It was impractical longer term, but really, as long as I didn't open more than a couple Surf (the Suckless browser, uses the Webkit engine) windows at a time it didn't feel slower than a tricked-out Mac or a beast of a Windows machine, for everything else. Amazing what running as little JS as possible can do. I had to run Docker and VMs elsewhere since they hog memory by design, but it was entirely fine as code-editing and command line workstation. A heavy IDE for, say, Java might have been painful if I'd needed that—which is kind of crazy, because those used to run just fine on well under 1GB of memory, too.
Using Void helped a lot because a bunch of the background garbage on something like Ubuntu, which is really getting out of control, wasn't hanging around eating memory and periodically waking up to burn cycles for unclear reasons. I imagine the benefits of Haiku are similar (big fan of BeOS back in the day, thing's UI responsiveness on mediocre hardware was downright magical)
> car console, tablet, media centre, info kiosk etc
would be possible but hard without a mainstream browser. Sure, one can develop a native application, but this is not how mainstream development is done these days. E.g. info kiosks basically are browsers that display whatever there is on a (frequently updated) server, and so there's zero maintenance for a kiosk.
Upstream refuses to import anything related to BSD support, so they need to be maintained out of tree.
And this is for a much more popular set of projects.
"Not an easy task" is a bit of an understatement.
Presumably the use of rust is a dependency that needs fulfilled for building FF. Looks like there has been some work on getting rust to play with Haiku at both the Rust and Haiku ends:
https://docs.rs/haiku/0.2.0/haiku/
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/nielx/2020-09-06_rust_on_haiku...
I would imagine, but now I'm trying to figure out why; do they really use that much API surface? Network access should be simple enough, they need audio, keyboard input, and a canvas/surface to render to, but what else?
