Meantime, the usual Linux desktops continue to fail at even the basics, such as low quality file dialogs that e.g. change your selection after you've already clicked.
Other than that, BeOS system kits are elegant, so are its APIs for drivers and filesystems. Linux does instead have a huge, ugly, syscall interface.
It just takes enough perspective to not see UNIX and its clones as the "end it all" of what an operating system should be, and then you'd realize it's actually pretty hard to come up with anything that Linux does better.
For instance, I created a from scratch video editor for Haiku which does 4K UHD videos with OpenGL based plugins, with over 30 effects, and 10 languages. The installer package with no dependancies is 1.3Mb (fits on a floppy disk). https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo Under Linux, I would require many more dependancies since I have no guarantee what libraries or API’s the users have installed.
That is an unfortunate, probably unavoidable, byproduct of the freedom that brought Linux on so many computers, platforms and users. Everyone can write a software, or fork an existing one, nobody enforces a standard for development or integration. I guess it's not easy to build a giant free community around a free software and keep consistency. It's a mess, and has been a necessary one when the aim was to spread Linux as much as possible, but now we're paying the consequences. (Which is why I believe the day Microsoft will reveal their Linux distro, bringing stability and unification behind a known brand, is the day all non technical die-hard users and more importantly most commercial entities that use Linux will abandon the usual distributions, essentially killing them.) Haiku however was born as a clone of a closed system, and only recently is seeing some media coverage; there's no guarantee that, should it one day reach Linux' level of popularity, the influx of developers , users, and demand for more software, won't create the same issues there as well.
People love to bash linux for this and they are right. The single feature that makes linux historically suck on the desktop is the one reason it succeeded everywhere else.
That's the problem. There are too many Linux distributions to 'support'. From a developer standpoint. I have to 'define Linux support' and need to draw the line somewhere and pick a Linux distro and write a guide for it.
Several people will ask if their distro is also supported and another one will ask, followed by another one with the same question and then you would be updating more than 10 troubleshooting guides and maintaining more than 10 CIs for 'official' support. That's very expensive and this is why you cannot target 'all' Linux users.
On the other hand, I can support all Windows users 100% of the time. Same thing with macOS, and Haiku also has little to no fragmentation and that means I can give 1 CI per OS. Not 10 or 20. Even Redox gets it right with the same idea.
It's nice to see an open-source OS for once that has a sane desktop, usable software and is unified just like Windows and macOS.
You can try to prevent it with project structure, but even something really unified like FreeBSD ended up having derivatives like GhostBSD as well as full-blown divergent forks like DragonFly BSD that are not necessarily compatible anymore with upstream.
The actual reason for all of this is that the distro's themselves (and the BSDs) bundle 'hundreds' of external third-party system packages as first party just to get a 'basic desktop working'. I don't want to start pointing fingers at where a bug could be located at as it would be very painful to maintain and start searching through the whole Linux or BSD desktop stack. Good luck with that.
The only difference with the BSDs is that they just have a different kernel. Everything else has the exact same software stack just like many Linux distros.
Hence this, with having little to no OS fragmentation, it is also the reason why everyone only targets Mac and Windows. 'Official support' gets very expensive when 10 or 20 distros need to be tested on a CI or guides need to be updated as users tweak or mess around with their Linux distro.
This is true once you install a bunch of desktop stuff from ports and packages, however, any of the *BSDs are much more cohesive than Linux in the base system.
And I guess even the degree of desktop integration varies. On OpenBSD X11 is part of the standard installation. On FreeBSD it comes from ports.
This is not a workload os, or a workspace os, its a having fun os.