Haiku's USB 3.0+ Support Is Finally In Great Shape

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Haiku's USB 3.0+ Support Is Finally In Great Shape

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system now has good USB3/XHCI support in place with their latest daily snapshots...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Haiku-USB3-Good-Shape

[S.Pam]

Great news If everyone can donate code, coffee or some money we soon have a very much viable alternative to Gnu/Linux

[Guest]

Great news If everyone can donate code, coffee or some money we soon have a very much viable alternative to Gnu/Linux

Considering that BeOS was targeting multimedia workstations, it's hard to even consider the operating system as an alternative. Not to mention, you can't even run a relevant web browser and software support is lacking. Most software is either QT stuff, or SDL. At least the x86 version lacks a port of Emacs, so that's a bummer as well. Oh, and there seems to be no support for multi monitor setups.

Even if the operating system is approaching usability, (as in, it doesn't crash all the time and supports enough hardware to not require hunting a specific device to run) it won't compete with other operating systems which are more general purpose.

[schmidtbag]

Great news If everyone can donate code, coffee or some money we soon have a very much viable alternative to Gnu/Linux

If I'm going to replace anything with Linux, it'll be FreeBSD, and I have no intention on doing that any time soon. Nothing against BeOS but it doesn't interest me anywhere beyond a hobby project.
EDIT:
Or any BSD, I'm not picky.

[Guest]

FreeBSD

HugsBSD is as screwed as Linux is. It will be DragonFly BSD.

[Vistaus]

Considering that BeOS was targeting multimedia workstations, it's hard to even consider the operating system as an alternative. Not to mention, you can't even run a relevant web browser.

Eh, Falkon is available. It's pretty relevant in the KDE and Qt world and it has quite a few users. And in the near future, it will get Chrome extension support. So Haiku does have a relevant browser available. You can install it just fine through their package manager. Other Qt apps are also available and it does have support for multi-monitor setups.

Also, BeOS was targeting multimedia workstations, but Haiku isn't. But if that's what you believe, then you probably don't use Android either considering that Android was targeting digital cameras rather than smartphones/tablets when it was conceived?

[starshipeleven]

If I'm going to replace anything with Linux, it'll be FreeBSD, and I have no intention on doing that any time soon. Nothing against BeOS but it doesn't interest me anywhere beyond a hobby project.

I would really like to be able to replace Linux with Fuchsia.

[gilboa]

I would really like to be able to replace Linux with Fuchsia.

At least thus far and as far as I know, Fuchsia brings little new to the table (Compared to the Linux kernel based Android and the Linux based ChromeOS), beyond being Google-NIH and potentially being more restrictive to OEMs.

- Gilboa

[starshipeleven]

At least thus far and as far as I know, Fuchsia brings little new to the table (Compared to the Linux kernel based Android and the Linux based ChromeOS), beyond being Google-NIH and potentially being more restrictive to OEMs.

- Gilboa

Its main selling point is that it separates drivers from the kernel (in any sense, so they won't be able to snoop on the system for example) and keeps stable interfaces for them, so you can update the kernel/OS while still using the same blob drivers, any crash of the driver won't pull down the whole system.

Android or ChromeOS's Linux kernel is just bad. Average hacked-up embedded Linux kernel with blobs. It manages to join the worst aspects of opensource and closed source.

Android has reached the apotheosis with Project Treble in Android 8.0/9.0, where by adding another layer of abstraction and redirection they managed to decouple the OS from the kernel/vendor blobs so you can now update the Android OS while your kernel is still the same old unsafe crap stuck at whatever old version the hardware was released with.

This is the world outside of x86.

[gilboa]

Its main selling point is that it separates drivers from the kernel (in any sense, so they won't be able to snoop on the system for example) and keeps stable interfaces for them, so you can update the kernel/OS while still using the same blob drivers, any crash of the driver won't pull down the whole system.

Android or ChromeOS's Linux kernel is just bad. Average hacked-up embedded Linux kernel with blobs. It manages to join the worst aspects of opensource and closed source.

Android has reached the apotheosis with Project Treble in Android 8.0/9.0, where by adding another layer of abstraction and redirection they managed to decouple the OS from the kernel/vendor blobs so you can now update the Android OS while your kernel is still the same old unsafe crap stuck at whatever old version the hardware was released with.
This is the world outside of x86.

The theoretical pros of micro-kernel based OSs are well known, so are the theoretical (and actual) cons.

However, at least to the best of my knowledge, I've yet to see one high-performance (fully) micro-kernel based OS (Linux, Windows and MACOS are all Hybrid kernels), and it remains to be seen if Fuchsia will pull it of and if indeed it will end up fully micro-kernel, as opposed to slowly having features stuffed back in into the kernel, making it yet-another-hybrid-kernel OS.

A couple of points:

1. Most of the issues you describe are Google's own doing. They chose to let Android OEMs do what they want. No reason to believe that they won't let Fuchsia OEM do the same.

2. Most of the closed-source blobs in any Android handset is actually Google's own code and its mostly user space. You can live with an old kernel. Far hardware (if not impossible) to live with old Google and unsupported Google apps.

3. While theoretically a micro-kernel OS can recover from a crashed blob GPU driver, a buggy driver will be just as bad if its run in user space.

4. More-ever, you assume that you'll be able to take a GUI driver from Fuchsia 1.x and use it on a newly updates Fuchsia 2.x. Thus far, beyond RHEL (and Windows servers) I've yet to see any OS, monolithic, hybrid or micro-kernel based, that actually live up to this promise.

- Gilboa