In its time, BeOS (which Haiku intends to clone) was super fast and had a minimalistic UI that was very joyful to use compared to Windows and Linux back then.

In its time, BeOS (which Haiku intends to clone) was super fast and had a minimalistic UI that was very joyful to use compared to Windows and Linux back then. I wasn't too familiar with C++ or filesystems to comment on the veracity of the claims, but my understanding is they also exposed some seriously good APIs for the time and a neat filesystem. But as an end-user I would raise that there were a few very avant-garde apps - to me at least. But that was over 15 years ago... Everything has been moving forward fast since. Hardware (an iPhone 4 was as powerful as Deep Blue), software, languages, libraries, network speeds, computing paradigms, etc. Put another way, it's basically ... cool, but meh. As a former BeOS user for a while, I've been looking every now and then at Haiku out of curiosity, hoping it would soon come out and pick up momentum. But in all honesty, and as much as I respect the impressive work the team poured into it, progress has been so slow and there has been so much to catch up with since that I suspect it'll be too little too late to make any difference by the time there's a stable release. Then again, who knows...