The UK based Linux magazine ‘Linux Format’ (not so) recently featured a nice article on Haiku, now available as .pdf. In the article the author tries to find out if Haiku is or can be a viable alternative as operating system and if it can compete with Linux in the future. Additionaly there is some background information on BeOS and why and how the openBeOS project started. The article concludes with a short step-by-step tutorial on to get Haiku running in a virtual machine on Linux.

Overall the article, written by Graham Morrison, is mildly positive. The well known troubles are covered, on of the first things Graham runs into is that the pre-alpha releases don’t didn’t include a webbrowser. He also notes the total lack of productivity software. Most impressive is Haiku’s speed and responsiveness.

Some quotes:

…Why, when Linux is such a powerful and fully featured operating system, would someone choose to run an arguably inferior, less popular alternative? The answer is because we can.

…Sure enough, a single click reveals an Xfce-like cluster of menus, one of which is labelled ‘Applications’. This would hide the web browser – if one were installed. Instead, it lists a dozen or so technical demos, none of which add any functionality to the desktop.

…Unfortunately, there’s very little productivity software available, which is Haiku’s biggest problem at the moment.

…A recent port of AbiWord and Firefox is all you’d need for most small office environments, and you’d be able to install Haiku on virtually any spare machine in the office. It would also feel quicker than most other operating systems, Linux included, and the limitations in the desktop environment wouldn’t be important.

All in all the article is fair and good looking with a couple of nice screenshots. Some of the problems the author ran into might be caused by the fact that he was testing Haiku in a virtual machine instead of on real hardware. The conclusion of the article ends with the words: This is the computer desktop we should always have had!

Get the four page (.pdf) article form here, thanks to haiku-os.it for the link.