Thanks in large part to the hard work by X512 and everyone developing on Haiku, our nightly RISCV64 images are now functional.
RISC-V marks Haiku’s first functional non-Intel/x86 port!
This is still crazy to me. This port has taken relatively little time, yet it marks a major milestone in Haiku’s history.
If anyone want to run on real hardware this is what’s compatible ATM. https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched
This was indeed brought up incredibly quickly and mostly through the efforts of a single person it seems. As a completely outside observer, this seems to imply that Haiku itself is very nicely designed and written. It is amazing to me both that there is already a RISC-V port of Haiku, given that no RISC-V desktop hardware really even exists yet, and that no other architecture has made it as far, given how fast this effort went. In fact, the Haiku team has never fully released on even their primary architectures ( x86 and X86-64 ).
The Haiku team obviously hold themselves to a high standard as Haiku has been in “beta” forever while being arguably more stable than Windows 11 was when it first went into full production. I say that mostly seriously after using both.
It is a real shame that Haiku will almost certainly never have any mainstream success. Based only on very casual playing, I find it a really nice desktop system.
Got one of the CD-ROMs for an alpha version and I liked it well enough. Haiku really needs a killer app.
http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/
It’s rather niche, but it does mean Haiku is AFAIK the only FOSS non-*NIX to be currently sold as (or alongside) a commercial product.
HandBrake was originally a BeOS app, but then it got ported to all the major desktop OSes.