BeOS was my dream from childhood. Haiku is amazing, especially because the original BeOS only existed for five years, while Haiku has been going for 24 already. What stamina!
What is the motivation for recreating Be? What would you hope to obtain that you cannot just by using, say, a customized Linux Mint?
If it's just historical/nostalgia/challenge, I get it. But people seem to believe there is something else too, and I'd like to know what that is.
Even now, using it feels like the system is bereft of bloat and cruft. It's a system _for the user_ that doesn't assume that the user is technically incapable.
What does this translate to, in some amount of technical detail?
You boot straight to a desktop, and there's no ads, alerts, pop-ups, pop-unders, noisy task apps, sidebars, widgets, and other engagement seeking focus destroyers. Every app has a reasonably consistent UX and presents as much necessary and relevant information as it can, without tedious wizards or aggressively hiding information behind folds or submenus.
IDK what scheduler voodoo they were doing, but it was awesome.
Only things I've seen that achieved something similar were QNX/Photon, and (though with the benefit of way stronger hardware and a ton of "cheating" by suspending applications) some (mostly early) versions of iOS.
I'm not sure I have any use for Haiku today, but I definitely wish for a world in which computer GUIs didn't feel so damn slow and janky and pre-occupied with whatever it's got going on internally rather than what I need it to be doing right now.
Also, I wish some kind of tagging system for filesystems had taken off well enough that I could rely on it, even cross-platform and when copying files between filesystems. Entire programs could just be file tags. Other programs could just be a thin GUI over tagged files. It sucks that didn't end up becoming a standard and reasonably cross-platform-compatible thing.
Hmm.
linux does at least have extended filesystem attributes. the dolphin filemanager from KDE makes use of them to support tags and comments. it's not ideal (tags are a comma separated string) but it is usable. adding tags is a bit painful though. i resorted to add and them through the commandline.
Actually, I think with Linux there may be a bit of a double penalty on desktop use with how much more attention the server use case gets compared to everything else.
When things are coded right, Haiku / BeOS is blazing fast (every single thing runs in a separate thread), and resource usage is tiny. I think the OS only uses about half a gig of RAM? When the apps are coded right, there's a feeling that this is how our modern computers could have been, free from bloated software and using the full speed of the machine. And when shutdown only takes a couple of seconds, it makes you wonder what the other OS's are doing.
Of course the reality is not that. Display drivers & video codecs on Haiku often don't have the right hardware acceleration, most of the software you need is now Linux ports rather than BeOS native. But Haiku sometimes feels like a calming OS. Because it's so small and quite modular, it feels like an OS you can still potentially get your head around.
As I said in another comment, I've only played with Haiku in a VM for not very much time, but I am a huge supporter of operating systems that are willing to break out of the codified mediocrity we've labeled "POSIX"; I suspect that we might be leaving a lot of performance on the table by constantly trying to POSIX compliant all the time.
Faster than booting w2k in a vm, on a modern cpu, at least in my tests.
Haiku is a unified system, so native apps have one windowing system, one desktop environment, one API, one media kit, one file system etc. There are less layers for data to travel, hence it will always be faster. Also Haiku targets desktop users (single user system, for better or worse), while Linux in all honesty targets servers and embedded with desktop a distant 3rd use case. Haiku package management is a generation ahead of Linux.
Finally, BeOS/Haiku core architecture is built from modern 90's designs, while Linux started as a clone of Unix (deep in the bowels of Linux there is a TTY terminal block device).
Finally, BeOS had a cool factor (and their fanboys) that Linux never had. Dual CPU from day #1. Blinkenlights. Geek port. Playing videos on a face of a cube. is_computer_on(). Linux is sooo boring in comparison.