Interesting philosophy on why Haiku is not Linux-based (from the site):
Linux-based distributions stack up software -- the Linux kernel, the X Window System, and various DEs with disparate toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt -- that do not necessarily share the same guidelines and/or goals. This lack of consistency and overall vision manifests itself in increased complexity, insufficient integration, and inefficient solutions, making the use of your computer more complicated than it should actually be.
Instead, Haiku has a single focus on personal computing and is driven by a unified vision for the whole OS. That, we believe, enables Haiku to provide a leaner, cleaner and more efficient system capable of providing a better user experience that is simple and uniform throughout.
I've always agreed with this, though I've never seen this particular text or seen it stated this way. Linux is a miracle of free software, it shows that a thousand people can come together and make a wonderfully complex system that actually works. But it is not elegant nor is it efficient, nor is there really any vision behind its creation. That's both a good thing (you can customize it and fork it to make it do anything you want) and a bad thing (lack of consistency). I do wish BeOS/Haiku had taken off. How different would the world be?
It's true, a working linux desktop system is pretty complicated and somewhat inelegant. But somehow, the more popular competitors are even more inefficient. They spawn and exec processes slower, context switch slower, you can't run a minimal desktop environment on them, only the huge default one. ("min-win" being the minor exception here.)
You can make a 50 MB bootable live USB with a minimal graphical desktop and a minimal web browser, based on linux. No such chance in less than a few gigabytes with the more popular alternatives.
The bloat of actual linux distributions and desktops is mostly down to user demand.
Bah, this justification is flawed and/or obsolete: why does it matter for reusing the Linux kernel what classic GNU/Linux distribution do?
It didn't prevent Google (Android) reusing the Linux kernel to build the Android OS..
For doing what Haiku and BeOS excel at, you need a huge pile of patches to the Linux kernel, to rewrite even more subsystems than Android did -- for one, the audio subsystem in Linux is an absolute disaster, and have the impedance mismatch of your kernel not being written with neither the same philosophy nor language as the rest of the OS. Haiku wants to be backward compatible with programs written for BeOS, so you'd have to write a mish-mash of compatibility drivers for that to work. At a point, it becomes easier to just write your own kernel.
I think you can get by with either/or, although as some have recently pointed out, an empty Android project is 38 mb large with 1000+ files [1].
I think there is probably something to an elegant, small system. In theory, it should be easier to learn, more predictable, and more stable. Even if this is just on the developer end, it should translate to a less buggy, faster, more consistent user experience, or faster turn-around time for features. In theory, at least :)
Right, but consider the reason that an empty Android project is 38mb large with 1000+ files. How much does it have to do with the fact that Android uses the Linux kernel? I was under the impression that the (hand-wavy, two-second) explanation for that was "Java nonsense", not "Linux nonsense".
Linux-based distributions stack up software -- the Linux kernel, the X Window System, and various DEs with disparate toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt -- that do not necessarily share the same guidelines and/or goals. This lack of consistency and overall vision manifests itself in increased complexity, insufficient integration, and inefficient solutions, making the use of your computer more complicated than it should actually be.
Instead, Haiku has a single focus on personal computing and is driven by a unified vision for the whole OS. That, we believe, enables Haiku to provide a leaner, cleaner and more efficient system capable of providing a better user experience that is simple and uniform throughout.