Please forgive me if this isn’t the right forum category. I tried my best to put it into the most fitting category.
I assumed we all have similar attitude towards Haiku (what’s good about it). But then I realized this is quite unlikely.
So: What do you like about Haiku?
Myself: The clean and elegant technical architecture. And the beautiful GUI.
Greetings
Peter
The pure fact it’s unique, isn’t fragmented between 1e+37 different desktop environments, init systems, C libraries, you name it like Linux. Doesn’t ping random IPs every 3.2 seconds or delete your files in an update like Windows. Doesn’t have a cult-like elitism behind it like Mac OS or whatever they change their name to this week. The fact it literally is a desktop operating system by desktop users that doesn’t try to be 200 things at once and has a team of honest and friendly developers that aren’t all mysteriously hired by some megacorp. I could go on and on, Haiku is just a fun and unique approach to personal computing that the technology world needs.
It’s quiet.
I like it because BeOS was an unofficial sequel to the AmigaOS because Commodore refused to let Be Inc. use their source codes only for Commodore to promptly go belly-up shortly after that. It is as media centric as Amiga was without being tied to a single-threaded multitasking kernel and proprietary hardware architecture.
I also like that Haiku is open-source unlike the thoroughly 32-bit BeOS. It’s far enough ahead of AROS that it didn’t need to switch to the Linux kernel like the Axe desktop environment and ARIX (both founded by AROS developers).
First time reading about this. Any source?
I only heard about it from some former Commodore employees at an Amiga convention. Basically Be offered to port AmigaOS from 68k to PPC for use on their boards before BeOS was written but Commodore had a deal with HP for using the HPPA-RISC CPU instead. They turned down Be in favor of HP.
After Commodore made another series of colossal business blunders they folded and the BeBox came out with its own SMP capable OS for PPC that was functionally equivalent but technically superior to AmigaOS. The only Amiga technology that outlived the Amiga was the blitter used by HP’s LaserJet 4 series printers. The AmigaOS is running on PPC CPUs today and is still a single-threaded multitasker.
Haiku is a well-intentioned attempt at recreating Be’s exciting approach to the OS. And a chance for ppl to write some code for an emerging OS.
However, it has its own problems. It’s really a version of NewOS (kernel) / BSD (drivers) - that is trying to emulate BeOS. And where Linux is a mish-mash of code, Haiku has a lot of arguments over development: native vs ported apps; gccx vs gccy compiler; Haiku IDE vs other IDE; integrated desktop vs other desktop; to target PC/x86 or other computer/platform types; even Be style icons vs other styles. Sometimes it seems like it might not reach v1.
It would be good to have a legacy Be compatible OS, and a glass elevator fork that is freeer and doesn’t have the arguments - so it can find its own unique identity.
I think these are rumors, but many Commodore and Amiga developers have switched to BeOS.
I like that it simply works.
I have to do a lot of boring office stuff these weeks and I do it all on Haiku because it’s the only OS where I only have to deal with that boring stuff itself and not with trying to get my stupid computer to do what I want it to do.
The desktop environment is also great, I can quickly switch between LibreOffice, Okular, BePDF, whatever… windows as if they were browser tabs, which gives me an enormous boost in productivity.
Haiku is simply great!
it doesn’t require the needless terminal bashing of the nixs, it doesn’t spy on me
The OS itself is cool for reasons others have already mentionned: it’s well designed and polished, it’s reasonably simple, it lets me do what I want without getting in the way (unless there are bugs, unfortunately there are a lot of bugs).
The developer community is generally nice and I have learnt a lot from other people here. Maybe less of this lately, but that’s because I’m getting (slightly) older and have less things to learn 
As a developer, the ability to submit patches pretty much anywhere in the project (Haiku itself, haikuports, haikuarchives) makes my life a lot easier than if I was trying to work on a Liunx based system which is way too fragmented (I tried this, at work. My patches were completely ignored).
I quite like the terminal (but not for everything), so i love that i can have my bash shell in haiku, too.
I love many aspect of haiku, like it’s iconic icons (beware of wordplay), the fact that is has a beautiful screensaver just from icons, the stacking of windows (btw, why does webpositive NOT use stacking???)
the translators for filetypes, the clean approach.
Why i cannot use haiku as my daily driver is missing features like full disk encryption and multimonitor support and webcam support, missing virtualisation (port kvm or bhyve, maybe?).
Suspend would also be nice, special keys on laptops (brightness, loudness)
One of the reasons, it was the successor of the BeOS, it still feels simple to use, has some nice packaging system and lets me work and help out with projects at haikuports, as a non developer, it’s a big plus for me. 
EDIT It was and still is a great group of enthusiast people! 
The OS itself is only the tip of the iceberg, Haiku is so much more…
It allows pragmatic solutions without cutting every possible corners.
This is not just a rumor. Back in 1998, at the World of Amiga conference it was announced the Amiga would have licensed a kernel from another company.
The two options on the table were Be and QNX.
You can read something about this intriguing story here
It’s not bad for getting into the world of technology, neat and nice, logical and simple enough to show file tree structure, documentation and other detection. The threshold for entering a study with this approach, almost the same approach was in Be inc.
1 It’s elegant, light, and fast.
2 It’s not Windows, Linux, or Apple.
3 It works well on old hardware.
It’s inspired by BeOS, which was an operating system that was simple, fast and lots of fun to use.
The more interesting question right now is: “what do you do not like”!