Haiku OS Resurrects BeOS as Open Source

Technical Writing Geek writes "The Haiku project, which began shortly after the death of BeOS in 2001, aims to bring together the technical advantages of BeOS and the freedom of open source. 'The project has drawn dozens of contributors who have written over seven million lines of code. Although Haiku is nearly feature-complete, there are still numerous bugs that must be fixed before it is ready for day-to-day use. The design principles behind Haiku are very closely aligned with those of BeOS. The central goal of the Haiku project is to create an operating system that is ideally suited for use on the desktop--this differs significantly from Linux and other open-source operating systems which are intended for use in a diverse range of settings including server and embedded environments.'"

Comments

Re:First poem

[KillerBob]

I'd be using Minix on my laptop right now, if it supported the wireless card. *shrugs* dual boot, Minix for work, and XP for gaming.

What I really want is an OS that boots, from cold, almost instantly, and from which I can run my games. As the only game I really play all that often on the computer already has a Linux-native port, I'd be running Linux if it supported my sound card.... Will be trying the next release of Ubuntu to see if it does. And if it does, it'll be reformat/reinstall time. For now, I'm running XP MCE 2005, and sleeping it when I'm not using it.

It works well enough. But all things considered... I designed the laptop when I ordered it with Linux in mind. Hoping/planning on using it. Picked my hardware knowing that it would work in Linux... NVidia GeForce 8600GT 256MB video card, Intel 8945J wireless card, etc... never occurred to me that the sound card would end up being unsupported, especially since it's an Intel-based sound card....

Oblig question

[kimvette]

Yeah, but, does it run Linux?

Seriously though, I fail to see why Linux is not good for the desktop. The whole beauty of Linux is it can be tailored specifically for a purpose; that is why it is so prevalent in headless embedded devices such as routers, multi-display devices such as cellphones, massive servers, supercomputers, gaming devices, PDAs, and desktop and laptop computers. The kernel can be tuned for a particular task or platform, it can be configured to be realtime or not, and the scheduler can be adjusted.

Out of the box, most distros' settings are great for the desktop and for light-duty servers. I do not agree with the implication that Linux is not ideally suited to the desktop. They are constructing a strawman to pick apart when really they should just come out with the truth: they like BeOS (it's interesting. I do not like it, it reminds me of Mac OS Classic, but it is interesting) and they want to promote it, and that they do not intend for it to be used on server or embedded devices so they will not be providing that capability. It's a more honest approach to simply state that than to imply Linux is not up to par for the desktop.