Gallium3D Support For Haiku Operating System

[Apopas]

They say they want compatibity with every application that already exists for BeOS, but these applications are few and old, for example Opera for BeOS it's in 3.6.2 version and Abiword in 0.7. So I don't think this is a big deal...
Maybe they have some special plans for the desktop things of Haiku and the Linux kernel limits them.

[philcostin]

If they want to build their own kernel, great! No need to limit ourselves to "one kernel to rule them all". Probably has a lot to do with licensing, freedom and people wanting to work on their own kernels.

[nanonyme]

More like "if they have enough manpower, fine". As long as they don't expect Linux coders to start implementing them drivers, I don't see anything wrong with it.

[Wingfeather]

*scratches head*

I have to say, Linux guys come across as a strange bunch sometimes. When for example there are mutliple confusingly-similar, but different, implementations of <Tool X> - none of which are optimal, by the way - they love to bang on about the Freedom (and don't forget to capitalise it, by God). And it's almost as if the freedom to choose between this multitude of equally-flawed creations makes up for the fact that none of them are actually correct. Seems silly to me. But, I digress.
My point is that as soon as anyone tries to usefully depart from linux and create a slick desktop experience (and it might even be usable by non-C experts ) they're denigrated for wasting everyone's resources.

One possible reason for the existence of Haiku? "Not everyone thinks linux is perfect."

But, I'm just guessing.

[V!NCENT]

*scratches head*

I have to say, Linux guys come across as a strange bunch sometimes. When for example there are mutliple confusingly-similar, but different, implementations of <Tool X> - none of which are optimal, by the way - they love to bang on about the Freedom (and don't forget to capitalise it, by God). And it's almost as if the freedom to choose between this multitude of equally-flawed creations makes up for the fact that none of them are actually correct. Seems silly to me. But, I digress.
My point is that as soon as anyone tries to usefully depart from linux and create a slick desktop experience (and it might even be usable by non-C experts ) they're denigrated for wasting everyone's resources.

One possible reason for the existence of Haiku? "Not everyone thinks linux is perfect."

But, I'm just guessing.

I am with you on that 100%. I will not dump Linux though, but Haiku might just be the ultimate FLOSS desktop out there. Instead of playing catching up, which they appearently don't seem to be trying to do, Haiku needs to be a platform on it's own that can amuse users; it needs to have some extra value that will make people think "Hey that's better! Cool I want that!" instead of "Now I can finaly dump Windows eXperience Pain!".

... if you know what I mean

[nhaehnle]

*scratches head*

I have to say, Linux guys come across as a strange bunch sometimes. When for example there are mutliple confusingly-similar, but different, implementations of <Tool X> - none of which are optimal, by the way - they love to bang on about the Freedom (and don't forget to capitalise it, by God). And it's almost as if the freedom to choose between this multitude of equally-flawed creations makes up for the fact that none of them are actually correct. Seems silly to me. But, I digress.
My point is that as soon as anyone tries to usefully depart from linux and create a slick desktop experience (and it might even be usable by non-C experts ) they're denigrated for wasting everyone's resources.

The question is in *where* the duplication of effort lies. There is a very significant qualitative difference between hardware drivers and everything else.

The difference is in testing and hardware availability.

If there are 1000 different text editors, that's no big deal - I also tend to think having that many text editors is rather silly, but who cares. If you like writing text editors, go do that.

However, having 1000 different drivers for a piece of hardware is a truly horrible idea. Why? Because "one piece of hardware" in reality actually means "several different revisions of the hardware that are different in very subtle ways, and one revision of the hardware might have a bug where all other revisions of the hardware are fine". Think of the nightmare of ACPI tables, broken EDID data, and all those fun things.

By having even two different drivers for the same hardware, you're significantly splitting up your testing base. It's entirely possible that the developers of Haiku never see e.g. a certain weird piece of USB hardware with a strange bug. On the other hand, it is very likely that some Linux person has seen this hardware and added a fix for it to the Linux kernel.

This is *very* different from e.g. desktop applications. They just don't have this kind of issues.

Also, and I feel kind of silly for trying to repeat it again and again and again:

My point is that as soon as anyone tries to usefully depart from linux and create a slick desktop experience (and it might even be usable by non-C experts ) they're denigrated for wasting everyone's resources.

If you want to create a slick *desktop* experience, then clearly your key differentiation from the competition should be in the desktop, *not* the kernel. I would welcome a serious project that takes the Linux kernel and adds an entirely fresh userspace on top of it. Not saying that I would support it with my own effort, but it would be pretty cool.

But Haiku is more or less doomed to never become widely useful because of lack of hardware support, and they could avoid that by just using the Linux kernel (or a BSD kernel, or whatever, just *not* something entirely new).

Yes, it's true, you might want to use a different scheduler that's better suited for desktop tasks, or add some other tweaks. But nothing stops you from doing that within the Linux kernel, and you'll still get all the hardware drivers for free.

[nanonyme]

If you want to create a slick *desktop* experience, then clearly your key differentiation from the competition should be in the desktop, *not* the kernel. I would welcome a serious project that takes the Linux kernel and adds an entirely fresh userspace on top of it. Not saying that I would support it with my own effort, but it would be pretty cool.

I agree, that does sound pretty cool. I personally wouldn't probably have enough vision to even start with that. (getting rid of GNU might be a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-with-a-tazer-ten-times-just-to-see-if-it-hurts kind of cumbersome but I'd find that an interesting idea too; maybe a completely POSIX-compliant userspace?)