“I will be honest in that, in the past, I did not feel I got much out of Haiku and its previous alpha releases. They were interesting from a design standpoint, certainly, but not practical operating systems I could use to get things done on real hardware. That has changed. Haiku can be used almost exclusively to accomplish my work on a day-to-day basis on my laptop now and I am impressed with what this light, responsive, desktop-oriented project has accomplished in recent years.”
I also liked and want to highlight the preceding paragraph regarding hardware support, which I agree on (in my case, Lenovo V510 laptop, only the borked ElanTech PS/2 touchpad and Wifi are not working in EFI mode, which is already in Trac):
My second point is that the big issue I run into when reviewing non-Linux operating systems, particularly the BSDs and MINIX, is the lack of hardware support. Even Linux distributions that ship without non-free firmware tend to cause me problems. Haiku is rare in that it worked with all of my laptop’s hardware. This meant I could fire up the laptop and be on-line in under 30 seconds from the power button being pressed to the time I was checking my preferred news sites. Not many operating systems can balance that kind of efficiency with this level of hardware support and my hat is off to the Haiku team.
