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And we never really got any of them working, so I would contest that. Many years ago, I asked about Pi 2 support on the Haiku forums and there was a lot of ill will towards Broadcom closed binaries. I pointed at the Plan9 port and a couple more examples and nothing happened.

I tried the same thing several times with the Pi 3 and the Pi 4, and someone more vocally pointed towards RISC-V. Some four years later, there is a somewhat working RISC-V port, but in the meantime there is still no working ARM port of any real use.

On the whole, I was not overly impressed with the Haiku OS community where it regards exploring widely popular platforms that, despite having some challenges, would provide them with a larger audience. It's their call, but as an original BeOS user (and who can actually spot the Be Book from my couch as I'm typing this) and someone who's spent the past two years delving into the Rockchip ecosystem, I'm quite saddened by the way things went. It's not as if they lacked other ARM options, they just a) didn't have the resources and b) were perhaps a tad too opinionated.




The RISC-V port was done almost entirely by one developer who took an interest in it. It wasn't as though the project got together and decided to prioritize RISC-V over ARM; it was just that someone did a port, and then it got (mostly) upstreamed. Nobody has taken an equivalent interest in ARM, in large part because, well, the developers are all running x86 machines as you might expect, so that's what Haiku gets developed on. If someone comes along (or one of the existing developers takes interest) in working on the ARM port more, we will hardly reject the patches!


Opinions aside, they just don't have the resources for ports. That's the shame: that this project isn't more popular. Linux doesn't have this problem anywhere close to the way Haiku does.




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