people really don’t care who makes the qpp “generally speaking” they care if ut works, and is easy to use for what they need to do.
both of the apps you just cited are not very user-friendly. power users are a small part of the market.
compare QuickBooks to gnu accounting.
the issue is user facing accessibility
Why not? If done by someone who knows how to do it, it is very valuable. If they go as far as taking the time to explain their choices, we can even learn a few things from it 
That issue doesn’t have anything to do with Haiku, moreso the fact certain FOSS just isn’t as good as proprietary software and the truth is that it’s pretty much because one is developed as a hobby and although this is in good spirits and they usually tend to it to fix bugs and other things, one is developed almost every single day, as a career to make money and to feed your family. It’s pretty clear one will be more polished and refined. That’s not to say FOSS couldn’t be developed as a career, on a payroll, with a schedule (like how waddlesplash is paid), just saying it usually isn’t and most projects aren’t.
It probably depends on who, I certainly want to have my family and friends be able to use it eventually, but I will only recomend it once I think Haiku is ready to be used by them.
But if its just pure bigger number users i dunno, seems a bad case to optimize for, mediocre seems to win there easily
Same here, I would like my family could use Haiku,but at the moment I cannot recommend using it.
For my parents it is still to difficult and not user friendly for handicapped people.
For my son it is not feature complete to use it at the university to use!
They use TeXLive with TeXstudio, BeTeX or Emacs which we have now, but I did not got to work for my own!
If students are able to work with Haiku they will go to develop more software for Haiku in the future.
I think to have students using Haiku is the way to go…
I’ve let computers absorb ~36 years of my life thus far. I’ve written for my first love, an Amiga magazine on disk back in the late 80’s & early 90’s (Megadisc).
I’ve run a successful sole trader business solving software & hardware, networking issues (solicitor firms, car dealerships, surveyors, accountants, hardware/farm supply store, lots of farmers & a pile of us little people as customers). Primarily Windows - 3.11 through to XP.
I wrote a pile of wiki pages, 1 for Arch Linux, many for Manjaro (years ago now, there wouldn’t be much of it left now & who knows what’s been done to that by others?).
I ran Arch Linux for years, I bailed out when they started fighting amongst themselves about systemd, ran the odd BSD, stacks of different distros.
Why am I telling you this you may be wondering?
Because I’ve gotten old. My internal CPU has slowed way down & continues to do so, my memory is shot to pieces. What once was easy & obvious, doesn’t even occur to me now! Inconsistencies in communication skills, & problem solving, abound.
I used to say to my X that when my brain deteriorates far enough I will no longer be able to deal with Linux, (I only use Win7 for Steam). I don’t like Windows, back in the day, all it was good for was making me money.
To continue - “brain degeneration will mean that I’ll have to use OS/X”, was what I’d say to her. As the IT intelligence required to use OS/X is low, & its reliable. BUT, I really don’t like OS/X (I’ve owned it). OS/X has flaws that never get fixed, that make it hard for people who don’t have perfect eyesight.
I love how Haiku has been designed. The GUI is simple, functional & has its own beauty. I thus far like the community too. I hope that Haiku becomes the OS that will see me through my last years of computing.
You may think this is a strange post, but really, there are a huge number of boomers growing old at the moment. I think that Haiku could make MANY people’s lives easier as they move through the phases:- retired - senior citizens - geriatrics - … We understandably don’t like it, seeing our parents age really sucks. Guess what, it happens to us too.
We all know that Haiku isn’t there yet, but the train keeps on rolling… & my fingers & toes are crossed (I’m going to have to get somebody to come & uncross them for me.) 
We’re off topic at this point, but there should be a term for reaching the state in life when we realise that: our parents are just human, and dealing with parental decline and death.
As for how computing relates this this, I wonder: how computers might be able to assist the aging population, and how using computers could be done in such a way to push back mental decline. An observation of mine is that those who stay active, still work, do things mentally, are the ones who live longer and stay sharper.
[Not saying you’re old or anything, but, as you said, we all age.]
So, I don’t think you’ll have to be stuck with macOS (I love Macs, I feel they are what you make of them, choose your own adventure), but explore, stay active (new OS each month?, maybe even the weirder ones like OS/2, AIX, Serenity, Haiku [obviously], Arch linux, etc) to keep up the mental gymnastics.
I’m trying to keep it weird also, I just swapped out my x86_64 desktop for a ppc64le machine from Raptor Computing. It’s interesting, fun, warts & all.
Now for something completely wayy off topic, read a larger series of books, like The Expanse. Keeps you engaged, and makes you feel good (my experience). But please, don’t keep things simple. That doesn’t help (in my assumptions, who knows for sure).
What happens to many of us, is that we become “incapable” of doing certain things. The dots can become impossible to connect. There are always those things in life (the likes of Einstein & Hawking, couldn’t solve problems that they wanted to).
With age, more & more things can become impossible, or so difficult that they require so much of what becomes an ever diminishing energy supply, or make demands beyond our diminished cognisant capacity, that you just can’t be bothered. The cost becomes too great. Uneconomical expenditure of limited resources.
I’ve watched people who once were very intelligent with great brains deteriorate with age to the point where they don’t read even what we’d call very simple stuff, because they just don’t understand it. Their brain has lost the ability. This is even worse than the - uneconomical expenditure of limited resources - reason.
My point in the previous post:- is that due to Haiku’s nature of being free to purchase (something else in its favour as opposed to buying an Apple product), fairly simple to use & maintain, not being overly complex in its front end. This lends itself in my view to being a really good system for the elderly. I think it was PulkoMandy who said yesterday that part of the Haiku design brief is for it to be for beginners to the computer world to be able to use (they are not his exact words).
This fits perfectly with being suitable for the aged, as most of us reach a point from where we start reverting back towards our infancy. Simplicity is a most wonderful thing (even if once complexity was what we really got off on getting into).
Those Raptor machines sure are expensive, I really am interested in PPC and wanna check one out one day
You totally should! It’s a difficult decision to make, but building your own Blackbird (just buy from them the CPU & motherboard, and getting the chassis, RAM, PSU, GPU, storage elsewhere) makes it a lot cheaper!
It’s amazing that the whole thing, hardware included, is open source. And for parallel jobs, it’s still very fast. But it is a five year old CPU now. I was playing around with the linpack benchmarks, and in some niche areas, the Power9 held strong linpack_benchmark/results.md at main · rjzak/linpack_benchmark · GitHub. It depends on what you wish to use it for.
How much did the whole thing cost you & what OS are u using with it?
$6k for the Talos II motherboard, dual 8-core CPUs (from Raptor)
$1k for PSU, used Radeon 590X, 4x 16G DDR4 ECC RAM, 1T SSD (from Amazon, eBay)
Currently running Void Linux PPC in little endian. I will have to change to Chimera when the maintainer stops supporting Void PPC.
That’s quiet alot of money, but if you’re having fun…
I wanted a new system, and despite being older, it was newer than the system replacing it; and it was a 40th birthday present to myself. But yeah, it’s a lot, which is why it took me about 2 years to make a decision!
Too bad haiku can’t run on it, ppc is so close and yet so far from haiku, from what i’ve read here & there, it’s just a matter of a driver or 2, that’s all what’s preventing it from booting on ppc, if i had the skills i would try to port the netbsd drivers which are needed for this.
It’s likely more than a driver or two, especially since I’d want it to be ppc64le, and the existing code is ppc32. Plus, Haiku would need to be able to be started with Petitboot, making it more un-like the old PPC Macs that the existing ppc32 Haiku code targets.
I created a thread at the Framework (modular laptop) forum. It has proved successful with 2.3k views and 24 replies over a year. So you may find more luck bringing Haiku to the attention of users of alternative hardware than users of alternative OS. Since Pine is mentioned a lot on these forums, is there much visibility of Haiku on places where their user community gathers?
Edit: I see there is a forum at pine64.org with categories for various products and subcategories for the different OS (Linux, BSD, Android). But as of yet no Haiku. Which product should we ask for a Haiku subcategory first?
The idea of promoting Haiku to users of specific hardware might be a good idea, but it’s prolly not advisable to do so on hardware that it doesn’t run well on just yet. In particular, anything ARM-based for now; not until the ARM ports have progressed at least as far as the RISC-V port, anyways.
Just as well then that Pine64 has a Risc-V based single board computer, the Star64. This machine does not (yet) have a section in the Pine forum, but Haiku should be over it like a rash when it does.
Haiku does of course work very nicely on x86 which provides plenty of opportunity for us to seed new threads on hardware manufacturer’s user forums to raise the profile of our chosen OS.
Is the plan to be as annoying as the people who ask all open source projects to rewrite their code in Rust? Doesn’t seem so great to me, this was a bit annoying (even if they are right that it should be done)
We are still in beta, advertising to general users isn’t a great idea at this point. Or at least it has to be done with some care to make sure people don’t expect a production ready OS. Sure, the people who go for RISC-V (hopefully) don’t expect a fully finished and ready CPU either, so they may be OK with that?