Haiku

[Sandy Bridge]

Haiku Beta 4 dropped in December, sporting a nice list of new improvements, including better HiDPI support, thumbnails in Tracker (the file explorer), support for GTK, and a port of WINE, the latter two of which enable a lot more applications to run.

 

To give it a try, you'll need a Pentium II or Athlon or later, 384 MB of RAM, and 3 GB of storage space.  A little more demanding than Windows 98, but quite reasonable by today's standards!

 

Is anyone here running Haiku?  I took Beta 3 for a spin in a VM last year, and found it to be a pleasant experience, and the UI to be extremely responsive, even in a virtual machine.  That beta wasn't at a place where it could wholly replace Windows for me, even from a non-gaming standpoint, primarily due to not yet having a wide enough variety of software, but I appreciated the different-but-sensible UI paradigms and saw a lot of potential.  It was refreshing to see a different take than what the Big Three (Windows/Linux/Mac) provide.  I plan to try Beta 4 as well.

 

(Side note on organization, I wanted to put this in the "Operating Systems" sub-forum but can't create threads there, and Haiku does not fit into any of that forum's sub-forums, so this seems like the most appropriate spot)