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I noticed the word "essentially" and the quotes around "free," but I wouldn't call a hidden cost "essentially 'free.'"

Edited 2011-10-06 03:30 UTC

It doesn't ship with every PC, even some major manufacturers like Dell and HP offer Linux preinstalled or even a bare hard drive, to save the cost of the license. And while the cost of the version of Windows bundled with the PC is absorbed in the sale price, the next major upgrade will be out of pocket.



Well that's purely subjective. I absolutely love the OS X interface and all the cool little features under the hood. I feel exactly the same way about Haiku, and it's free. Granted OS X is pretty cheap these days, but it's also (officially) limited to Apple hardware so that's a negative.



Again, that is subjective. While I've been enjoying what I've seen of Gnome 3.0 (now 3.2) as I get used to it on my netbook, I'm eagerly anticipating getting Haiku to properly boot on it. Right now I'm settling for a VM in full screen and it's working very well. But running it native will, for me, be a much more pleasant and useful experience than Linux has been, no matter the distro or DE.

I'm curious to know if you have had only limited experience with Haiku and the BeOS way of computing, or if you're an old hat going back to the R4.5 days like me. It really clicked with me back then, and to this day is still closer to my ideal interface and workflow than any other OS by far. I have my own ideas of how an interface should present itself to the user, and Haiku espouses a lot of those already.

No, that's not subjective. Not properly booting, and then being without most of Linux's productivity tools while bringing almost nothing of its own, all make Haiku objectively less usable on the desktop than Linux.

Warm fuzzies isn't the most important aspect of usability. If it were, the Tamagotchi would be considered more usable than a Palm. In fact, warm fuzzies don't count at all, and although Haiku is more usable than a Tamagotchi, it's still mainly a toy OS.

"It doesn't ship with every PC, even some major manufacturers like Dell and HP offer Linux preinstalled or even a bare hard driver."

HAHAHAHAHAHA.

"Mac OS X is certainly nicer than Haiku"
"Well that's purely subjective."

So?

"I'm curious to know if you have had only limited experience with Haiku and the BeOS way of computing, or if you're an old hat going back to the R4.5 days like me."


If had the intelligence to read my post, you would have read the fact I was a professional R5 user for years, and I've used Haiku more thoroughly than some of the developers.

Haiku is too little, too late.

Now move on.