Haiku has less of a software problem than I expected, since Qt has been ported to it, and it has some (not the majority of) Qt apps, as well as the Qt Creator IDE. I'm not sure if Qt apps are as light and responsive as native Haiku apps though.
Unfortunately I never did find supported hardware and clear out enough hard drive space to install it (despite shuffling my disks around and losing my last copy of important files). Perhaps I could try running it in a VM, but why not use the outside OS at that point?
As usual it's a matter of what you're trying to do and how closely it matches the things the devs are trying to do. My only real attempt to use it lately was on an old eeePC I only really wanted to use for remoting into my home Windows PC and I ran into a bunch of issues with the only working RDP client (commandline-run FreeRDP). Waddlesplash even had to pick up on a post of mine here on HN and take it upon themselves to update FreeRDP to get to that point. It functions, but is seemingly unable to resize or even go fullscreen despite specifying the relevant commandline arguments, which on the tiny monitor is a problem because it leaves me forcing it to run in a less-than-fullscreen resolution that accommodates the title tab and moving it to the top-left corner.
Personally, I am not a fan of the reliance on ported-from-unix packages. Especially considering that there is currently no autoremove for the mountains of dependencies that they bring with them. If Haiku had containerization this could be more easily mitigated, but as far as I'm aware it doesn't.
> Perhaps I could try running it in a VM, but why not use the outside OS at that point?
The thing that i always found puzzling with Qt, Java, etc on Haiku is that if you are going to rely on those instead of taking advantage of Haiku's uniqueness and integrated UI approach, then why not just run Linux with a BeOS-like theme?
Haiku has good native software not available in other OSes.
Also, the performance can be much faster on Qt software. I remember some QT5 based video player playing 4k videos on an old Celeron in software while Linux wasn't able to do so even with GLX/DRI/XV acceleration.
Talking about supported hardware, I always select hardware that will run the software I want, not the other way around. When I build my desktop PC last year, it was all AMD hardware. Haiku works great on it, and with X512’s vulkan driver, I’ll even have 3D acceleration. I’m buying a laptop in 2 months, again, it will be all AMD hardware. And Haiku will run great on it. As will Linux.
Unfortunately I never did find supported hardware and clear out enough hard drive space to install it (despite shuffling my disks around and losing my last copy of important files). Perhaps I could try running it in a VM, but why not use the outside OS at that point?