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Comment by indigodaddy | Hacker News Reader

Can Haiku be installed on bare metal? I remember thinking about installing it many years ago but it seemed so complicated as to keep me from attempting.. I would imagine a lot has changed over 6-8 years?

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I have Haiku running on my personal AMD 3700X, Navi 5600, nvme, 3840x2160 screen, working sound and wired network. My work PC has AMD 2700X, Vega 56, also working audio and wired network. My work laptop is MacBook Pro from 2014 (11.3), nvidia gt750m, working audio and wired ethernet. I also have an embedded APU 1605b, working audio and wired ethernet. None of these have hardware accelerated GPU drivers (framebuffer only) or WiFi firmware. So my success rate is 4 out of 4 on actual bare metal systems. But I choose my systems carefully ...

You're just bragging about your hardware :))

But seriously, it's great it works fine on bare metal in so many configurations.

It really is too bad that GPU drivers are closed and hard to re-implement in HaikuOS, the performance and resource management seems awesome compared to the current "bloated" operating systems.

Yes, but you need to carefully pick the hardware at the moment. I, for example, have it running on an old Netbook (MSi Wind U100, 2GiB RAM, spinning disk) and everything apart from audio and webcam seems to work very well, including the WiFi. If you look at the supported hardware, you should be able to build something that works, though, YMMV.

I installed it a couple of months ago on an unused laptop. There is a live environment with a graphical installer, and it worked well. I had a bit of trouble getting the bootloader to work, but once I figured out what was going on there were no more issues. All hardware worked out-of-the box, and there is a software repository. You can tell there are a few bugs here and there, but all in all it's a nice environment to try and play with.

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