I have a very fond memory of BeOS, I had a BeBox way back in the second half of the nineties. It was my first multi-processor (now "multicore") system and I've

I have a very fond memory of BeOS, I had a BeBox way back in the second half of the nineties. It was my first multi-processor (now "multicore") system and I've never looked back since. The system, the philosophy, and the OS were ahead of their time by leaps and bounds. That said, at the time it was a solution in search of a problem. I've been trying out Haiku for several years. I have to say that it brings back very fond memories and is astoundingly feature-complete, but the limitations of its architecture is beginning to show: the system has no in-built notion of security and lacks even the most basic primitives for such purposes insofar as it isn't multi-user and has no notion of access privileges. The architecture is POSIX-complete but without users it is surprisingly limited. Of course there is no real chance of extending the architecture to 64 bits or of porting it to non-x86 architectures. Haiku is a great effort, but it's a requiem for what BeOS could have been. EDIT: it seems that there is a 64-bit version I was unaware of.