libraries for them, like libSDL and stuff. It was about the driver-development related pain.
P.S. I rephrased that bit in order to avoid further misunderstanding.
Hello,
If I just think about my need ,
Calibre is a very useful application to store ebook collection. I tried to compile, byt my knowledge is too poor, to be able to do it. The receipt exist.
I also use Joplin as Notes taking application.
PHP will be definitly something great
Hello. There is already a “work in progress”, trying to bring Calibre into the HaikuDepot: