OSNews

Haiku has never been about being multiplatform or supporting multiple toolkits. This notion frontally contradicts a lot that Haiku has stood for from the very beginning: a compact, lean and mean system, consistent throughout by means of a single API that is both clean and complete (please, read the general FAQ on the Haiku website). This position is in clear contrast with the more complex landscape of mutiple toolkits, DEs, multiple layers of abstraction, etc. that, IMVHO, perpetuate the complexity of Linux on the desktop.

In this context, opening the gate to multiple toolkits would be taking the Linux road, and would signal the beginning of the end of Haiku how it was originally thought out to be. It will also most likely make the native API irrelevant, as nobody will care to use it in the end.

When/if that happens, Haiku is not compelling anymore, and it would become hard to find a valid reason why anyone would want to run in Haiku apps that already run, are more up-to-date and better supported than on Linux; such a scenario would only make Haiku another uninteresting "me too" OS.

Haiku can only become compelling if it has something fundamentally different and better to offer, and offering the very same user space stuff as other more mature platforms will not cut it. Only through native apps that take advantage and expose the unique qualities of the OS (multi-threadedness, extended attributes, data translators, media kit, etc. etc.) to the end user can take you there, even if it takes many more years (which it will).

I do understand the logic behind the desire for something like Qt, but I think it is being driven by an understandable but short-sighted impatience to have more apps in the short term than to stick to the project's original long term vision to develop Haiku into the unique platform that it was set out to be in the first place.