It's nice to see Haiku making such good progress -- I feel that the existence of a user-friendly open source OS that's not a UNIX or Windows derivative is a good thing in itself, if only because it may be keeping alive some ideas that don't fit in the legacy-oriented Linux mold.
Maybe Haiku could become a nice netbook OS? Its single-user media focus certainly fits the bill. (Although Internet appliance computers were Be, Inc.'s swan song marketing attempt as well, so maybe they don't want to reopen that wound...)
I do think that Haiku needs some kind of forward-looking showcase project with a bit of gloss. Right now the superficial impression is that they've mostly catched up to a decade-old commercial project. Consider these screenshots of the first and latest release of this system...
(I prefer the 1994 version actually -- those tight pixel fonts and prominent grids of awesome 45°/30° icons must have something to do with it... The old light-grey look actually looks fairly contemporary alongside the Leopard and Windows 7 aesthetic.)
I second netbook OS suggestion. They should port Haiku to popular netbooks e.g. acer aspire one, asus eeepc, MSI wind, so that anyone could run it without any problems.
This way there is no hardware hell(at least not that big) and you get usable system for the masses.
Maybe Haiku could become a nice netbook OS? Its single-user media focus certainly fits the bill. (Although Internet appliance computers were Be, Inc.'s swan song marketing attempt as well, so maybe they don't want to reopen that wound...)
I do think that Haiku needs some kind of forward-looking showcase project with a bit of gloss. Right now the superficial impression is that they've mostly catched up to a decade-old commercial project. Consider these screenshots of the first and latest release of this system...
BeOS Developer Release 4, from 1994: http://osnews.com/img/20869/screen2.gif
Haiku, from 2009: http://osnews.com/img/20951/1.png
(I prefer the 1994 version actually -- those tight pixel fonts and prominent grids of awesome 45°/30° icons must have something to do with it... The old light-grey look actually looks fairly contemporary alongside the Leopard and Windows 7 aesthetic.)