Haiku has been accepted into Google Summer of Code again this year, and over the past few days the project has detailed some of the areas developers will be focusing on. For instance, Vivek will be working to bring 3D hardware acceleration to Haiku:
The Mesa renderer in Haiku presently ventures into software rendering. Haiku uses software for rendering frame buffers and then writes them to the graphics hardware. The goal of my project is to port Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) Driver for i915, from the Linux kernel to Haiku with the help of DragonflyBSD’s Linux Compatibility layer, so that those drivers can be later extended to add OpenGL support (Mesa3D) for hardware accelerated 3D rendering.
Other projects include bringing Harfbuzz support to Haiku, building a Haiku preferences pane (blasphemy to an old BeOS user such as myself, but entirely a 100% good idea for normal people), developing a calendar application, and adding Btrfs write support.
I look forward to the progress!
It’s easy for me to think, “But I’m not ever going to use those features…”, but then I remember that the more features that get added to Haiku the more it becomes a viable alternative mainstream operating system.
It is a viable alternative operating system. There are no other non-*nix FOSS OSes that can even hold a candle to Haiku. It’s stable, feature-rich, has a reasonable library of software, and has a reasonably large following.
I just wish it had more “killer apps”, such as a native office suite, or a virtualisation solution like VBox. Though i think someone ported OpenOffice (or was it KOffice) via Haiku’s 3rd party QT port
May I suggest a far more modest target?
DosEmu.
If I could multitask a few DOS apps on it, I could use it for real productive work.
I did that using screen and separate instances of DOSEmu. It’s not technically multitasking under DOS but it is multitasking DOS apps. The real problem was if an app required raw keyboard mode (WordPerfect 6.0) then the keystrokes for screen wouldn’t be an option so I used a separate virtual console to run that one and did some sort of special keyboard exception for the key to switch vc (though I forget exactly how I did that last bit). Ah, the old days…
You might want to qualify that to “few” rather than “no”. I can think of a few, and one right of the top of my head: AROS. Arguably, it’s further along than Haiku, already having hw accelerated video, and being on far more platforms, with far more software available.
AROS doesn’t even have memory Protection…. making it rather dated. And part of the main reason they could get hw acceleration working as fast as they did… it’s a bit hacked up.
Certainly not in the same class of usable as Haiku.
Edited 2017-05-11 17:42 UTC
Memory protection has NOTHING to do with usability. Usability is having stable apps that cover what people want to do. Computers ran without memory protection for decades, and many still do. Granted, it means you need to be more careful about viruses, but I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of one targeting AROS.
Yes, this is encouraging. Here are a couple more that just got added to the Haiku website today:
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/a-star/2017-05-10_%5Bgsoc_2017~*~@…
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/return0e/2017-05-10_%5Bgsoc_2017~*…
Looking forward to progress in all of these areas!
I’m not too keen on copying the macOS/Ubuntu/Win10 preference pane either, though the Haiku mockup at least looks BeOS-y.
I recently acquired a Lenovo ThinkCentre dated around 2005, a Pentium D based machine, which runs the current snapshot of Haiku exceptionally well. I now have a reasonably fast and very stable Haiku box again, and I can retire the dying Dell PIII desktop I’d been running it on. I don’t know if the Lenovo’s “Broadwater-G” Intel graphics will be covered under the new i915 accelerated driver (it’s technically the same family as the GMA950), but I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
I think the design leaves the existing menu-based items intact, for people who prefer the original way, so you can just ignore the new combined panel if you want.
That’s the ideal solution that should keep most people happy…
The pref pane was already in the latest unreleased versions of BeOS. I think it would have been part of whatever UI BeIA gave the user. One of the hacked versions (PhOS?) had it included IIRC.
Sure, adding new features is more fun, but when the last official release is a five year old alpha, doesn’t it look like something is wrong about the priorities?