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by waddlesplash 2893 days ago
> but unfortunately all the efforts of the 'pragmatics' one who wanted to reimplement BeOS on top of Linux failed much earlier than Haiku

> New OS are in a bad situation: those build on top of Linux doesn't seemn to attract contributors (I blame personally a lack of imagination: a kernel isn't an OS!)

I think these two statements are, effectively, the same thing. Why have we (Haiku) stayed around so long, and all the others died? Somehow we managed to accumulate enough critical mass to not have heat death. I think the novelty of having a complete system is an attractive one, rather than "just another Linux distribution, why use that?" indeed.

And then, you know, maybe it's possible that what we've been saying this entire time about having a kernel and base system optimized for GUIs instead of just throwing one on top of them might actually be the case. :-p

> but those who use their own kernel are doomed for the lack of drivers..

We're so doomed, I've been able to boot, run, and use Haiku on just about all PCs I've tested it with so far!

But yes, drivers are an issue. An issue we have mostly solved at this point, with the exception of hardware-accelerated OpenGL, but still...

1 comments

Saying that reusing the Linux kernel is the same as being "just another Linux distribution" is the problem: most Linux distributions are just Unix clone: if you create a VMS, a BeOS, a MacOS or Plan9 with a Linux kernel then what you have is a different OS with a Linux kernel not just a Unix clone. Using the Linux kernel doesn't force you to be POSIX compatible (which is a double edged sword: you get a lot of software but you loose your "originality").