Most OSs have their OS philosophy or features listed on a splash screen, or in a slide show during install. So this criticism could be addressed via a features splash screen appearing after the boot screen. It could have a similar theme of a black background, HAIKU name, and leaves - but with a difference. The name HAIKU could be written vertically, representing a tree, with 6 leaves (3 either side). Beside each leaf could be written a feature:
Our install process is just too fast to show any slides…
I don’t think a user that went to the trouble of downloading a gigabyte ISO and installing that is still interested in that kind of PR info. (And even before that, when they look around the website etc., few care about buzzwords like multithreaded and db-filesystem. They need short user stories as examples what and how some things are done in Haiku.)
Once installed, a user is probably more interested in learning about the most important features and starts exploring the system.
Here’s where a quick tour would come in handy… oh look, there’s a “QuickTour” in the HaikuDepot! Get it now!
My blog gets syndicated on DZone. Looks like they’ve chosen to syndicate my post with my quick review video. Should lead to a few thousand views of Haiku hopefully!
Oh wait! You mean take some time to do a quick tour first to learn the system, just like the techy ppl at Linux Magazine did?
It’s wasn’t PR, a features splash screen was just an attempt to nullify some users’ criticisms. But I cede to your greater knowledge of computing, and desire to keep the BeOS look & feel intact.
Mostly an installation walkthrough, admittedly done on a VM instead of hardware. Not entirely unflattering, but a little inaccurate when it references software availability. I’m guessing the reviewer didn’t probe very deeply into Haiku Depot after seeing the limited Featured category.
There are lots of image editors available and there are two office suites available (Calligra and LibreOffice). The author of the article should at least have mentioned 3D games as an example of a lacking application category, since that would’ve been more accurate. Wow, that article is quite shallow.
