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Comment by oralty | Hacker News Reader

>> Haiku is an OS that basically no one uses for any purpose.

> By your logic, since macOS has ~1/10 the install base of Windows,

Does not follow. MacOS use relative to Windows is not at all a fair comparison. Firstly "everybody" uses Windows, so 1/10 of huge number is still a huge number. Second, except for gaming and some particular areas like EDA, MacOS has a general software library with a broad-base of technical and non-technical users throughout the world. Haiku OS cannot claim to have anything like that.

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> MacOS has a general software library with a broad-base of technical and non-technical users throughout the world. Haiku OS cannot claim to have anything like that.

That was the second half of my comment. Please re-read the first half.

My point in that part, though, was that macOS has ~1/10 the users of Windows, but Windows' UI/UX was/is widely regarded as absolutely atrocious, and macOS' as being pretty good to great, depending on who you ask. So "if it has less users, their thoughts on design are irrelevant" is ... not a good argument.

I reread and it didn’t make any difference. MacOS may have 1/10 the Windows base but that is not having “very low userbase”, while I think it is quite reasonable to say that about Haiku. Reread what I said, the MacOS base is large and it is a general base of highly technical and non-technical users alike that are not all hobbyists. This does not describe Haiku in the slightest.

There is a valid point to be made about verifying usability and the need for a large and diverse userbase.

How much you want to bet that the Haiku userbase is overwhelmingly male? And this is not to make some concerned sexism argument but to illustrate that the community is more representative of the IT crowd rather than the general population.

> There is a valid point to be made about verifying usability and the need for a large and diverse userbase.

OK, that is indeed a valid point, but not one I got from the first comments.

I think Haiku has a diverse enough following that we are past most of these concerns, and a lot of our major paradigms which differ from other OSes were validated in the BeOS days. There are some areas where we still have work to do -- e.g. interfaces for the blind -- but overall we are doing quite well.

> How much you want to bet that the Haiku userbase is overwhelmingly male? And this is not to make some concerned sexism argument but to illustrate that the community is more representative of the IT crowd rather than the general population.

Oh, I know it's true of Haiku, but I practically can guarantee the same is true of Linux/BSD/etc. So then, can only "mainstream" operating systems have anything to say here?

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