Haiku Beta 3 - Hackdot

Re:Haiku Beta 3 by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday July 26, 2021 @07:55AM (#27958334)

It's the unfortunate reality of trying to write an OS these days: we are drowning in hardware. There is just way too huge a variety of hardware out there and basically no standards for interfacing with it requiring a ludicrous number of drivers to support anywhere close to everything.

At this point, my advice to anyone wanting to create a brand new OS would be to limit their scope to something like the Raspberry Pi line so they have a very limited set of hardware they have to support[0]. Of course, Haiku started long before the Raspberry Pi existed so that wasn't really an option for them.

[0] Unless you count USB peripherals of course. Ugh.

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Re:Haiku Beta 3 by analognoise on Monday July 26, 2021 @11:34PM (#27968332)

I'd go even further:

We pick some basic set of specs, a processor, and run the whole thing on FPGAs so we control all the circuits and can always make an ASIC if we want. Full control, full power. Like what if MiSTer was considered a valid target for productivity software?

Like we agree to go back to nothing and build the whole thing. Graphics drivers a problem? Design a new graphics system, all open.

Would it be current? No. But it would be really open, and easy to develop for.

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Re:Haiku Beta 3 by arthurcolle on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @09:48PM (#27979574)

Is this feasible?

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Re:Haiku Beta 3 by analognoise on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @09:08AM (#27983245)

Yes, definitely.

It's taking a page from retrocomputing and going "What if instead we built productivity software and made it a valid base for modern computing, what would we need?"

I don't really know how many people would be interested in this approach though.

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