Haiku OS Action – From BeOS compatible to Desktop [video]

Some years back, my father converted from Windows to Ubuntu, and was very happy with it --- until the Great Unity Switch. (I believe his phrase was 'it looks like a tinker toy'). I tried him on live CDs for a whole bunch of Linux distributions, to see which ones he liked. Just for fun I added Haiku to the list.

Yep, it was the one he liked best from the whole bunch, because it was fast, simple, and the UI had a really low cognitive load. (If you move the Tracker down the bottom of the screen it turns into a classic Win95-style task bar.)

Alas, right now it's too unstable to get useful work out of; wireless hardware support is poor and the web browser's not really good enough yet. I'm hoping there'll be a new release RSN, though. The current nightlies look pretty good and there's a really nice package which makes installing and porting software pretty easy.

I was just putting together a blog post on installing various "light" OSes on a decades-old laptop (Dell Inspiron 1200); the tl;dr version is that Haiku OS is by far the most performant, powerful, and just plain fun.