I love the idea that you can do much (never all) with OS itself and extending the OS with add-ons for me looks like the way to make Haiku really stand out in elegance, efficiency and ease of use (just noticed 3 x Es)
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Low minimum specs, which means itās perfect for people who want high performanceā¦ once the drivers are all finalized. I tried Puppy Linux on my old laptop and it ate up all my RAM, but Haiku runs decently well.
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! interesting as puppy linux is praised to be the choice for this
I think seniors (think I am approaching that soon enough) could be also one of target uses as they hate relativly frequent interface updates (even annual modifications on smartphone confuse my mother for example)ā¦they would prefer things do not change at all unless they need it to change for themselves 
<3
BTW - i really wanted to update this now to 2020 > 2021,
but even as author of thread I do not seem to have enough priviledges to do thatā¦
can someone else?
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There are several varieties of Puppy. I have used Slacko, Tahr, and Xenial (the best, in my view) successfully on a variety of machines, mainly Thinkpads. If one doesnāt work well, you can always try another.
Good though Puppy is, Haiku is streets ahead - or it will be when the browser is sorted.
And you canāt have the same godzillious number of apps you have on Linux, Windows orā¦wellā¦iOs. A selection of which apps to promote the development of must be sliced.
Which apps need to be created first? The most useful for the intended target audience (that cannot be the general, average, unskilled user IMHO)
How about this for a concept: A focus on transparent virtualization/emulation?
Virtualization, as Iām sure almost everyone here knows, is running a āvirtualā version of a computer inside an envelope that makes the OS think itās running on an actual hardware computer. Emulation is a similar/related idea. So, you have Haiku as the āhostā OS ā running on the actual hardware or ābare metalā but underneath/within it you have Windows and/or Mac environments that can run those programs.
Think of the āClassicā Mac environment of Mac OS X, allowing one to transparently and seamlessly run OS 9 and earlier programs side by side with OS X programs. One could copy and paste between them, they occupied the same desktop metaphor together, etc.
Maybe Haiku could become the best host OS for the best virtualization experience. Succeeding at that would automatically bring along all (OK, not all, never all, but a good chuck, the vast majority) of the software written for these other operating systems. And one could use them all within an elegant system with a nice and completely-customizable GUI.
Just thinking out loud hereā¦
All nice and great, but we have no support for virtualization at all currently. So for 2021 this doesnāt look like a great use case. Maybe in 2025 or 2030, but then itās off-topic here
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I honestly doubt that, for one the ābestā virtualization OS was already done, itās called Xen and nobody uses it. And windows also is basically just windows VMs running on the NT kernel now.
I donāt think we are qualified for this in any case, we donāt have qemu guest drivers, we donāt have hyper-v guest drivers, and we have absolutely no accelerated virtualization as a host, nor our own virtualization stack like windows, linux and the BSDās have. ;ļ»æ)
The only thing we do have is qemu, and itās pretty neat, just seriously beeing limited by our lack of virtualization drivers.
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I think adding hardware accelerated virtualization to Haiku is not trivial, but a much easier project than some things like accelerated GPU support, and as I have said before I would either use NVMM or get a lot of inspiration from it. That developer pulled it off in 6 months I believe.
Having this opens up things like @ToBeās idea or Docker support or something like WSL to make Haiku a better general development platform for web back-ends which run on Linux. Maybe now qemu could be used but it would obviously be faster with native accelerated virtualization.
With that said I donāt think it should be a priority for the core Haiku project but obviously if someone decides to take it on soon that would be great. I have some interest in working on this project but probably wonāt have time for it for a while, and it may be outside my skill set though maybe a great way to learn.
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I donĀ“t know if I can come up with any rational use cases for using Haiku, but I have to quote the Rolling Stones here: āItĀ“s only rockĀ“nĀ“roll but I like itā 
Oh yes, and the community is amazing as well 
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I am ordinary user not dev, i love design and this is reason why i switch to windows 10 but with w10 i have neverending problems with updates. In haiku i like simple ui design and i am very happy that haiku have in this time package manager and optional updates. Very nice is think that haiku have more and more packages ported from linux like libreoffice and qt5
In my view haiku is nice, clean and simple.
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With WebAssembly coming to web browsers and outside the browsers as well, the Puppy Linux competitor perspective becomes more prevalent because browser applications running at native speeds throw proprietary operating systems under the bus with all the bloat and politics they bring with them. Caches work better on smaller code and thread affinity doesnāt hurt performance either. To get ideal performance in the future, the choices look like either Haiku or Fuchsia. Not so much Apple or Microsoft.
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Iām gonna take a different angle on this. With the threat of big tech to the open internet landscape, I think alt tech such as Haiku plays a more important role in fostering ecosystems that can compete over time. We need to make sure that Apple, Google and Microsoft cannot box us into a more closed, controlled and heavily censored internet society. All of the alternative technology platforms and communities need to band together and form a coalition in order to fight big tech tyranny. This is a great opportunity to make Haiku shine.
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My use-case for Haiku is 100% escaping Big Tech. Now that a RISC-V desktop motherboard is coming out in less than a month there is an opprtunity to have libre hardware AND software for the first time I am aware of. I am right now trying to ramp up to growing my awareness of this OS and what it can do.
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@davidpgil that sounds like a brilliant user case!
It would be amazing if you would consider to write something about this (maybe short essay) and post your progress. I am sure other people would be interested and it would be great case study. (I will add it to the the top post, once I get edit rights or it gets turned into wiki page)
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True. Would you be interested to elaborate on how this manifests for you in practice?
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Google is probably the biggest threat to an open and free internet. I see Chrome as the new IE6 that is attempting lock the World Wide Web into a single web browser with Google trying to force its will on how the web should work. I have already seen web developers go back to being lazy and only committed to supporting Chrome (for example) and poo pooing the rest and that should worry people. Alt tech needs to find ways to collaborate and build open web technologies that are seamless cross platform that can compete and offer viable solutions to what big tech is doing. I think Haiku, Amiga, and other such alt tech platforms should form alliances in both the developer and end-user circles to prop up these platforms as viable alternatives.
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As I keep saying to others here, I really think itās important to have an operating system like Haiku. Unix and Windows systems form a duopoly in the tech field, and I think computer users and programmers desperately need a third way. Haiku provides it and in spades.
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Itās not such a bad idea. Pizza-munchers outnumber Haiku-writers by about 1 million to 1.
Yes, I know itās an old thread!
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Good thinking, dcatt. Unfortunately, as a long-time Amiga follower I can only name a few success stories that are unique to the next-generation Amiga-like platforms: the Hollywood scripting language including its freeware plugins, the Wayfarer web-browser for MorphOS (based on the same WebKit source base as Web-Positive but closed-source and big-endian PPC otherwise) and the Radeon HD and RX series drivers for AmigaOS 4.1FE2 via Warp3D Nova. All of them are closed-source at least partially. None of them support multi-core architecture in any way.