Why would you be interested in it over Linux? If you are comparing it for 2016 state of PC computing Linux, nothing. There is no killer app on BeOS/Haiku that could justify it.
But if you want to compare it to 1998-style PC, BeOS was a really high-performance, POSIX-compatible OS. It could do things that neither Windows NT, Linux or MacOS (pre- OSX) could do, and it could do it even on very limited hardware.
Nowadays, I think that if Haiku could be ported to ARM, it would become a very interesting alternative for any kind of SOC-based appliance where you'd need more than a microcontroller but something like Linux/Android is overkill: smart TVs, audio/video receivers, smart home hubs, some cool guitar sound effect pedal, etc...
Huh..never thought about that. The trouble is, of course, porting anything to ARM. You'd have to maintain builds for hundreds of ARM devices with individual images and kernels, or you'd have to choose to explicitly support just a couple of devices (and then maybe people in the community will have unofficial builds for the rest).
..or you could only chose to support devices that support device tree configuration, but there's a good chance your kernel still won't boot on half of them. ARM isn't an architecture. It's just a chip, with people implementing stuff in crazy ways all over the place that will never make it back upstream to the mainline kernel. It's a fragmented mess and there's no incentive to fix it since most ARM devices are build around planned obsolescence to be replaced every two years.
Personal pleasure of an alternative desktop. Experimental playground for OS developers. Minimalist box for older hardware with high performance. Obscurity benefit against hackers that I hear PPC Mac users still get.
A few things like that. It's not competitive against Linux/BSD desktops in about any other case.
Sadly I felt that it was the POSIX compatibility that killed it for me. Before that there were several wonderfu applications purely written for the OS. After we got ports of Linux apps which were far less interesting or as well configured for the multithreaded nature of the API.
Comments
Why would you be interested in it over Linux? If you are comparing it for 2016 state of PC computing Linux, nothing. There is no killer app on BeOS/Haiku that could justify it.
But if you want to compare it to 1998-style PC, BeOS was a really high-performance, POSIX-compatible OS. It could do things that neither Windows NT, Linux or MacOS (pre- OSX) could do, and it could do it even on very limited hardware.
Nowadays, I think that if Haiku could be ported to ARM, it would become a very interesting alternative for any kind of SOC-based appliance where you'd need more than a microcontroller but something like Linux/Android is overkill: smart TVs, audio/video receivers, smart home hubs, some cool guitar sound effect pedal, etc...
Huh..never thought about that. The trouble is, of course, porting anything to ARM. You'd have to maintain builds for hundreds of ARM devices with individual images and kernels, or you'd have to choose to explicitly support just a couple of devices (and then maybe people in the community will have unofficial builds for the rest).
..or you could only chose to support devices that support device tree configuration, but there's a good chance your kernel still won't boot on half of them. ARM isn't an architecture. It's just a chip, with people implementing stuff in crazy ways all over the place that will never make it back upstream to the mainline kernel. It's a fragmented mess and there's no incentive to fix it since most ARM devices are build around planned obsolescence to be replaced every two years.
"Why would you be interested in it over Linux? "
Personal pleasure of an alternative desktop. Experimental playground for OS developers. Minimalist box for older hardware with high performance. Obscurity benefit against hackers that I hear PPC Mac users still get.
A few things like that. It's not competitive against Linux/BSD desktops in about any other case.
"Minimalist box for older hardware with high performance. "
That's what I like. For when even a good Linux distro is too much for the hardware. The slow, old thing can be transformed into a nice, new thing.
Sadly I felt that it was the POSIX compatibility that killed it for me. Before that there were several wonderfu applications purely written for the OS. After we got ports of Linux apps which were far less interesting or as well configured for the multithreaded nature of the API.