Installed Haiku in VirtualBox today and pleasantly surprised

[bedouin]

The last time I tried to run Haiku it was probably under VirtualPC on a PPC Mac.  It didn't work, and so I never bothered with it again.

For some reason I've been thinking a lot about BeOS lately though.  Maybe because it's been 10 years since I abandoned it; the writing was on the wall, and I didn't want to be like the nutty Amiga guys.  That said I think it is still one of the best operating systems I ever used.  It's a shame that even the pro audio world failed to acknowledge what BeOS was capable of; the first digital vinyl system (DVS) was developed on BeOS, simply because no other system had such low latency at the time.  That might still be true 10 years later.  Reason and Record would be awesome under BeOS, along with Ableton. 

I decided to install VirtualBox on my headless Debian machine, and tinker with Haiku on my Mac over X11.  While I could just install VirtualBox on my MacBook, I felt like offloading the resources onto my workhorse/server/hobby computer.  Plus it's just kind of cool.

Honestly I didn't expect much more than a file manager and maybe some shoddy binary compatibility akin to ReactOS or WINE.  I definitely didn't expect any kind of stability.  First thing I noticed is that NetPositive had become WebPositive.  NetPositive was an awesome little browser that was incredibly capable despite being about 3mb or less of code.  WebPositive takes on the NetPositive look but throws WebKit underneath.   You've got an up to date browser that can accomplish most tasks, a giant step forward from using a buggy version of Oprah that crashed every 20 minutes years back.

Admittedly I didn't do much more than browse the web and chat on IRC, but I'm keeping it around.  I've been waiting for a BeOS resurrection, and Haiku really seems close to making that happen.  To be honest, Haiku is probably more complete in many respects than BeOS r4 or 5 were without even leaving alpha.

Will OS X finally have a true competitor good enough to pull me away from Apple?  Let's see.  Haiku seems like it would be an awesome netbook OS, and perhaps it can find a home in burgeoning tablet world one day as well.

[piratePenguin]

Standalone an OS is worthless. (developers developers developers!!!)

That's becoming more untrue everyday thanks to one thing we all should appreciate a bit more: the web. There was a time when you had to use IE to get onto internet banking and things were getting worse, but thanks to people who were hell-bent on defending web principles (Netscape, Mozilla) that's over (for now) and an OS like this can be SO useful thanks to the leaps and bounds the web has come since.

Haiku could be coming to maturity at a really good time, and I hope it can start making a big deal about itself in the near future.

But for small devices and netbooks, I imagine their competition in a few years will largely be Android, which would want to be quick on it's feet too.

The funny thing is, it didn't even cross my mind just now that Apple will be involved. Apple know how to make money but they don't know how to make it big.