Can a distro of Haiku be made in the future?

I have no problem with a well done distro of Haiku. Something that gives more to users than current Alpha releases. It could even attract more users.

You would have to choose a stable release and add lots of stable software applications or games to it.

Don't confuse forking with distro. These are two different things. Forking is taking a software project in a different direction from the original. Distro is taking Haiku and customizing and adding software to it. ie: a custom version of Haiku itself with extra apps

The license allows you to create a distro so the choice is really yours and no one elses. Others may not like the idea and be opposed but you are free to make one if you choose to and follow the distro guidelines. Just because you do one, don't expect everyone to download it. Look at Linux, where you have like 350+ distros and only the top 20 are mostly used.

Have you tried haiku on a netbook ? It is already very very light. What exactly doesn't meet your needs ?

i'm not going to argue against haiku's integrated paradigm- haiku is like an all-in-one printer, you always know what you're getting and it's always the same. some people like that, and they should probably look at haiku. in fact, like those people i like the idea of a team of people carefully fitting every piece of everything together, like you're doing. and since you're making your own parts, you can be (pretty) sure they fit!

that doesn't mean it's stupid or pointless the way gnu/linux is done... when i started with computers, everyone was using dos or apples- later, windows or macs. if you bought a mac, you knew what os you got, even though they seemed to make a new one for each machine, they could if they even did. dos was always the same, though at one point they switched compression utilities. everything was standard.

fast forward to today. people are running operating systems on tv's, dvr's, ipods, phones, notebooks, desktops, netbooks- haiku is a desktop and notebook os, and maybe you can get it to run on a netbook (i saw a thread about asus,) and maybe you'll make a version for phones. maybe you'll make a version for mips processors, like the one i'm using to type this.

however, it's unlikely your team will get to all those things. right now, i still want to see haiku running outside qemu, but i don't think the vesa is going to work on my widescreen notebook any time soon. why? my screen isn't a target for your devs right now. that's ok, it's alpha, right?

seeing as your team is doing other things (perhaps it's good they're working on openoffice compatibility- i don't know. i'm sure there are plenty of good priorities to choose from) the natural thing to do in the free software world is just build more teams. i say natural, because it's rare that every person on earth works well under the same organization. as much as i hope the united nations works out, it's a cat-herding thing.

so people naturally split off and form their own teams. and when you can take pieces of another project with you, you end up choosing to fit those pieces together and you get something much like, but not really the same as the other thing. you get a distro. and any person who loves distros and also loves haiku will probably "slap together" various pieces to make something that works KIND OF like haiku, but not. maybe a beos-like shell on gnu/linux. not what haiku is trying to do, i know. but it will keep them from remixing your project, which is your preference anyway, right?

but then maybe i get vesa support today, instead of when your team wants it. or i get ext3/ext4 support, which who knows why i need that? or mips support, or a wm that works really well on phones... it's a tradeoff.

i don't think of that kind of design as senseless, it's how houses are built. not everyone has the same kind of house, they all look different (except in some suburbs.) not every house uses the same parts, they get them from everywhere and fit them together. underneath, the wood and basic structure is pretty much all the same, kind of like gnu/linux.

what you guys are building isn't like a house, it's more like a toyota camry. that's ok, the camry is a popular car. everybody has one. they know exactly what they're getting. it's not too fancy, it gets from a to b, it's not hideous (at least i don't think so) and all the parts are for a camry. although if you need a truck or a motorcycle, you'll probably need different parts entirely.

now it's true that some distros put things together (they go for more integration) better than other distros. but that's still an argument for distros, at least in the gnu/linux world. some people are good at integration, and some don't care about all-in-ones, so they do it the way they want to. everybody can, that's the thing. you don't want the people who don't even care about putting things together carefully in charge of the projects that are well integrated- better to have two teams: one that doesn't care about what you want working on something else, and one that does care about what you do, working on that. this produces 2 distros, until there are hundreds. but since many distros have just as many developers as haiku, it wouldn't gain anything to have them all working on the same project. as for the strays working on small projects- they're not interested in the larger distros anyway.

it might. although generally a distro refers to both the os (gnu) and the kernel (linux,) btu while haiku doesn't technically need a distro at all, the os in the case of gnu might use a different kernel entirely- so there's a greater "need" (advantage) for distros there from the start.

exactly.

agreed. in short, i don't think distros would necessarily benefit haiku at all, i wasn't arguing that there should be haiku distros- only that distros aren't a pointless concept in other instances. if someone improves support for x,y,z for haiku, they'd probably be better off adding it to the official sources than forking. if there were ever as many users of haiku as there are of gnu/linux, distros might appear anyway, whether it's an advantage to haiku or not.

I wouldn't have distros, none of those thanks a lot, but I would have different versions designed for different classes of devices, not applications (like Windows).

x64:

Desktop
Netbook/Notebook

The notebook variant would include drivers for PCMCIA/Expresscard interfaces.

ARM:

Back in the early 2000s, there were barrels of Pocket PC's and Handheld PC's that ran the ARM variant of Windows CE 3, 4, 5, and 6. Why not target these devices? Handheld PC's would be even better thanks to a proper qwerty keyboard. A good example of these devices are the Jornada 720 series by HP. Software could be developed to syncronise the ARM and x64 variants of Haiku, like ActiveSync did with CE and Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP.
What else might ARM be used for anyway?

I just want a OS that you stick the disk in, its asks you several questions and it installs. Let there be a window with links to all the additional software with easy to install and remove options. We don't need the bloat that is Windows and we don't need the confusion of 1000+ different versions of Linux. It needs to be intuitive for the lay person to set up (type of processor, number of processors/cores) Recompiling your OS is for technical folks aka Linux users, I want one that asks me what I have and does it for me.

I have watched BEos/Haiku for years now and its still not ready for prime time, it cant replace what I need out of a Windows machine, yet. I will keep waiting and watching, someday I may be able to use it and I hope that day is soon, but I'm not a programmer and I can't compile or figure out how to build things with packaging and stuff. I applaud the folks working hard on this and pray they can complete it in my lifetime, but its been ongoing for years and waiting is all I can do.

I have installed the last couple versions of BEos and a copy of the first release of Haiku, but other than toying around with it didn't serve much more than a trial to see how it functioned. At current it seems a few people have been able to actually use it for a limited range of applications. I will wait longer to have something to replace Windows on a computer. Please keep up the effort and know that I will be cheering you on from the bleachers.

I've been thinking of Haiku's applicability on 'smaller' devices myself. I wonder just how small a memory footprint Haiku can have while still functioning as a gui desktop os. When I boot into Haiku it uses ~90mb ram on my machine iirc and thats certainly not a hog by any means but I'm guessing it could be using quite a bit less. Assuming that Haiku in it's current stage ships with debug code then stripping that and shutting down certain servers that might not be needed (like the print server) would perhaps make a decent difference. Anyone knows if there's been any documented tests on how small memory footprint Haiku can land on?

It's fun to think about little RAM Haiku can boot with. But this is not a useful number. It is important to decide what you will be doing, what applications you will be running, and also how much data each application will use.

For instance, it's not unusual to run a browser with 6 open pages including facebook, youtube, gmail, a chat application, a word processor, and maybe a simple game. I haven't don't done the math here but we are probably between 256 MB and 512 MB of RAM.