Haiku On Arm
A recent Activity Report over on Haiku’s Blog-O-Sphere mentioned that two developers are currently working on the ARM port of the OS. I think this is important for a couple different reasons.
For those of you not familiar with Haiku, a free and open-source operating system derived from BeOS. BeOS emerged in the 90s and didn’t ever really catch on. The duopoly of macOS and Windows pretty much crushed it out of existence. Most of that crushing came from Microsoft. It’s a whole long, sordid tale that I’d be willing to tell if anybody is interesting. Just hit me up on Fosstodon.
Originally BeOS, and then Haiku, were designed to be a multimedia platform that would make the best use of it’s hardware. That philosophy stands today, and Haiku has very little overhead.
Last June I wrote about the Beta 2 release of Haiku. In that article I first stated “I’m guessing this would work great on a Pi, but I haven’t had a chance to try that out yet” only to have to go back and note later on “I discovered that Haiku isn’t compatible with ARM processors at the moment, so it won’t run on a Raspberry Pi. In my opinion, that’s extremely unfortunate.”
I was very disappointed when I found that out as I felt like the Pi would be a perfect little media computer running Haiku. I still do, which is why I’m thrilled by the news that Haiku is working on their ARM port. Others have noted (and hypothesized) that this move could be in anticipation of seeing more ARM in mainstream PCs after the release of Apple’s M1 based computers. Honestly, I don’t really care about that. It’s possible we could be seeing that in the future, but I’d love to see Haiku run on ARM machines we have right now.
All in all, this is welcome news. I can’t wait to try it once they have their port complete.
Day 2 of the #100DaysToOffload 2021 Series.
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