I have a fantasy that 20 years from now, Haiku will be the operating system of choice for hackers with design sensibilities (NB: I didn't say graphic design) who want a powerful, flexible, programmable OS that just works and requires minimal configuration.
This niche is currently filled by OSX, but I think it's slowly falling out of favor because of Apple's increasing focus on the end user and "iOSifying" everything.
Of course Haiku is still some ways from it, but I've been following its development for a while now and I feel like it's on the right track. If one or two manufacturers end up providing good hardware for Haiku to run on when it's a bit more mature, it'd be wonderful and then my vision would happen.
There are worse foundations and inspirations to have than BeOS - a man can dream :)
FWIW Debian stable (esp. with KDE IMO) is now very close to this. I have no patience at all for a fiddly daily machine, and for the most part I've been pretty happy with it.
There are probably other Linux distributions (Mint?) that can fill this niche.
I only mention this because, if people are looking for something right now, setting aside a little bit of time to try out Debian stable or Mint might be worthwhile.
But yeah. I'd love to see Haiku become a strong alternative OS. I've been keeping an eye on it ever since it was announced. (I still have the BeOS R5 disc that I installed on a PPC machine years ago.)
Desktops like KDE can preview images in a directory. But BeOS was on another level with this stuff.
Imagine if (1) your filesystem was a high-performance nosql database; (2) your desktop was just a thin layer around this, optimised for navigating around and querying the stores. But NoSQL has never since been so smooth and beautiful to interact with.
The mail system: a daemon drops files in a directory and makes a ding sound. The user then just browses the directory containing the mail messages. (The file explorer detected the metadata and displays this as columns.) When you double-click on an icon, you get a special-case form that displays the contents of the data. http://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/3q99/bemail/bemail-sc...
If a unix were to do this stuff, it'd stop being unix: metadata on files is incompatible with the everything-is-a-stream-of-data philosophy. ryanweal writes below, "think everything is an icon instead of everything is a file". Brilliant. Haiku team should take "everything is an icon" as their motto.
The people that used BeOS and look forward to Haiku are going to disagree with you on that. I'm guessing that they look at Linux distros as a hodge-podge of various libraries without any cohesive philosophy.
Yeah, that's my position. I use OSX at work and Arch at home; and while I love Linux, it is quite messy. (Which works to its advantage in many ways- it wouldn't be that powerful and flexible if it weren't)
It reminds me of BSD in some ways: small, focused, albeit on the desktop instead of the server. I love using it, and have a VM running alpha 4 on every computer I own!
Once the Gentoo Grinch grows a heart and make an installer your problem will also be solved. I can get any package and any library built the way I want by typing `emerge`.
Gentoo certainly gives you the tools to make a great system, but it needs far more than just an installer to get there. The whole distribution needs a lot more curation. It takes far too much research to figure out which options are potentially useful and which are just relics or break too many other packages or include a feature that is impossible to put to use.
This niche is currently filled by OSX, but I think it's slowly falling out of favor because of Apple's increasing focus on the end user and "iOSifying" everything.
Of course Haiku is still some ways from it, but I've been following its development for a while now and I feel like it's on the right track. If one or two manufacturers end up providing good hardware for Haiku to run on when it's a bit more mature, it'd be wonderful and then my vision would happen.
There are worse foundations and inspirations to have than BeOS - a man can dream :)